A mechanical planter setting lettuce seedlings in a production field
From the archive · 1943–1946

Consumer Time

Fifteen minutes a week on the national networks, with a cast, sound cues and a cash register for a theme tune. The rest of this archive is instruction. This is the campaign persuading.

What this is. 7 production scripts from Consumer Time, broadcast on NBC and the Blue Network between 1943 and 1946 for the Food Distribution Administration, then the War Food Administration, then the Department of Agriculture. A recurring cast — a consumer reporter, Johnny Smith, and a consumer representative, Mrs. Evelyn Freyman — introduces a dramatised story each week. Scanned by the National Agricultural Library; every script is listed and linked at the foot of this page.

Read as persuasion, not instruction. Which means the verdicts below run heavily to “of its time”, and that is the finding rather than a disappointment. What a government thought would move twenty million households — who it cast as the hero, who as the fool — is not recoverable from a leaflet. Where real horticulture is buried in the dialogue, and there is more of it than the format suggests, it is judged on the same terms as everywhere else.

A restriction on the scripts, explained. Each one carries a notice that it is “for reference only”, not to be broadcast without special permission, and that the title Consumer Time is restricted to network broadcast of the programme. That governs putting the show back on the air under its own name. It is not a copyright claim and could not be one: these are works of the U.S. federal government and so not subject to copyright. We are quoting them, not broadcasting them.

How we transcribed them. Mimeographed production scripts with heavy show-through from the reverse of each page — one carries a full page of mirrored text the scanner read as nonsense. “CONSUMER THE” for “CONSUMER TIME”, “Victory Oardener”, “vre” for “we”. Repaired, and nothing else. Stage directions are dropped from quotations where they interrupt a spoken line; speaker names are kept where the exchange needs them.

A cash register, then a story

Every episode opens the same way: a till rings twice, money goes in the drawer, and a voice says that is your money buying food. Then fifteen minutes of ration points, ceiling prices and a dramatised lesson — an old farmer teaching a beginner about cutworms, a family driving to the community canning centre, a man on his back porch in July who thinks the year is over.

Two episodes are worth the whole run. In November 1943 a couple from Avalon Park, Chicago, describe turning the old city dump into 530 gardens and running a lending library out of their basement. In July 1945 the programme spends its entire slot arguing that the gardening year is only half done.

  1. 01

    Stop digging

    Still holds
    My advice to you, son, is give this here garden a rest for a while. Weed it — but don't always keep stirring it up. I know it's hard to stop — once you've got the feel of the earth in your fingers.
    Broadcast April 24, 1943

    A remarkable thing to find in 1943, because it is the argument minimal-tillage growing has spent the last thirty years making. Repeated cultivation breaks down the crumb structure that took a season to build, brings a fresh supply of buried weed seed into the light, burns through organic matter, and severs the fine feeder roots running in the top inch or two. The character delivering it is a folksy old farmer written as comic relief, and he is right.

  2. 02

    Disease isn't bugs

    Still holds
    JIM: I got the very best plants I could find. Guaranteed to resist disease. HEZEKIAH: But disease isn't bugs. JIM: Well, the man in the store said that he'd tried these, and didn't have any trouble with bugs. HEZEKIAH: Where'd he try them — in a window box?
    Broadcast April 24, 1943

    Still one of the commonest misreadings of a plant label. Disease resistance is bred against specific pathogens — a variety marked VFN resists verticillium, fusarium and nematodes and has no opinion whatever about cutworms, aphids or slugs. The exchange also lands a second point that has not dated: a result from one grower in one place, especially a sheltered one, is not a result.

  3. 03

    How to tell a cutworm from a rabbit

    Still holds
    HEZEKIAH: Rabbits wouldn't be likely to just cut a plant off and leave it there. They'd eat it. JIM: But why on earth would a cutworm be so ornery as to — HEZEKIAH: That's where a cutworm hides — during the daytime. In fact, he's been hiding there all winter, just waiting for a nice spring evening, and some juicy young plants.
    Broadcast April 24, 1943

    A working diagnostic key, delivered as banter, and correct. Damage that removes a plant without consuming it means a cutworm; damage that removes and eats means a mammal. Cutworms are the larvae of night-flying noctuid moths, they overwinter in the soil, they feed after dark, and the one that felled your seedling is usually within an inch or two of the stump — which is what makes the digging demonstration work. This is the third document in this archive to be about cutworms, alongside the 1943 tomato script and the 1944 insect guide.

