Blog Posts

Mental Health Stigma in Academia

10/5/2016

I'll keep this brief; first of all because there are so many other important reads out there on this topic, and second, because I am in mid-writing-binge and need to get back to the dissertation.

In the spirit of Mental Health Awareness week and calls to live #stigmafree, I have absolutely no problem sharing a part of me so close to my core it feels weird to admit to: I have had and continue to struggle with mental health issues. Unfortunately, this hardly makes me unique among academics at large, and even puts me almost in a majority among grad student populations.

In fact, this is what truly prompts me to write here: a long-standing obstacle between me and achieving the mental health and balance that I enjoy (and work hard for) today connected to my identity as an aspiring academic. I can tell you the year I first saw a therapist or first started on medication, but I cannot tell you when the sadness first started -- when was it normal people-sad and when did it turn into clinical depression? Who knows. But as long as I can remember, I learned that mental illness could be positive and something admirable and/or tragic in society --
IF AND ONLY IF it accompanied genius.

This myth is everywhere; from depictions of savants in movies and television as in Rain Man or A Beautiful Mind, to the haunted reputations of creative artists like Van Gogh, Beethoven or Edvard Munch. The correlation even carries over back into the land of mental-health stigma, like how people love to point out that the Unabomber had a ridiculously high IQ. Perhaps most influential of all for me, though, was the predominance of authors for whom their mental illness is an important part of their sanctification as a brilliant genius. Admittedly, I did and do have a predilection for Russian literature and French existentialists. The suicidal Hamlet has always been my favorite Shakespeare character. My favorite romance went from the uplifting Jane Eyre to the much more morbid Wuthering Heights almost as soon as I picked it up in seventh grade. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, and Kate Chopin's The Awakening . . . I didn't have a lot of positive role models insofar as brilliant female authors of positive outlook and sound mind went. Besides, wasn't feel-good literature all just pop-fluff? I wanted to read the real geniuses.
The depressed ones.
They made sense to me, and made me feel less freakish.

I think that for years, I was actually scared of what would happen if I lost the comforting blanket of depression, anxiety, and whatever else was going on. I wanted to not be in pain, but I was also scared to death of life without mental illness. What if I was no longer special? What if the depression and my academic successes were coming from the same root source, and I couldn't have one without the other? I would be that much less like so many of my tortured, miserable, suicidal intellectual heroes.

But here's the truth. I am well now. I am getting ever better all the time with continuing support, love, exercise, good eating, mindfulness, and tackling my problems one by one, just as everyone should do. My dissertation is getting written.

I am smarter, sharper, more insightful, more analytically grounded, and more intellectually bold than ever before.
And even if I wasn't:
I'm still here to share my thoughts with the world, whatever they are worth -- and that is worth a lot.

Work Smart: Comprehensive Advice for Grads (or Anyone!)

9/28/2016

Yeah, I'm not allowed to work in bed like this anymore. (Usually I didn't even bother to get out of PJs)

Recently, I had the opportunity to organize and throw the exact workshop that I wish I could have attended during the first month of my first year of grad school.

When I arrived at grad school, I had no coherent note system besides home-made binders of one-side-printed paper foraged from recycling bins on campus, with recycled cereal boxes (also foraged) to use as dividers. I didn't have any particular work ethic besides "read what looks interesting to me" because I only took classes that were absolutely fascinating and had professors that worked hard to make even the dull points seem intriguing. I had an intense social network of friends who also valued schoolwork, so there was always quiet peer pressure to get work done (even if only so we could party hard later!).

All this changed when I moved to Delaware. I felt really, truly, alone, with more work to complete and information to process than I had ever been tasked with before. I spent the first two months reading every word of every book assigned until I finally couldn't and collapsed from exhaustion and lack of sleep. I want this experience for no one.

Once the first Professor opened my eyes to bibliographic software, once I was first told I shouldn't be getting bogged down in every word of every book, once the first upper-year grad student confided in me that there were better, smarter, systems of getting work done, life improved by 1000%, as did my productivity and comprehension. With each new phase of my career in history, I've had to adapt again, growing new skills, strategies, and tools for reaching my goals. The time has come to pass on my tiny pile of accumulated advice and knowledge to all who may need it, as I once did.

Nota Bene: This blog post represents nothing original to me; I have groveled at the feet of many wise mentors and confided in many sage peers, who together have built this archive of productivity-making-strategies. Thanks to all of you.

How to Read A Book

Yes, you can make it to graduate level studies in the humanities and not know how to read a book. I know I did! I knew how to move my eyes from right to left, from top to bottom, make sense of the words, take some notes, and even come up with some analytical thoughts, questions, or critiques. But I didn't really know how to most effectively and critically read a book for academic purposes. You need to talk to your mentors, peers, and others in your department and discipline about best practices for you. I will simply pass on my primary introduction, which shaped my reading from then on: How to Read A Book by Susan Strasser. (Go to Section 2/page 3.)

Citation and Note-taking Software

I use Zotero, made by historians, for historians, for free. I love it dearly and it is one of my gods. That said, people use a lot of other tools. You should talk to people in your department, discipline, and library, as well as watch demos online to figure out what is right for you (and your budget; some will require purchase of software, and some might require a subscription fee). Other popular options used by peers of mine include: EndNote, EverNote, Mendeley, and RefWorks.

ASIDE: The marvelous instructor and brilliant scholar David Suisman is to thank for introducing me to Zotero; thanks to him also for presenting in last week's workshop and always having a moment to lend advice to the grad community.

There is another set of closely-related programs that can also be used for note-taking, but prove their real worth when helping you write and make new material out of the source material you've assembled. Some people use one software from the above category for all their needs and Word for writing (like myself), some people use software from this second category exclusively, and some people use a citation software from above and one of the writing softwares listed here (I am thinking about making this transition.) In this category are: Scrivener, Idea-Mapping softwares (link to an inventory of several in this category), LibreOffice, and FocusWriter.

Setting Goals, Scheduling Tasks

"Things that get scheduled get done."
While I have settled on old-fashioned pen-and-paper to-do lists (preferably held within a Slingshot Organizer), there are many ways to skin this most-crucial-of-all-cats. You NEED to know what you have to do, in order to do it. I've heard personal testimonials about other list-making-systems including:

Bullet Journals -- Deceptively, this is a method, not a product. It helps you organize, prioritize, and visualize. You buy into it or you don't. By the time I discovered this, I had developed a very informal system of symbols for accomplishing the same, but if you have no system, check it out.
Productivity Journal -- Is prioritizing your main problem? Do you know exactly what needs to get done, but find yourself cleaning the kitchen, doing the laundry, or even working on academic side-projects instead? Then this is for you. While it is a product, you can also just photo-copy your version of the template onto a notebook of your own making (with materials scavenged from one-sided printed paper in library recycling bins, right?!?!)
Sticker charts -- My friend and fellow-scholar Darcy Mullen is all about the stickers, and that is AOK. If you just have problems with motivation alone, invest in some awesome stickers and shamelessly reward yourself for your productivity-achievements by affixing them one by one to a chart or location of your choosing.

