Victory Gardens for Beginners and Busy People

What a wartime government told first-time growers

1. 01

   How much time it takes

   Still holds

   Plant scientists of the U.S. Department of Agriculture say that an hour a day of regular attention should take care of a small home garden.

   Still about right, and still the number people most underestimate. Note the word regular — an hour most days beats a frantic weekend, because weeding and watering respond to consistency rather than effort.

2. 02

   Sunlight

   Mostly holds

   Make sure the plot you choose for your garden has plenty of sunshine. If your plot does not get sun for 6 hours of the day, you can't raise vegetables.

   Six hours remains the standard minimum for fruiting crops — tomatoes, squash, beans. The absolute is too strong though: leafy greens and many roots crop perfectly well on four. In the Willamette Valley, where summer light is long but often diffuse, shade is more often the limit than heat.

3. 03

   Reading the soil

   Still holds

   Experienced gardeners say, “If weeds grow rank on the land, it is a safe bet that the soil is fertile.”

   A genuinely good field test, and free. Vigorous weeds indicate fertility and workable structure. What it cannot tell you is drainage or pH — for those, the NRCS soil survey now maps your specific ground, which no 1943 gardener could consult from a kitchen table.

4. 04

   Planning on paper

   Mostly holds

   Plan your garden on paper. The Victory Garden leaflet just mentioned gives several plans for gardens of different sizes. The smallest one is 30 by 50 feet, but you can have an even smaller garden if you haven't that much space.

   Planning on paper first is as useful as it ever was. The scale has changed: 30 by 50 feet was their smallest plan, and it is larger than most gardens now. Intensive spacing and raised beds mean a modern 4-by-8 bed produces what took considerably more ground then.

5. 05

   Growing for nutrition, not just preference

   Still holds

   Of course, you'll want to plant vegetables the family likes. But give some thought also to vegetables that supply the most food value... particularly vitamins and minerals.

   This is the most forward-looking line in the script. Choosing crops by nutritional return per square foot is treated today as a modern idea; it was wartime policy in 1943, when food value per unit of scarce ground genuinely mattered. The reasoning has not aged at all.

6. 06

   Asking someone local

   Still holds

   You want to know which vegetables, and which varieties of those vegetables, grow best where you live... from your county agricultural agent.

   The county agricultural agent still exists — that is the Cooperative Extension Service, and in Oregon it is OSU Extension out of Corvallis, with Master Gardeners in Lane County. Eighty years on, the best answer to “what grows here” is still a person who has grown it here.

7. 07

   Row orientation

   Still holds

   If it's level, run the rows lengthwise. If the ground slopes, run them around, not up and down the slope. Put the tall plants on the north or west side so they won't shade the low ones.

   Both rules are still taught. Rows across a slope rather than down it slow runoff and hold soil — the same contour principle used at field scale. Tall crops to the north is basic and constantly ignored; a row of staked tomatoes on the south edge will quietly shade out everything behind it.

8. 08

   Placing fertilizer

   Still holds

   Use a hoe to make a furrow about 2 inches deep and 3 or 4 inches wide, parallel to the line where you will plant your seeds, but at least 2 inches away from that line.

   Band placement, described precisely. Keeping fertilizer a couple of inches off the seed line avoids burning germinating roots, and it is still the right technique. Their reason for the care was rationing — “fertilizer is precious this year” — but the agronomy stands on its own.

9. 09

   How much to cultivate

   Still holds

   The plant scientists say to hoe or cultivate only often enough to keep weeds out. Extra hoeing does not help... may even harm tender roots.

   Ahead of its time. Decades of enthusiastic tilling followed this advice being ignored; current soil science lands back where the Bureau of Plant Industry already was. Disturb the soil as little as the weeds require.

10. 10

    Watering

    Still holds

    Soak the soil thoroughly and deeply, the way a heavy rain soaks it... Frequent light sprinkling is bad. It waters the roots of shallow-growing weeds, and doesn't give the garden plants enough water to count.

    Correct, and still the most common mistake made with a hose. Deep infrequent watering drives roots down; daily sprinkling keeps them at the surface and feeds weeds preferentially. West of the Cascades this matters from roughly July, when the rain stops and does not resume for two months.

11. 11

    Getting the bulletin

    Of its time

    The first thing to do is to write to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C., for a copy of the free 1943 Victory Garden bulletin.

    The instruction that dates the piece most sharply. Writing to Washington and waiting for a leaflet was the fastest route to authoritative growing information in 1943. The same department's material now arrives in seconds — this page exists because of it.

12. 12

    Sharing the surplus

    Still holds

    In a very small garden you won't have room enough for potatoes and corn... However, you may get around that difficulty by swapping vegetables with a neighbor who grows plants you don't have.

    Presented as a workaround for scarce space, and it is really the whole point of a victory garden. Nobody grows everything well. The swap is what turns a set of individual plots into something that actually feeds a street. One transcription note: the scan reads “swarming vegetables with a neighbor”, which we have read as “swapping” — a machine misreading rather than a word anyone wrote.