Working the garden year

The Department corrected itself

1. 01

   Six hours of sun — and the correction

   Still holds

   First, a garden should be in the direct sunshine for at least six hours a day... Crops like tomatoes, eggplants, peppers and lima beans don't grow well unless the plot gets more than six hours of sun a day. The leafy vegetables can grow with less sun than the fruit or seed bearing crops.

   This is the Department correcting itself in public and it is worth pausing on. In March 1943 its beginners' broadcast said that without six hours of sun “you can't raise vegetables”, full stop — an absolute we flagged as too strong when we annotated that script. Here is the distinction it was missing, and the Department had already found it: the same split appears in “To Grow or Not to Grow” on 11 February 1944, so the revision took eleven months rather than the two years we first said. This February 1945 script is where it is put most cleanly: six hours is the floor for anything that has to ripen a fruit, and leaf crops manage on four. West of the Cascades that difference decides what a shaded garden can be, because our summer light is long but frequently diffuse.

2. 02

   Where the plot goes

   Still holds

   Next, the land must be well-drained. Be sure your plot isn't in a pocket from which there's no drainage, else you'll have a better pond than garden... Many city lots have been covered with the heavy clay-like subsoil and with building trash. But soil that can be spaded into a loose, crumbly state now should be fairly easy to work all season.

   Three checks, all still first-order, and the third is the one people skip: spade a hole before you commit to a site. The building-trash observation is if anything more relevant now than in 1945, because the subsoil-graded lot is the default in modern development rather than an unlucky exception — the topsoil is scraped, sold, and replaced with whatever grades flat.

3. 03

   Rows across the slope

   Still holds

   If your garden is on sloping ground, have the rows run across the slope. When rows go up and down an incline, they invite spring showers and summer downpours to wash right on through the garden, carrying topsoil, seed and even little plants with them. But when the rows go across the slope, they hold the water and help prevent washing.

   Contour planting, described without the term. Each row and its furrow becomes a small check dam; rows running downhill become channels instead. The effect is large on a slope that barely reads as one — and in the Willamette Valley it is autumn and winter that do the damage, on ground that is bare precisely because the garden year has finished.

4. 04

   Keep the perennials out of the way

   Still holds

   Perennial plants — asparagus, rhubarb, herbs and so on — should be kept together and away from the rest of the garden. They aren't as likely to be disturbed by the annual spring upheaval of spading and planting that way. They're also much easier to handle when they're off to themselves.

   Correct, and the reason has grown since: asparagus and rhubarb are decade-long plantings whose crowns sit in the top few inches, so an annual spading through them is a slow way of ruining a bed that took three years to come into bearing. Segregating them is also the practical beginning of not digging that ground at all, which is where a good deal of modern practice has ended up.

5. 05

   Group the early crops on purpose

   Still holds

   Put the early spring vegetables together, and you have a cleared space to start your fall garden in as the early vegetables mature and are used.

   The best single sentence in these twelve, and the least taught. Everyone is told to sow a second crop in the gap; almost nobody is told to arrange the first sowing so the gap arrives in one usable piece instead of scattered through the plot. Peas, early lettuce, spring radish and overwintered onions all finish inside a few weeks of each other. Put them together in March and you have a bed rather than a patchwork in July.

6. 06

   Don't sow peas and beans thick

   Still holds

   No matter how tempted you are to put beans or peas close, don't do it. You can't transplant them successfully later. And thinning the rows and throwing away young plants is not only a waste but also disturbs the roots of the plants left.

   Legumes are the crops where over-sowing costs most. They resent root disturbance badly enough that transplanting a thinned pea is usually a waste of the pea, and the fine roots of the neighbours you meant to keep are damaged in the pulling. Sow to final spacing, and sow a second row a fortnight later instead of a thicker one now.

7. 07

   A beet seed is not one seed

   Mostly holds

   Each seed of beet and chard is really a package of several seeds. So several plants will come up from each one, and you are sure to have to do some thinning.

   Correct, and it explains a clump nobody sowed. What looks like a beet seed is a dried fruit cluster holding two to five true seeds, which is why beet and chard come up in tufts and why they are the two crops where thinning is not optional. The caveat is that plant breeding caught up: monogerm varieties, carrying one seed to a cluster, were developed from the late 1940s and a few garden beets are now sold that way. Check the packet — if it does not say monogerm, this broadcast still describes your row exactly.