If digital organization is more your thing, here are a variety of apps and online options for you to organize your life:

Habitbull -- This app is fantastic for visualizing your progress toward completing your goals. Build habits one day, one week, one month at a time, with myriad options for customization, color-coding, and adjusting your goals to suit your schedule. If you thrive off 'streaks,' this may be for you.
Trello -- Taco, the canine mascot of Trello, is your guide to the best to-do list application that may be out there. You can have multiple to-do lists for different segments of your life, share to-do lists with group or team members for collaborative projects, and instead of disappearing when a task is done, you get to shift items over to a DONE list that you see grow before your eyes! So rewarding!
Workflowy -- If multiple to-do lists and all the complexity of Trello is overwhelming for you instead of relieving, Workflowy has a beautifully simple, straightforward aesthetic and functionality to help you compile (and complete!) your to-do lists.

Actually, Really, Getting Stuff Done

So you have the software and notes ready, you know what you have to do . . . and sometimes the writing and working still doesn't happen. (If this isn't true for you, keep it to yourself and be frickin' grateful, please). I've discovered first and foremost that I am a socially-motivated, socially-oriented creature. I deliver best on things when I run the risk of disappointing people if I don't come through, and impressing people when I do well. Peer pressure has almost always served as positive force in my life, thanks in no small part to the excellent people I have been able to surround myself with. So here is my working tool-kit:

Pomodoro Writing-Dates -- I'm writing this as part of one right now! (A warm-up before launching into dissertation writing, something I've discovered helps me.) Pomodoros are a method of working where you set a timer for 25 minutes; at the end of this work sprint, you have a five minute timed break before the next cycle starts again. After four 25-minute work sessions, you have earned a 15 minute break. I make this work for me by connecting with writing peers through online messaging. Every week at the same time and day, my partner(s) and I start the timer at the same time and go. On the breaks we discuss what we accomplished, check in on each other's personal lives, work through any tricky ideas or exciting finds, and/or set goals for the next segment, and repeat. If you use the marinaratimer.com program that I linked to, by sharing the link with your partner, your timer is the same. Another perk of marinaratimer is that you can customize your work-break patterns to find what fits best for you.
Write-on-Sites -- Sometimes even better than cyber-writing is group writing in person. The write-on-sites I've attended and organized tend to work on similar principles as Pomodoros, but use a half-hour of work with ten minutes of break, if only because there are more of us to go around in the circle when we share our goals for the next work session, and more brains to pick when you need advice. I try and seat myself so that my screen is potentially visible to other people, because then I have another subtle motivation to stay off the internet, and just keep typing. [If you are in Newark DE, and I the other Grad Student Representatives have organized formal Write-on-Sites at 77 E Main from 9AM-12PM on Wednesdays and Thursdays, in the front room or back conference room if we have enough people]
Daily Writing -- I have become convinced that this is absolutely imperative. No weekdays off from working on, touching, interacting with, and doing minimum of typing on the dissertation. Have I accomplished this goal as an actual yet? No, but I'm working on it! Already just striving toward this, simply not being ok with taking a day off to just read is helping me tremendously.
An Internet Blocker when necessary -- but it often is. When I'm working at home without any peer support, this can be crucial. I use Self-Control, which works great and is absolutely, 110% un-reversable once you start it going, even if you reboot your computer, quit and uninstall the app, anything. What I like is that you can operate on two settings: either a black list (list of sites you cannot visit) or a white list (a list of the only domains you can visit). This allows me the freedom of accessing online articles and research while still blocking all the most pernicious rabbit-holes of research and recreation the internet allows.

My way is not the only way however. In talking to peers, mentors, and other academics, I've uncovered a whole host of other ways people work -- some of which I am considering or trying to add to my arsenal, and others of which are not for me. Here are some of those practices I don't use right now, with the reasons people have told me they like them:

Other forms of academic peer pressure -- when I hosted this workshop, people shared motivation tools ranging from snap-chatting peers photos of empty library desks to pressure them to get out of bed and to work, to weekly skype dates with a long-term work buddy, where you set and check in about weekly goals for your professional lives and projects.
Figure out your daily 'best work times' and schedule your most important work for those slots. I find my schedule subject to too many things out of my control to rely on this method. My husband works sometimes irregular hours at the hospital, events and life stuff happen. . . . and I'm pretty bad at noticing patterns like this. For now I'm trying to figure out how to work at any time, even if it doesn't feel particularly 'natural'.
Write First Thing -- Some people in particular emphasis 'free-writing' first thing in the morning to just get your thoughts out for a minimum of fifteen minutes. Some people say shoot for a minimum of a half hour. Some people say just do all your writing for the day then, even if that means two hours. Have an 8AM meeting? Then get up earlier! My sage (and productive) friend Michelle Anderson often invokes Mark Twain to explain this philosophy:

#eatthefrog

Decide What's Next -- Your last task of the day should be to decide exactly what comes next tomorrow, so that you can pick up your writing and research with momentum. What question are you reading this book to answer? What's the next thought you want to articulate? My esteemed colleague Elizabeth Jones-Minsinger passed on advice once given to her: always stop writing in the middle of a sentence. Then, your brain will be working on how to finish it until you return, and you'll both have spent really productive off-time away from it, and be ready to attack it again.
Go Analog -- many of my peers testify that writing by hand with pen and paper, can be an excellent way to work through ideas or make it through some tough writers block, especially if your primary mode of writing is digital. The physical motions, the different speed of writing, prompt a different way of thinking, they claim. I haven't hit any particularly heinous rough spots lately, but I'll be trying this the next time I do.
Go Nuclear -- I have not tried this, and do not think I will unless I am truly desperate. However, if you really need to make yourself put words one after another, the brilliant Jeff Applehans claims that the website writeordie.com has helped him in the past. The concept is simple: set a timer, and a goal number of words, then go. If you fail to keep pace, the program will start making angry noises, turning the screen red, and even deleting the vowels from the early parts of your writing to keep you going. HARSH.
Outsource Critiques -- A very wise practice that I hope I can force myself to implement. UD is lucky enough to have Dr. Steve Marti as a PostDoctoral fellow in the history department at the moment. When asked about his work ethic, he concedes that he doesn't actually have much problem sitting down and writing (damn him!), but that he has trouble knowing when to stop working on something. He suggests circulating your work among trusted peers throughout the writing process, and confining your revisions as much as possible to the problems they identify. That way, your list of things to work on it finite, as opposed to the infinite revisions we would all make to our own work if left staring at it by ourselves.

