North Americans responded to the call again during World War II. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 20 million Victory Gardens produced 40 percent of America’s fresh vegetables in 1943. In Canada, according to the federal Department of Agriculture, 115 million pounds of vegetables were grown in 209,200 urban gardens in that same year. There were, of course, thousands more wartime gardens in villages and on farms.
Such commitment to the food-growing effort didn’t just spontaneously spring forth from the collective consciousness of the North American urban populace. It arose in response to policies and promotional campaigns that worked to organize public purpose. At all levels of government, in both the U.S. and Canada, officials drove home the message—often couched in patriotic terms—that gardens were a matter of “duty.”
For example, the federal government appealed to Canadians during WWII with the following bold and baldly stated goal: “Every available bit of land that is suitable should be put into a garden. Those with experience should help their neighbours who wish to start.” The feds advised provincial governments that it was “desirable to sponsor community garden and backyard garden campaigns.” Cities across Canada took up the charge. Victoria, British Columbia, offered concessions to the public at $5 a year to grow gardens on vacant lots. Toronto, Ontario, offered the use of municipally owned lots to individuals and groups for gardening purposes, charging just 25 cents for a permit; interestingly, the fee covered police protection for the gardens. Even Toronto’s mayor got in the act, arranging a photo op with the Globe and Mail, which dutifully reported that Mayor Fred Conboy’s flower border was replaced with tomatoes and that his lawn was being transformed into a potato patch.
Citizens responded with all-out effort. The police and firemen at the Forest Hill Village station in Toronto cut four patches out of their 5,000-square-foot lawn. As the Globe described it in June 1943, they used “any odd time they [could] spare from upholding the law and keeping firefighting equipment in tip-top condition” to grow tomatoes, radishes, Scotch kale, carrots, cabbages, and more.
The Ontario Hydro Horticultural Club’s Victory Garden Committee had 425 members in Toronto alone (750 throughout the province) gardening on land donated by municipal commissions and private owners. In Toronto, they grew $26,000 (or $331,000 in 2009 dollars) worth of food in 1943. The Community Gardens Association of Toronto tended plots on major streets, cultivating $30,940 worth of vegetables. The Pine Crescent Joy Club, an east-end Toronto activity club for youngsters, turned the lawn, where once they enjoyed badminton, horseshoes, and lawn bowling, into a 35-foot-long, V-shaped Victory Garden. Seed companies did a roaring business: in response to a reporter’s inquiries, one seed seller responded, “We’re so busy selling seeds for Victory gardens that we have no time to even discuss them.”
All this food-focused labor bore results across the country. By the end of the 1943 growing season, there were approximately 52,000 Victory Gardens in the greater Vancouver area, which together produced 31,000 tons of fruits and vegetables valued at $4 million. Many Vancouverites also applied to the City Building and Zoning Secretary for permission to keep more than twelve chickens (permits weren’t required for fewer than twelve), though this pales in comparison to the livestock action in Britain, where, according to Michael Hough’s book Cities and Natural Process (first published in 1984 as City Form and Natural Process), keeping chickens, pigs, goats and bees “evolved as a major urban activity” during the war: “By 1943 there were 4,000 pig clubs comprising some 110,000 members keeping 105,000 pigs.”
The British effort no doubt provided inspiration for many North American Victory Garden campaigns. Images of British citizens growing food in craters left by bombs and using the Tower of London moat to grow cabbages were surely potent motivation for North Americans to assist in the war effort by growing food anywhere and everywhere. Even the royal family was tending vegetable gardens at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.
Although it might seem inappropriate to make the connection, there are striking parallels between then and now. Global conflict threatened and continues to threaten our ability to take care of our most basic needs. For us in North America, the threat may not be as immediate, but it hovers in the background because our society is now far more global. We are more connected to, and dependent upon, other parts of the world than ever before. Today, as a result of many factors, including the recession, close to 4 million Americans and 3.4 million Canadians live in poverty and struggle to feed themselves adequately, relying on food banks, food stamps, and charitable organizations to supplement their diet. Although the particular circumstances of past world wars, the Depression, and the current climate are vastly different, there remains a common thread: millions of North Americans are in need, and one of the basic things they need is food. In this context, are the times not ripe to nurture the resilience—resilience that sprang, literally, from the soil—that helped North Americans through not-too-distant times of conflict and economic hardship?
Perhaps the “yes we can” that we need to proclaim—beyond symbolic gesture, and from the soil—is the yes we can of feeding ourselves. And it would be useful to remember, while we flex our yes we can muscles, that not too long ago, yes we did.
JUST WHEN AND why did we lose that commitment to domestic food production? And, equally important, how? What were the mechanisms at work to help create a cultural amnesia around our ability to feed ourselves? Was it a collective decision to so emphatically negate the food-producing possibilities of the city? Or was it rather a slow accretion of factors, each building upon the other, until we had forgotten the productive potential of our urban environments?
I suspect that we were willing participants in the erasure of food growing from our cities, at first anyway. World War II was over, and with it went need, replaced with want. There were products to buy and there was work to do in order to be prosperous enough to purchase all those consumer goods. Our homes became places of display, the stage on which the trappings of accumulated wealth could signal success. A profusion of food plants had no place in that display; they spoke of need, not ordered control. Much better to carpet our home landscapes with lawn—the ultimate symbol of triumph over necessity, a declarative public statement that we no longer depended on our yards to have the capacity to supply food, since the stores (and later the supermarkets) did that just fine. We had reached a heightened position of luxury in which space could be “wasted” and sustenance replaced with decoration; ornament was what we wanted. (I’ll be talking about this in more detail in chapter 5.)
There were—and still are—class elements to this attitude. The suggestion of need that accompanies food gardens was, for a long time, something to hide rather than trumpet. To be forced by economic necessity to grow some of your own food was a public announcement of straitened circumstance and reduced status. For a brief period in the 1970s, the back-to-the-land movement— ironically, a movement characterized by privilege—attempted to invert the equation, rebranding need as a moral virtue, food growing as an ethical requirement. It’s easy to imagine that those who didn’t have the financial option of “dropping out” were less than entranced by the message.
As a teenager, I saw a similar thing happen, not only as it relates to class and food gardening, but to issues around ethnicity. At my high school, most of the students’ fathers (and it was
> Converting a Lawn to a Vegetable Bed
A no-dig technique called sheet mulching is the easiest way to convert an area of lawn into a vegetable garden bed. Start preparing the bed in fall and you’ll have wonderful soil ready to plant in the spring.
> Mow the existing grass using the lowest setting on your lawn mower. No need to rake up the clippings; just leave them where they land.
> Cover the area with a layer of cardboard or newspapers (if using newspapers, add a layer approximately ten sheets thick; if using cardboard, a single layer is fine, though be sure to remove any staples and packing tape).
> Spread a 3-inch layer of soil and/or soil mixed with compost and/or well-rotted manure on top of the cardboard or newspapers.
> Top it all off with a 3-inch layer of chopped