8. 08

   Eat what you pull

   Still holds

   You can often use the thinnings of greens like chard and beets. The young leaves you pull out are delicious to eat. Use the first thinnings of beets as greens, later thinnings as baby beets cooked with greens... Tiny-finger carrots are fine, too, just washed and boiled a few minutes.

   A free crop most gardeners compost. Beet and chard thinnings are the same leaf sold as baby leaf at some expense; turnip, mustard and lettuce thinnings are salad; and thinning carrots late enough to get finger carrots is a legitimate strategy rather than a failure to thin on time. The one exception is the crops in the annotation above — pull a pea or bean thinning and you have simply lost it.

9. 09

   Transplanting is a cost, not a tonic

   Still holds

   You should know that transplanting in itself does not “do the plant good,” as many people believe. Transplanting is a strain on the plant and slows up growth until the plant recovers. So in transplanting do everything you can to ease the strain... Evening is a good time to transplant because plants can recover somewhat in the cool of the night.

   Still true and still worth saying, because the folk belief it is arguing with has not gone away — that a move somehow toughens a seedling. It does the opposite: root hairs are lost, water uptake collapses for several days, and everything gained is gained back later. Soak before lifting, keep the roots covered, plant into wet ground, and go out in the evening. The same instruction appears in the 1943 tomato broadcast, in nearly the same words.

10. 10

    Three gardens in one year

    Still holds

    One of the rules for a successful garden is: keep all the space occupied all season. Don't let carefully worked, well-cultivated soil go to waste, or go to feeding weeds when it might be supplying you with food... in many parts of the country Victory gardeners can have 3 gardens — a spring garden, a summer garden to plant now, and a fall garden.

    The framing is better than the usual one. “Succession planting” sounds like an optional refinement; three gardens sounds like what it is, which is the ordinary use of a piece of ground. The midsummer list the broadcast gives — chard, New Zealand spinach, snap and lima beans, soybeans, black-eyed peas, sweet corn, late cabbage — is still about right for a June sowing anywhere with a long enough autumn.

11. 11

    Follow leaves with roots

    Mostly holds

    It's a good idea to follow leafy vegetables with root vegetables, and root vegetables with leafy vegetables — or, in other words, to plant a different kind of vegetable for the summer crop from the early crop. Don't plant summer greens where spring greens were.

    A serviceable rule of thumb standing in for the real one. Rotation works on botanical family, not on which part you eat: spinach and chard are both leaves and are in the same family as beet, so following one with another is exactly the move the rule was meant to prevent — while lettuce after spinach is fine, because they are unrelated. Kale after cabbage is the same trap in reverse. Our crop guides derive their related-crop links from family for precisely this reason.

12. 12

    What can still go in in June

    Mostly holds

    Is there still time to start Victory Gardening? Indeed there is. Early June is a very good time to plant tomatoes, lima beans, peppers, cucumbers, pole beans, summer greens, salad crops, and sweet corn, if the first frosts locally do not come too early in the fall.

    The list is right and the conditional at the end is carrying almost the whole sentence. A tomato set out in early June needs something like a hundred frost-free days after it, and sweet corn is worse — count backwards from your first autumn frost before believing any of the seven. That is a local number, it was not knowable from a radio in 1944, and it is the one thing this broadcast could not supply.

13. 13

    The August sowing, and the greens that suit it

    Still holds

    If you can find a bit of empty space, where beets, onions, carrots or such have been pulled, there is still time to put it to producing food for your family again... the answer to our problem is leafy green vegetables... leaf lettuce. And, if we have favorable weather, Chinese cabbage, collards, corn salad, and our good friend, kale. If you want something with a pleasantly pungent flavor for a change, there is mustard, turnip tops, and cress.

    The right list for the last sowing of the year, and for the right reason: every crop on it is harvested as a leaf rather than a fruit or a stored root, so it does not need to complete a life cycle before frost — it only needs to grow. Several improve after frost rather than ending at it. Corn salad, which the broadcast slips in without comment, is the hardiest thing here and will sit under snow.

14. 14

    Winter radishes are a different crop

    Still holds

    One of the members of our club who has gardened for years is always recommending winter radishes... But be sure you ask for winter radish seeds when you buy them because they are different from spring radishes.