Other Resources

I cannot recommend highly enough signing up with the National Faculty Center for Diversity and Development. Hopefully, your workplace has an institutional membership you can piggy-back off of. Their weekly "Monday Motivators" help keep me on track toward reaching my goals and aiming to improve my work practices. They also offer boot-camps, webinars, forums, and many other resources.
Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day by Joan Bolker. Read it. It IS a worthwhile investment of your precious time.
Look to your discipline for resources, support, and tools. If you are an historian, the AHA has a fantastic set of Resources for Grad Students.

Final Thoughts -- before I get back to my dissertation

If there is anything I've learned in this process, it's that contrary to the philosophy of Fredeerick Winslow Taylor, there is no "one best way" to scientifically manage your way to success. I have a broad toolkit because some tools work some days, and some on others. Start collecting your own set of tools. Make checking in with your work practices an important part of your self-care routines (which you should totally have, and should include exercise!).

Be well, and WORK!

Environmental History Grad Writing Workshop - Join us!

9/26/2016

Call for Papers: ASEH 2017 Writing Workshop

The Graduate Caucus is pleased to announce its call for participants for the 5th annual Graduate Student Writing Workshop to be held at the ASEH annual meeting in Chicago in 2017. Selected writers will join in small discussion groups with other graduate students and a faculty mentor to workshop pre-circulated pieces of writing. These small working groups will be organized by type of material - thesis/dissertation proposals; conference papers; journal articles (including Gallery submissions); and thesis/dissertation chapters. Please note that a 15-20 maximum page limit will be enforced. Applicants are invited to present their most current work.

The purpose of the Graduate Student Writing Workshop is to provide a forum for graduate students in environmental history to develop their writing and research skills. Guided by the faculty reader, each participant will read and comment on the work of fellow participants. The workshop will emphasize all aspects of the writing process, from cultivating the first germ of a project, to chapter organization and revision, to shaping proposals and abstracts. Groups will be encouraged to discuss writing style, voice, and mechanics, as well as practice how to get and give good feedback. Confirmed faculty participants include Andrew Case, Finis Dunaway, Catherine Dunlop, Stephen Pyne, and Kendra Smith-Howard.

To apply, submit a one-page (double-spaced) summary of the work that you intend to bring to the writing workshop. Note in your application the subject matter of your work as well as the format and potential audience. In addition to the one-page summary, include a one-paragraph bio indicating your research agenda, educational affiliation, and current contact information. Applications should be sent via email to Anastasia Day (aday@udel.edu). The deadline for applications is December 1, 2016. Please note that, if accepted, the final version of your work must be submitted to your faculty reader and fellow participants no later than February 27, 2017.

Wha'd life be without homegrown tomatoes...?

9/21/2016

"Only two things money can't buy
That's true love and homegrown tomatoes !"

(Do watch the whole thing; it's 2:30 of pure joy and you will hum it while reading the rest of this post)

If I's to change this life that I lead,
I'd be Johnny tomato seed...

My partner is a tomato fiend—tomatoes of any form, in any dish, anytime is AOK with him. In contrast, I am only tomato-tolerant most of the year when our only options are cardboard red spheres raised in greenhouses or canned red gunk coming from our local chain grocery store. However, all that changes in the summer. The moment I get to grab a sun-warm, crimson globe of juicy sweet flavor off that vine, I’m hooked until the home-grown tomatoes are all gone. Further impetus to our household’s tomato-love was the recent acquisition of a pressure canner as a wedding gift (from my in-laws, who know us very well!). We were determined to have not just some tomatoes, but MANY, MANY tomatoes this summer, and to preserve them to bring some summery warmth to our winters.

Plant 'em in the spring; eat 'em in the summer,
All winter without 'em's a culinary bummer

We planned for a grand total of 25 tomato plants and wound up with 27. Per our garden plan, only 14 of those are in the Victory Garden. We have 9 more off the back porch, two that were in pots and later transplanted out, and accumulated two accidentals. This was a lot of tomatoes. We’ve canned over 100 lbs already and dehydrated probably close to 50 pounds more. We’ve eaten roasted tomato soup, gazpacho of all colors and sorts, mostly-tomato-tabouli, many variations on tomato pasta sauce, burst-tomato galette, stuffed tomatoes (from Moosewood), salsa of so many varieties, fried green tomatoes, and just plain sliced and cubed tomatoes on top of most of our meals at this point.

I know what this country needs:
Homegrown tomatoes in every yard you see!

WW1 gardeners grew tomatoes too!

Just as they are in back-yard gardens today, tomato plants were the indisputable hallmark of Victory Gardening in World War II. Our pre-occupation with tomatoes is only in keeping with my historical experiment, in other words. Every single Victory Garden plan I have come across includes tomatoes, and every instructional guide lists the vegetable among recommended plants for even the most tiny backyard plot. Even if you didn't have a patch of land or a plot, Americans still found ways to grow tomatoes. Victory gardener Elizabeth Guthrie remembered walking down New York City streets and seeing "every window box with a tomato plant in it." [25 Years of Community Gardening. (New York: American Community Gardening Association, 2005).] Tomato recipes exploded across the pages of wartime cookbooks to use up the harvest -- including entries in the 'Desserts' section such as "Tomato Spice Cake" !!! (I have tentative plans to bake this; rest assured, I'll update with results.) Meanwhile, housewives across America canned more tomatoes than I'm sure I could ever fathom.

As a final illustration of the importance of tomatoes in war, please read one of my favorite historical finds EVER, straight from the Wall Street Journal at the height of the war:

'My one and only,' He cried passionately, 'come to me. Shake off the hackles that are holding you dormant, arise and let me take you in my arms. Let me display you in all your pristine glory to envious friends and passersby. Raise your head to the heavens and your face to mine, and by so doing make me the happiest, proudest, and most fortunate man in all the world. Arise, my love, arise.'
So saying, the amateur horticulturist hopefully sprinkled a little more water on the single tomato plant in his 'Victory' garden.
-“PEPPER and Salt,” Wall Street Journal, July 27, 1942.

I forget all about the sweatin' & diggin'
Everytime I go out and pick me a big one

But that's not quite true. I remember a lot of the sweating and digging. I remember the struggles. And, as a historian, I naturally feel it's important to document those struggles filled with sweat so we can improve upon this for next year! Therefore, a list of our problems:

Lack of Variety

Yay Southern Exposure Seed Exchange!

