Friday, March 27, 2020

Think about a Victory Garden this Year

If you were looking for a project that is creative and grounding and is also useful, something constructive to counter gloom and doom, it would be hard to do better than to grow some vegetables this year. (And if you already do that, it's a year to do more!)

via Twitter
See also this OPB piece

Editorial for the WWI version of a "victory garden"
January 7th, 1918
March 3rd, 1919

via National Archives 1917/1925

1 comment:

Salem Breakfast on Bikes said...

Slate has a nice interview with an historian of the victory garden movement.

Just in the history of agricultural technology, they note:

"People assume, “It was the midcentury, it wasn’t as chemical-laden or industrial as gardening can be today,” but they all used as many chemicals as they could lay their hands on!

This also marks the first time hybrid seeds became hugely important in industrial crops, especially over the course of the Great Depression, and hybrid seeds make their way pretty immediately into this backyard gardening movement because they are best scientifically, they are the most efficient.
"

Separately, it is also interesting that local companies, like Territorial Seed, are so swamped they are having to shut down parts of their business temporarily:

"Three weeks ago, we closed our company store in Cottage Grove, and two weeks ago discontinued taking phone orders in our call center. We reassigned many of those staff members to shipping and seed filling departments in an effort to keep pace.

...the order surge is still on and we have not been able to substantially lower our shipping turnaround times....given the date sensitivity we will take the extraordinary action of not accepting any more orders at this time, and concentrate on shipping all existing seed orders to ensure their timely delivery....

My wife Julie and I have been in the seed business for 35 years and have never experienced anything comparable to this...
"