    A distinction still routinely missed, and the reason August sowings of radish disappoint. Spring radishes are bred to run from seed to table in a month and will bolt or go pithy if asked to do anything else; winter radishes — daikon, black Spanish, China rose — take two or three months, size up in cooling weather, and store for months in damp sand. Sowing the wrong one in August produces a flower stem and no radish.

15. 15

    Drought is the number one hazard for a late sowing

    Still holds

    One point our garden club chairman brings up at every occasion is that we must not let our gardens get too dry, especially during the hot weather. Moisture is extremely important... Vegetables cannot make satisfactory growth without it. They will be stunted and some may even die... For the leafy green vegetables this is just about the number one hazard.

    The whole difficulty of the fall garden in one paragraph. An August sowing goes into hot dry ground at the driest point of the year, and the seed has to germinate before the surface bakes — which is why the practical answers are all about the first ten days: sow deeper than in spring, cover the row with something that will not crust, shade it with a board or a length of burlap until it is up, and water the row rather than the bed. After that the weather starts working for you instead of against.

16. 16

    Vegetables among the flowers

    Still holds

    At the back of a flower bed, on the north or west side where they won't shade out flowers, tomatoes on stakes, pole beans or tall growing varieties of okra will provide a nice background of greenery for flowers as well as some food for the table... Near the front of the bed, in the place of sweet alyssum, you might plant beets, feathery carrots, lettuce and a little parsley.

    Ornamental edible planting, decades before anyone called it that, and the placement advice is exactly what a designer would give now — tall crops on the north or west so their shadow falls outside the bed, and the low crops with the best foliage at the front. Chard, beet and feathery carrot tops earn their place on looks alone. What makes the script better than most modern versions of this idea is the sentence that follows it.

17. 17

    The limit of the idea, admitted

    Still holds

    There's a limit to the amount of double duty a plot of ground can do. A plot where flowers are crowded with vegetables won't produce either well. So be sure you have the space, the good soil, the sunshine before you plant vegetables in the flower bed.

    A government broadcast, in a campaign whose entire purpose was to get more ground planted, telling its listeners where its own suggestion stops working. Interplanting is a way of using space that is genuinely spare; it is not a way of getting two crops out of space that was only ever enough for one. Competition for light and water does not negotiate, and the usual result of ignoring this is a mediocre border and a poor crop.

18. 18

    How a garden was judged

    Still holds

    First, there's general appearance... Next, arrangement. Is the plot laid out so tall plants like pole beans and corn do not shade the smaller vegetables? Are later crops planted where the earlier ones have finished bearing? Third, selection of vegetables... Then there's pest control... Finally, judges take cultural practices into consideration.

    Five headings that still make a fair self-audit at the end of August, and the interesting thing is which of them is a judged criterion rather than a nicety: succession. “Are later crops planted where the earlier ones have finished bearing” is the same instruction as the layout broadcast in February and the June succession list, appearing here as something a stranger would mark you down for. Three separate scripts, one idea, which is a decent measure of how central the Department thought it was.

19. 19

    Order early, and where to find leaf mould

    Still holds

    If you didn't start your compost pile last year, the experts suggest that you look around for places where blown leaves piled up in the fall. You ought to find some rotted leaves there you can use.

    The fastest way for a new garden to get organic matter into its first season, and it costs nothing. Leaves that drifted into a fence corner or a ditch last autumn are part-rotted by February and can go straight into the ground or into a new bed. It is also a reminder that a compost heap is a slow instrument: the pile you start in February is for next year, and this is what to do in the meantime.

20. 20

    Rotenone instead of pyrethrum

    Superseded

    While you probably won't be able to find any pyrethrum, the contact poison, you can use rotenone in its place.

    Exactly backwards by present standards, through no fault of 1945. Pyrethrum was scarce because it is extracted from chrysanthemum flowers grown chiefly in Japan and East Africa, and the war had cut the supply — so the Department pointed gardeners at the substitute. Since then the two have swapped places entirely: pyrethrins remain permitted, including in certified organic production, while rotenone was withdrawn from garden and crop use in the United States after animal studies linked it to the kind of nerve-cell damage seen in Parkinson's disease. Read alongside the 1944 insect guide, which names both.