We only had three types of tomatoes, none very different from each other. We grew heirloom Brandywine (it only seemed patriotic, living as close to the Brandywine as we do), ‘Big Beef’ varietals that were gifted to us as starts by our amazing landlord, and then Fox cherry tomatoes. All three were slicers, all three were red, round, and of similar size except the cherry tomatoes. Turns out, you can get a little bit sick of home-grown tomatoes.

Solution:
Next year, I’m growing many different types of tomatoes for different purposes! Green Zebras and Purple Cherokees for color, flavor, and novelty, golden pear cherries for our small ones, and then only filling in the gaps with generic slicers like Brandywine and Big Beef.

Lack of Support

Not, not emotional support; the physical kind that should be easy and straightforward. We inherited some tomato cages this year. I had never used such contraptions before, but they appeared to be period-appropriate (can I get a source on this???), popular and low-effort to set up; plop it on and call it a season, right? No. Seeing the cages start to buckle early on, we supplemented with stakes inventively foraged from the woods and plunged into the ground by hand. These collapsed together with the cages as the tomatoes continued to grow past all reasonable expectation of mass and quantity. Our hopeful tomato forest turned into a sprawling tomato jungle. This is a problem because tomatoes on the ground rot more easily and catch more diseases, less air flow decreases pollination and also increases disease, it is incredibly hard to sort through the limbs to access and pick tomatoes without bending/breaking stems and finally, they swallowed up nearby rows of vegetables in their sprawl and were very space inefficient.

Solution:
Next year I want to stake out our tomatoes the way I was taught for big rows: we’re constructing a Florida weave, or else.
This is efficient in terms of labor since no tomatoes are handled individually, orderly in appearance, and incredibly sturdy, since it relies on metal stakes pounded into the ground. It also works only in rows; this is the most pro-row you will ever see me.

Bushiness

JUNGLE.

One of the traditional ways of keeping any plant from putting its primary efforts into growing branches and to make it direct its energy toward producing fruit is pruning. When done to tomato plants, this is called ‘suckering’ – nipping the new baby branches that start to grow between leaves and main stems along the plant. We started strong with suckering, but the timing of our wedding in the middle of June meant that when we returned it felt like all our efforts had been for naught. Despite early, conscientious suckering, the tomato plants had each grown too many limbs for us to keep track of, each too big for us to prune without creating a large wound and possibility for infection. This probably contributed to the tomato jungle collapse effect.

Solution:
Don’t get married at the start of the growing season next year – or leave town for a week-and-a-half for any other reasons either, I guess?

I've been out to eat and that's for sure
But it's nothin' a homegrown tomato won't cure

For all our troubles with tomatoes, both good problems (abundance) and worse problems (tomato jungle), we did have a success that, to me, stands out above and beyond the rest. Behold our great technological innovation: self-delivering tomatoes! Not only did we not go out to eat ANY tomato dishes this summer, but sometimes we didn't have to even go outside the porch!

When I die don't bury me
In a box in a cemetery
Out in the garden would be much better
I could be pushin' up homegrown tomatoes!

Weekend Reading . . .

9/14/2016

If you haven't already, you should definitely be checking this out: The Graduate Association of Food Studies has come out with their Fall 2016 journal issue! The contents are amazing, written by intelligent and enthusiastic up-and-coming scholars across many fields and disciplines who study food. I was lucky enough to have joined onto this exciting organization close to its inception; through it, I’ve met some truly incredible individuals who inspire and inform my work. If you work in anything related to food, I cannot more highly recommend joining this supportive community by becoming a formal member.
Visit https://gradfoodstudies.org for the whole issue!

Selfishly, this issue is extra exciting because it’s a new opportunity to see my name in print, and my writing in publication. Even more exciting, I was able to help promote a thoughtful book that I found intellectually stimulating, historically well-researched, and extremely relevant to food conversations in twenty-first century America. In short, I authored a review of Rose Hayden-Smith’s Sowing the Seeds of Victory: American Gardening Programs of World War I (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2014). Read it yourself here: Review of Hayden-Smith, Sowing the Seeds of Victory.

Just coincidentally, as I was looking for the cover-image of the book for this blogpost, I saw that around the same time I was first submitting my review to GAFS, my colleague Chris Deutch also reviewed it, on H-Net (cross-posted on H-Environment and H-War). Read his review here. We largely concur -- how validating!

Less selfishly again, you should definitely be sure to read my esteemed peer Darcy Mullen's article entitled, "Cartographic Communities of Locavores: Local Ideographs & Spatial Rhetoric". She takes a compelling look at what local food movements *mean* today -- and I mean that in the semantic, rhetorical, ideological senses; what does 'local' denote and connote? How can ideographic theory help bring clarity to such socio-spatial rhetoric?
To read more of her work in her blog on food, and books about food, check out http://storiesofsoil.blogspot.com.

Image from Mullen's article. You know you want to read this.

Autistic Students Fail Because of Institutions, Not Professors

9/13/2016

Nota Bene:

This is a personal issue for me, absolutely. On the one hand, I am aiming to enter the ranks of the professoriate, and care deeply about both pedagogy and the plight of university teaching staff in a professional capacity. On the other hand, I have the deeply personal experience of being older sister to a wonderful, amazing, talented young man who is on the spectrum. He has received his Associates degree from a local branch of a state college. However, it is clear to everyone who has ever met him -- or heard his highly technical music, which has made its way onto two internationally syndicated television shows! -- that he is fully capable of the intellectual task of completing a bachelor's degree. One of my parents has also been deeply involved in multiple aspects of higher education (though never as professor, working closely with professors) at two different institutions. To this, I also add my own years at Lawrence University and then the University of Delaware. It is this body of experience and evidence that informs my thoughts here.

Reflecting on Inside Higher Ed's article, "Students on the Spectrum"

This morning, I woke up and read my daily digest of InsideHigherEd articles, to help me keep abreast of national events shaping academia. I don't always agree with the opinion pieces, but I read them anyway; of course I clicked through an article about autism and post-secondary education. The authors, Elizabeth Finnegan and Margaret Finnegan, open with some troubling and undoubtedly true statistics, and come to a sound conclusion based on them:

A 2015 Autism Speaks report found that only 30 percent of high school graduates with autism ever attend a two- or four-year college, and those that do fare poorly. Research suggests that 80 percent of them never graduate. Furthermore, only 32 percent of high school graduates with autism find paying work within two years of graduating high school. This need not be. Half of all individuals with autism have average or above-average intelligence. They can do the work. The problem is not the students. It’s the colleges. [....] Together, we have seen the many ways that colleges fail students with autism.

My fist was raised in the air! Yes!
We are talking about making Higher Ed more accessible, not for those who cannot do the work or maintain the intellectual standards of the institution, but for those who can and are not given the institutional support to do so. The authors went on to make another slam-dunk point:"if autism is indeed a social disability, then denying the social needs of autistic students is inherently unreasonable". Carry on with the structural critique, I cried! Lay it on me, and I will broadcast your message from the rooftops!

As the article went on though, something went deeply wrong. Perhaps you can spot a trend:

When students felt their social needs were met -- in particular when faculty members proved willing to modify their teaching style -- students had much more positive experiences. But American professors are not required to modify their teaching style for disabled students
[....]
It would help if faculty members understood how autism affects learning. But professors are busy [...] professional development seminars are often poorly attended, especially those focused on helping students with special needs. [...]Even when given the opportunity to learn more about the needs of disabled students, professors turn those choices down.

What happened to institutional critique? Then again, why delve deep into causes of underfunding, problems of administrative support, societal stigma around neurodiverse individuals, or what is making the professors so very busy, when you can simply lay the lion's share of the blame and responsibility at the professors' feet???

Don't worry: professors can present work, research in archives around the world, publish books, articles and materials meant for public audiences, mentor higher-level students, teach introductory classes AND spend significant amount time finely honing pedagogical skills! [/s]

All these things are not possible at once. Furthermore, from a shallow political perspective, dumping on faculty like this is just justification for more budget cuts. What we need -- and will not get by simply denigrating university teaching staff-- is reform and justice in the academic labor market. This would actually help faculty to help students.

To Be Fair...

I also know that terrible professors can be a big portion of the problem and definitely exist. The article details the experience of one its authors interacting with a faculty member:

Elizabeth, for example, struggles with understanding if professors are being sarcastic or rhetorical. Uncertain, she often responds too much or too little. When one professor expressed frustration at her eager hand raising, she asked privately if he would signal her when he wasn’t being serious or didn’t require a response. “No,” he said. “I don’t need to change my teaching for you, and you need to learn sarcasm.”

You cannot just ask someone on the spectrum to 'learn sarcasm' on top of your course load; this is truly atrocious! Yet,I believe this story whole-heartedly. I've heard stories of the same and worse levels of appalling callousness; I have seen them unfold. In some cases, the adjuncts have given up on ever getting tenure, never were trained to teach during their masters or doctoral degrees, and/or don’t get paid enough to care between their commutes and second (and third and fourth) jobs. The tenured professors just don’t have to care and/or are bitter over being stuck at a community college instead of an R1; some should have retired years ago. Some of the tenured professors who aimed for R1 also never learned how to teach, spending all their time on research. I'm not saying all university instructors are infallible, above critique, or even good at teaching. But do these anecdotes represent a majority, or even a statistically significant percentage of professors??

Furthermore, I also hold pedagogy important. Yes, I feel personal responsibility for the well-being of students within my classroom, and have made a point of personally seeking out all the tools available to me to make myself a better, more inclusive and welcoming instructor. I would be one of the three faculty attending those workshops on dealing with disabilities in the classroom; UD offered an excellent opportunity to do so just last year,

Why do I disagree so vehemently then, if I agree that faculty can be major causes of failure for autistic children -- and yes, also major parts of the solution???

Because this article stops at blaming professors.

What if I told you the reason I couldn't attend the disabilities in the classroom workshop last academic year was because I was trying to grade 87 mid-term exams in a single weekend, while also finishing another draft of my dissertation prospectus?

The problem is the university teaching labor system, and this article doesn’t address or even acknowledge the underlying causes at play, of which overworked and under-dedicated university instructors are often mere symptoms. How about the fact that 70% of university teaching staff across the United States today fall under the classification of non-tenure-track-faculty??? The vast majority of those are adjuncts; they are underpaid and overworked. Many are not even offered offices, let alone professional development opportunities. And how can they attend these unpaid 'opportunities' when over a quarter rely on food stamps to make ends meet, and many more still fall below minimum wage in their annual earnings. There are myriad articles detailing the crisis of labor in higher education, and how this issue lies at the very heart of the corporatization of the university, budget crises, disappointing student learning outcomes, and more. Educate yo'self!

But at least not all the responsibility for fixing the problem falls on faculty; the authors move away from faculty alone when they talk about solutions. They point out just how helpful social support from other students can be, and how meaningful:

For Elizabeth, the greatest support has often come from students who have chosen to act as social interpreters. A whispered word or two is often all she needs to better and more appropriately engage with her curriculum. Colleges like California State University at Fullerton already have mentorship programs that pair neurotypical and neuroatypical classmates. We recommend expanding such programs so that peer mentors -- perhaps those offered the coveted privilege of priority registration -- work side by side with autistic students in the classroom.

I agree; such programs are wonderful, and peer support can be fantastic. However, this also side-steps the fact that universities are broken in their very bones. The whole problem cannot lie with university instructors, and the whole solution cannot be instructors teamed with student aids. The worst thing we can do for all students - neurotypical and neurodiverse alike - is to shallowly malign instructors for systemic problems of which their pedagogies are effects, not causes. This article is yet another that side-steps the deep crises of higher ed to focus on bad-mouthing professors, the face of the university, and offer glib, no-reform-needed solutions. But faculty and students alike deserve better. We deserve more. We need to demand more from our institutions to serve the needs of all.

The Row Verdict

9/11/2016

Pre-Trial Context:

"Make the rows straight. A good garden line is as necessary as any garden tool.”
-John A. Andrew, Kitchen Garden Guide (Philadelphia, Pa: Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, 1942),

As discussed in an earlier post, it became clear that I was going to have to garden in rows instead of beds or patches for a number of reasons. Most importantly, World War II garden plans are almost exclusively laid out in rows. Thus, it wouldn’t be representative for purposes of my experiment to pursue bed gardening. More minor considerations included the hypothetical possibility of renting machinery from a neighbor that would work best in rows for cultivation throughout the season (this, too, is a common piece of advice).

The plan selected, for reference (sans all double rows except for beans and tomatoes).

The Case For Rows

I expected the upsides to row gardening to be clear; World War II materials claimed:

An orderly, tidy, leisurely, and all-American aesthetic. I'll let the quote to the right speak for itself. [Leonard Harman Robbins, “15,000,000 Victory Gardens,” New York Times Magazine, August 23, 1942.]