21. 21

    Storing vitamin A for winter

    Mostly holds

    Fortunately, the body can store quantities of vitamin A, can store enough to carry it over months with very little A in the diet. So if you and your family eat generously of green and yellow vegetables all summer and fall, you will start the winter with your own private stock of vitamin A to tide you over any shortages during the winter months. And hoarding vitamin A “inside” is patriotic hoarding.

    The physiology is right, which is not something one expects from a wartime broadcast making a morale argument. Vitamin A is fat-soluble, the liver stores it, and the stores really do last months — which is why deficiency is a winter disease rather than a daily one. Two things it could not know. Plants supply not vitamin A but beta-carotene, which the body converts at a rate that varies a good deal between people. And absorption needs fat in the same meal — so the butter, cheese and fats being rationed in the very same broadcast were part of what made the vegetables work.

22. 22

    A prediction about his own programme

    Of its time

    People who have grown food for patriotic reasons, from a sense of duty, may feel that their duty is done when the war in Europe is ended. Especially if they're among the many worthy folks who have been gardening on poor soil, or on plots away from home, or if they're so busy with other work they hardly have time to garden.

    The manager of the federal garden programme, asked in October 1944 about next year, predicting the collapse of his own campaign — accurately, and about a year early. What is striking is the diagnosis rather than the forecast: he does not say people will lose interest, he says the ones who leave will be those on bad ground, on distant allotments, or short of time. Read against the 1945 and 1946 programme documents, it is the most clear-eyed sentence anyone in the campaign produced about why participation is unevenly distributed.

23. 23

    The best way to teach nutrition

    Still holds

    The best way in the world to teach a person nutrition is to get him to grow a garden. He may think he's not interested in vitamins, but if he grows a lot of tomatoes and greens and cabbage and so on, those “green and yellow vegetables” we hear so much about, then he's bound to get his vitamins anyway, and they're mighty easy to take if he grows them himself.

    A better argument than most of the nutrition education that has been attempted since, and it works by sidestepping the problem rather than solving it. Nobody eats more kale because they have been informed about kale. People eat what is in front of them, and a garden decides what is in front of them in July whether or not anyone has been persuaded of anything. Eighty years of dietary campaigning has not improved on it.

All 12 broadcasts

In season order, each linked to its scan. Marked scripts are quoted above; the rest we read and took nothing from, which is worth saying rather than leaving them off the list.

• April 5, 1943Quoted

  Why the wartime food situation called for concentrating on greens, and the argument that a summer of them builds a store of vitamin A for winter.

• May 10, 1943Quoted

  Sowing density and thinning: which crops resent it, why a beet seed produces several plants, eating the thinnings, and what transplanting actually costs a plant.

• June 18, 1943Quoted

  Succession sowing — three gardens in one year — with a list for the midsummer planting and a rule about what should follow what.

• June 6, 1944Quoted

  A recruiting broadcast for late starters, with the crops still worth sowing in early June and a large conditional attached.

• July 5, 1944

  Chiefly about who was doing the gardening — women taking on plots and farm labour while men were overseas. Little horticulture; read and not quoted.

• August 16, 1944Quoted

  The last call to sow: which leafy greens still have time, why winter radishes are not spring radishes, and the moisture problem that defeats an August sowing.

• October 12, 1944Quoted

  The manager of the federal garden programme, asked about 1945, predicting who would stop — and arguing that growing food is the best way to teach nutrition.

• February 2, 1945Quoted

  A checklist for choosing the plot: sunlight by crop type, drainage, soil, slope, and the case for a garden close to the house.

• February 5, 1945Quoted

  Order early, because deliveries are slow. Where to find rotted leaves for a compost pile. And a substitution between two insecticides that has since reversed completely.

• March 9, 1945Quoted

  Four pieces of garden design in four hundred words: rows across the slope, perennials kept apart, tall away from short, and early crops grouped so the fall garden has ground waiting.

• “Vegetables in the Flower Border”, 1945Quoted

  Growing vegetables among established perennials — where to put the tall ones, what looks well at the front, and a candid warning about the limits of the idea.

• August 9, 1945Quoted

  The five things garden-contest judges scored: appearance, arrangement, selection, pest control, cultural practices. A usable self-audit.