Rows from Putnam &Cosper

Easy weeding and maintenance, they said. Over and over again I read variations on the sentiment: "Straight Rows Aid Cultivation" [Victor H Ries and Ohio Fuel Gas Company. Home Service Dept, Planning the Victory Garden. (Columbus, Ohio. Home Service Department, Ohio Fuel Gas Company, 1944) 5]. When your garden plants are in rows, by necessity your weeds will grow in between them, also in rows, and are therefore easier to identify, and eliminate, moving down the row either pulling my hand or using a cultivator tool. Furthermore, one should always pursue the fewest, longest rows to maximize gains here: "One long row instead of two short ones saves labor." [Joseph H. Boyd and Victor H Ries, Garden For Victory, Ohio, Bulletin 232 (Columbus, Ohio: Agricultural Extension Service, Ohio State University, 1943),

Making the most of the space you’ve set aside for gardening: good row garden layouts help the gardener "plan to make every square foot of your available land account for itself in the greatest number of bone and tissue building elements," wrote J. G. Alexander (“Your Victory Vitamin Garden,” Hygeia, June 1943.) Close rows = more product per ft., according to all the World War II experts.

Rows lend themselves to more variety in a small garden than over-large patches of any given crop. You can even split rows half-way down, as we did with the radish/lettuce row. In the middle of explaining why one should follow their row plan, Sunset Magazine's Vegetable Garden Guide explains: (1942, Full view)

Ibid.

However, I also had some early hypotheses informed by 21st century science and experience/intuition respectively:

Fewer pests because less concentrations of any one plant over a wide and long area. If monocultures breed pest specialization and increase populations, more plant diversity decreases pest propagation -- and, at least on the cross-ways axis, rows create much diversity. Essentially, if intercropping two species in a field is putting two rows of different plants side by side, a row garden with one row of each plant would be considered maximum intercropping if it were happening over acres and acres . . . so we should have minimum pest problems, right???

Ease of access for harvesting even small beans – no reaching across over-wide garden beds. (Even four feet can be way too wide if you are under 6 feet tall, as I have discovered in past garden plots.) With bed layouts, if you lean on the soil, you are inevitably compressing the roots or possibly squashing plants. Rows seemed initially like they could fix this problem; although there weren't any rows, there would be logical foot-places between the rows that would facilitate access, or thus ran my very early hopes.

The Verdict on the Case

Having ripped out the overgrown beans, the tomatoes sprawl where beets and chard were meant to thrive...

What actually happened: none of those things. Visual and horticultural chaos ensued. I never knew where was safe to put my foot so harvesting was an excruciating game of twister. The weeds lurked in all the hardest to reach places, and we still had colossal bug infestations! I’m convinced that the difficulty getting between the vegetable rows for harvesting and weeding reduced our total harvest as well, putting a dent in any gains in productivity made by putting so many vegetables so close together with no paths.

In all fairness, it might not be that rows are inherently flawed; it could simply be that the plan I chose to follow was bupkis in terms of spacing. Certain rows were COMPLETELY overshadowed by their neighbors. The beans in particular just took over all the adjacent areas to their own space and completely eliminated the path between them; you couldn’t tell they were in two rows within two weeks of sprouting! The chard didn't stand a chance -- the bugs that seemed to originate with the beans also migrated to eating chard as the season went on, so the diversity failed to save them!

[NOTA BENE Let it not be thought that I am denying any human error at play. Perhaps the beets might have stood a chance of surviving on their own if only we had chosen a more sturdy staking method than wire tomato cages. It became clear the cages were incapable of supporting the great bulk of weight presented by all the fruit, and the tomato plants swallowed the beets alive as they spread out horizontally as the summer went on . . . . The plan likely assumed we would be competent at staking our tomatoes so they could grow in a more, erm, vertical direction.]

Nonetheless, perhaps the unknown author of my garden plan should have followed Jean-Marie Putnam and Lloyd C. Cosper when they advised gardeners of 1942 to invest in some technology to aid with planting:

"Garden-o-meters show the proper distance apart the rows should be for each type of plant." – pg 52, Gardens for Victory, First (New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1942).

[This is most certainly NOT what Putnam and Cosper were referring to, but this was the first google image result for "gardenometer" .... however, when unable to find any "garden-o-meters" online, my first thought was not dissimilar. I immediately went to an article I had just read on singularityhub.com entitled: "FarmBot Will Grow Your Food For You; Just Press Go" . . . god, I really should write a post about farming-futurism sometime . . . ]

(Credit: Alice Thompson, click image for link.)

The Final Straw (no, not a mulching joke)

The problems of succession-planting with rows was entirely unanticipated, although perfectly obvious in hindsight, and has permanently soured me on rows. Read more in the 'third shift' post coming soon!

A Summer at Hagley: Archives, Authors, and Allergies

9/7/2016

A Recap of My 'Day Job'

How many archives gigs include a desk with a skylight?! Lucky indeed.

This summer, I was lucky enough to obtain an internship working in the Manuscript and Archives Department of the Hagley Museum and Library; I needed to find something local, convenient, flexible, and paid, given my obligations to my garden, my dissertation, and my wedding! I was beyond fortunate to work with the delightful staff in the gorgeous Soda House, taking materials from their original boxes as given by the donors, organizing the materials so they are easy for future researchers to access, and rehousing in new folders. I would deaccession duplicates, select materials in need of conservation, and set aside photographs, VHS’s and other materials more appropriate for the Audio-Visual Department to handle. While I had amazing supervisors, support, and guidance, I was given autonomy almost like any other employee. The result was a summer of growth, exploration, skills acquisition, and a surprising love affair with seeing archives from the other side of the reference desk.

Abbreviated List of Materials I Processed (That Researchers Should Know of!)

*The Rubber Bawl,* May 1944. Dupont Louisville Works Safety Department. Dupont Performance Elastomers LLC, Collection.

Dupont Performance Elastomers LLC, Collection The bulk of this collection is an incredible run of employee news publications from 1943 until 1991 at the Dupont Neoprene plant in Louisville, Kentucky. It was a joy for me to find myself doing accidental research on factory conditions in World War II, as well as to see the evolution of employee culture, interests, and recreations over the years.
Edy Mozzi Papers - When I was cataloging this, I treated it as its own collection with its own accession number. Since I departed, it has been transformed into Series IV of RCA Camden records. This makes much sense in terms of contents, but my finding aid research was much abbreviated: if you are interested in reading my expanded finding aid information for this series, contact me.
Electrical Power Systems Records - These records were donated to Hagley by Dr. Julie Cohn; some of them came from her father’s work and career. They also formed a small portion of the research that went into her dissertation, soon to be book manuscript: "Biography of a Technology, North America's Power Grid Through the Twentieth Century". (University of Houston, 2013) As that title might suggest, these papers are those of engineers – primarily former Leeds & Northrup Co. employees – who were involved in the technological problems of connecting power grids across the United States in the 1900s.

James W. Scarlett Letters - These papers were kindly sent our way by James’ son, Dr. Timothy Scarlett, a professor at Michigan Technological University’s Industrial Archaeology program. Dr. Scarlett was primarily responsible for organizing, writing up historical/biographical context, and creating an inventory of the materials.
Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America Engineering Drawings - I wrote a blog post trying to spark public interest in the materials for the Hagley Sarnoff Project blog entitled: "The Titanic Connection." Read there for more about these incredible artifacts.
William G. Ramsay Family Correspondence - Really interesting set of letters, bulk 1868-1916 from a figure that Hagley already has materials pertaining to. This collection is most interesting for the correspondence to and from female family members of William. Personal favorites included William’s letters to his wife -- and hers to him:

My Dear Heart Willie -
Did you know I did not realize that you were going today to be away till Thursday -- I felt quite pitiful about it for I really did not say Good-Bye at all --at--all-- I have written five letters this evening ...
[William G. Ramsay Family Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 2. Lena to William (18 letters), 1893-1903]

At the very end of my tenure, I assisted Marsha Mills with Lunt Silversmiths Records, accession number 2544. Stay tuned for a full finding aid later this fall, but accept this sneak peek of some children's silver spoon designs!

Take-Aways from My Summer Loft

Soda House gussied up for a wedding.

Archives are FULL of dust and mold that will trigger all your morning summer allergies. Blueprints and simply dirty materials will stain your hands black with dirt if you don’t wash frequently, and sometimes leave an icky residue anyway. Oversized materials can necessitate standing on your feet all day carefully moving huge and delicate sheaves of paper from one table to another. Boxes of paper quickly become very heavy indeed, and moving boxes from shelf to shelf can be a workout in itself, even if you have indeed been doing the occasional pushup in the mornings, as I was. The stacks are freezing to protect the books, and you can feel very silly packing huge, heavy cardigans for work during an excessive heat warning. But to be honest, the worst part about working at Hagley all summer was seeing other people working on the Charles Lamb design collection or original Hagley building blueprints and wishing I could ALSO be helping with those!

Indeed, for all the back-ache and sneezing, I took great joy in my work this summer. I discovered an unexpected form of intellectual stimulation; the puzzle of looking at raw materials, figuring out what they are, and trying to see all or many possible angles for research within them – not just approaching with my own lenses of food, environment, social history. These materials could all be used for so many different projects, and help to answer so many different questions. While it wasn’t my job to think of them all, it was my job to organize the materials so they could be most easily used for the widest variety of purposes – and easily accessed by researchers from out of town on pressing time-tables. I think I’ll have a lot more empathy going forward whenever I get frustrated with a finding-aid, outraged by a filing scheme, or can’t find what I need in the first half hour within arriving at a new archive. Thanks for all you do, archivists – especially my amazing co-workers from this summer: Lynn Catanese, Lucas Clawson, Clayton Ruminiski, Chris Baer, and Marsha Mills.

ADDENDUM - MORE HAGLEY

Want to spend more time at Hagley or see what researchers there are up to? Check out any of the following:

Stories From the Stacks - researchers on the property talking about their work in audio form!
CONFERENCE - MAKING MODERN DISABILITY: HISTORIES OF DISABILITY, DESIGN, AND TECHNOLOGY October 28.
Author Talks - hosted in the Soda House, featuring new books based on Hagley archival holdings
Research Seminars - scholars present works-in-progress, pre-circulated with RSVP, for comment and discussion.

Weekend Work: The Garden as a Sisyphean Task

9/4/2016

Garden Ideal vs. Garden Reality

Front paper, Sunset’s Vegetable Garden Book. (San Francisco : 1943). HathiTrust Digital Library.

Dating back to the earliest garden magazines, readers of horticultural lit have been treated to pictures of perfectly trimmed beds, immaculate borders, orderly plantings, tomatoes staked out upright and proud, with lines drawn by rulers and nary a leaf out of place. No one publishes pictures of that weedy back corner, the stretch of broccoli completely decimated by pests overnight, the potatoes that were vibrant one day and gone the next, the rows of spinach planted that never came up . . . (Did you know soil temperatures above 75 degrees Fahrenheit can stop certain varieties' germinations? We learned this just recently.)

My summer story is a little different than standard depictions of gardens from World War II - or any other era. Just Friday I came across the visuals at left and nearly despaired of my garden. I sighed and went to the internet for a quick break from work, when I stumbled upon a blog post: My Garden Sucks and That's Ok. That's when I knew what I needed to write about this weekend. Still, one particular World War II quote came to mind as I surveyed the weedy wasteland at the start of some seriously heavy work and weeding:

For even though they have the best of intentions in the beginning, many people permit their own gardens to go to waste through carelessness, neglect, or ignorance.
-Florence Kerr, “Community and Defense Gardens, Presented at the National Defense Gardening Conference in Washington, D.C.,” December 19, 1941. RG 16 Entry 17 Records of the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, General Correspondence, 1906-1970. Box 303 (1941) file "Gardens". National Archives at College Park, Maryland.

My ego couldn't handle a further-out shot, but this is still pretty brutal. And this was after ripping out the horrendous mess of pest ridden over-old beans from the early summer.

My Weekend To-Do List Was Not Modest:

For the Victory Garden alone:

Rip out beans (old, eaten by bugs)
Replant turnips/parsnips row
Continue with setting mouse traps with peanut butter
Dump all the seed packets that got wet in the rain and see if any germinate
Pest treatment – make homemade spray? Investigate WW2 resources further
Decide if moving our little greenhouse to VG plot in winter, if so, where; rest that soil???

-NOTE TO SELF definitely call Mike McGrath on this and see if I can get on WHYY's You Bet Your Garden!

Outside the Victory Garden:

Rip out back bed weeds, fill in with seeds where zucchinis were, stake lone tomato there
Weed & replant sad failed lettuce bed: cabbage back row, middle row arugula, front trim of spinach
Start basil, chives in pot.
Try again with eucalyptus & thyme cuttings so have indoors this winter
Repot cacti, baby orchid, big orchid (need orchid soil though)
Make a raised bed and plant garlic STAT. (How much would be a years supply?)

PLANS TO EXPLORE FOR NEXT YEAR

Put a raised bed in lazarus bed where soil isn't draining well
Mulch the shed-stair-corner for winter so we can plant with flowers next year
Rain barrel possibility???

Results:

Smartweed (Persicaria macula)- pest or bouquet?

This may not be completely surprising, but we didn't do everything on the to-do list. Tons of weeding was accomplished, some re-planting in the back, lettuce, and Victory Garden beds. Perhaps truly the most impressive outcome of the weekend was the nuclear-red color of my lower back after working outside for many consecutive hours on Saturday in a sports bra. It looks much better, though the sun is down now so pictures can't capture the improvement.
As is the way of the garden, along the way to accomplishing the things we did, more to-dos emerged: the creation of the bouquet at left, the realization that I could be making smudge sticks out of the mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), ideas for pollinator-friendly plantings in under-utilized corners, and of course, more ideas for things to research and write about out in the garden. Here's to a week as productive and satisfying at work on the dissertation coming up!

Bonus: Delaware Gardening Resources (Try this at home!)

Because sometimes you still haven't found a Delaware-specific World War II gardening guide, and you want some recommendations that might take into account the warming in the last 70 years since World War II.....
http://www.thedch.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/Content%20-%20Planting%20Calendar.pdf

http://www.ufseeds.com/Delaware-Vegetable-Planting-Calendar.html

http://www.almanac.com/gardening/planting-dates/DE/Newark

http://extension.udel.edu/lawngarden/master-gardener-volunteer-educators/delaware-garden-calendar/

Following a long germination in the heat of summer

8/26/2016

... At long last a post has sprouted from the (questionably) fertile soil of my mind. Like carrot seeds that germinate for so long you're ready to give up and plant something else there. Speaking of which, twenty thousand other things have sprung from the soil – look at how the garden has grown!!!

Ok, so this was actually almost a month ago. More pics coming.

It's been a long summer and busy summer. Wedding, full-time employment at the amazingly beautiful Hagley library (more about that forthcoming), ), vaguely trying to still be an active academic (conference proposals, etc.), and gardening around the house and in the garden adds up to quite a lot. As I pointed out in another post, it's not that extraordinarily different from the over-full lives of patriotic American victory gardeners and war workers. In one of the least surprising turn of events ever, I am here to report -- it is not easy!

Fruits of My Labor

Baby beans! (Now eaten/canned)

The next few weeks, I’ll be cranking out and finishing all the half-written observations, tentative conclusions, lessons learned for next year, trials, and tribulations that occupied the height of this heat-ridden summer (while you all waited with bated breath for updates, I’m sure). Topics on the agenda include:

My verdict on row gardening
Composting
Garden pests
Canning
Other forms of preserving
Food waste
Gardening economics
Lawns
Plus some book reviews and miscellaneous historical finds

But First: The Ground Covered

Before I admit to all my shortcomings, failures, trials, and tribulations, I want everyone to have a clear idea of exactly the scale of my undertaking. Here’s a brief summary of all the ground I tried to cover this summer. Not just cover in fact, but plant, weed, water, treat for bugs and wilt, harvest, reseed as necessary, and keep free of rodents!

"Plan 750"

All the Garden Beds Dimensions and Areas:

Fenced in area = 18’ by 22’6’’ or 405 sq ft
Lettuce bed = 6’6’’ by 2’8’’ or 17 and 1/3 sq ft
Back bed = 5’ by 26’ or 130 sq ft
Back-side/Lazarus bed = 10’ equilateral triangle or 43 and 1/3 sq ft
Front herb beds = two right triangles, 11’8’' by 12’6’', or 146 sq ft
Back porch pots = 13 to 25, avg. 8” diameter, thus 6.5 sq ft

The grand estimated total is just over 748 square feet.

For reference, this delightful home plan to the right is 750 square feet and includes two bedrooms, a bathroom, a family living room with fireplace and a normal-sized kitchen. Yeah, I've been gardening a house worth of square-foot-age.

I did notice some beds got more attention that others – even days I didn’t have time or energy to water the Victory Garden with the hose for 25 minutes, I often found ten minutes at a time throughout the day or evening when I could water the entirety of the pots, the Lazarus bed, the Lettuce bed, the back bed, or take a few watering cans to the front herb beds. The same, unfortunately, followed for weeding, reseeding, and pest control. Just like how you clean the kitchen most days and the living room once a week while the bedroom constantly flirts with chaos, right? (I can't be the only one...)

A Little Knowledge Can Be Dangerous ...

Chard star!

I am more than willing to call this garden season a success in so many ways: more vegetables than we could eat, more herbs thriving in our clay-like soil near the house than I dared hope, we didn’t abandon the garden or give up because it was hard and hot, the weeds never fully won, and I did manage to get (something approximating) a tan from all the hours out in the yard!

However, over the course of the summer I realized that I am definitely a first-year Victory Gardener. I ran out over-eager and over-ambitious -- especially in thinking I could keep up with the blog through the height of harvesting! Both bugs and rodents ate way more of our crops than their fair share (like our entire beet crop!), bacteria wilt got the cucumbers, weeds were more wild than ideal, and we definitely wasted seed when our stock accidentally baked out in a severe heat wave for five days -- and then wasted time and energy planting the dead seeds! In short, I became the twenty-first century embodiment of the World War II-era Department of Agriculture's greatest fears. The USDA encouraged scorn and mockery of those underprepared and under-committed to the task.

"We all recall the over-eager gardeners of the last war [...who] rushed into the field with hardly any preparation for their heroic labors, beyond looking up Agriculture in the dictionary to see what it meant"
Robbins, Leonard Harman. “15,000,000 Victory Gardens,” New York Times Magazine, August 23, 1942. Pg. 15.

An unfortunately apt, if hyperbolic, excerpt. Ogden Nash, “My Victory Garden,” House & Garden, November 1943.

Most amazingly, I wasn’t even a new gardener! I’ve been paid to work in gardens and farms in three different states, and spent four years of undergraduate volunteering 20 hours a week or more on the school garden, plus spent a childhood watching my father garden (with varying degrees of success!). I surely had more experience and/or expertise than many of the urban citizens of the United States in World War II.

The problem could be that, try as I might, I just couldn’t make myself strictly follow all the instructions from World War II. Some were impractical (plowing 100 pounds of various additives into the soil), some were dangerous (applying arsenates to my food crops), and some were just . . . more work than I was interested in (ergh, I know how to stake a tomato just fine!). I wasn’t great at following the instructions, or being a good, pliable pupil/gardener. But isn’t that what most Americans/people would do? Combine intuition with past experience with inspiration and take these instructions a healthy grain of salt? My failures may well be as instructive as my successes, I suspect (and hope).

Unfinished Business

However, these are only tentative conclusions. The summer may be drawing to a close, but not the heat here at the top of the Delmarva Peninsula, and as my World War II materials remind me, the fall garden season is only just about to begin!!!

Ralph Sargent Bailey, “Plan Your Victory Garden for Three-Shift Production,” House Beautiful, February 1944.

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