  4. 04

    The garden on the city dump

    Mostly holds
    TURRELL: That used to be the city dump. MRS. TURRELL: Garden experts said we just couldn't get anything to grow there... TURRELL: Yes, we had everything from old bed springs to tin cans to clean out of there before we could begin to plant... We had 530 gardens, or about one for every three families.
    Broadcast November 24, 1943

    530 gardens in a community a little over a square mile, on ground the experts had written off — the best story in the archive, and the model for a great deal of modern urban agriculture. The caveat is one 1943 had no way to raise: a former dump or industrial lot is a soil-contamination question before it is a fertility one. Lead, arsenic and petroleum residues do not announce themselves, lead in particular concentrates in leafy greens and in the dust on root crops, and the standard advice for any urban plot with an unknown history is now a soil test for heavy metals first, and raised beds over a barrier layer if it comes back high. Everything else about what the Turrells did is worth copying exactly.

  5. 05

    A lending library in a basement

    Still holds
    As we went along with the work, we discovered that a lot of people had questions to ask that most of us couldn't answer... So we decided to start a Victory Garden library where everything from textbooks to seed catalogues would be available to the workers... We use the basement of our house as neighborhood information center and place to discuss our gardening problems.
    Broadcast November 24, 1943

    This is the whole argument for a reference section, made in a basement in Chicago in 1943 by people who noticed that a campaign hands out instructions and does not answer questions. It is also, fairly precisely, what this site is trying to be, which is worth admitting rather than pretending we thought of it.

  6. 06

    The neighbourhood recipe book

    Mostly holds
    Housewives who had canning recipes which had been tested, were asked to come and put that recipe in a big home-made book. That book is now in the library you mentioned.
    Broadcast November 24, 1943

    The instinct is good and the word has moved under it. “Tested” here means a neighbour had made it and it had worked, which is the sense everyone uses in a kitchen. In canning it now means something narrower and technical: a recipe whose acidity and processing time have been laboratory-verified to reach the centre of the jar at a temperature that kills Clostridium botulinum spores. A tried-and-true family recipe is exactly the category current guidance warns about — not because grandmothers were careless, but because a jar that failed silently could not be told from one that did not.

  7. 07

    Popcorn beside the sweet corn

    Superseded
    Time to get out the seed catalogue and decide whether you're going to plant Beefsteak Tomatoes... or Earlianas! Or whether you ought to try growing popcorn this year alongside those two rows of Golden Bantam.
    Broadcast March 3, 1945

    Charming, and it would ruin the sweet corn. Corn is wind-pollinated and the kernel takes its starch or sugar character from the pollen that fertilised it, not from the plant it grows on — so popcorn tasselling next to Golden Bantam gives you starchy, chewy kernels in the same season, not in the next one. Separate them by a few hundred feet, or by two or three weeks of flowering time. The varieties named have aged better than the planting suggestion: Golden Bantam dates to 1902 and Earliana to about 1900, and both are still sold, which is more than can be said for most of the varieties in our own 1863 census.

  8. 08

    The community canning centre

    Of its time
    There's one important thing that everybody whose community has a center should remember this year. That is... keep your canning center open... keep it operating to the fullest capacity.
    Broadcast July 14, 1945

    Thousands of these existed — shared premises with pressure canners, sealers and steam, booked by appointment, because the equipment was expensive, rationed and idle fifty weeks a year in any one household. They faded through the 1950s and had largely gone by the 1960s. The economics that created them is intact, though, and the model has quietly returned under other names: shared commercial kitchens, cottage-food incubators, extension-run canning days. If you have ever wondered why you own a pressure canner you use twice a year, this episode is about the alternative.

  9. 09

    Making a villain of the neighbour

    Of its time
    MOLLY: Oh hello. I'm so sorry Robert and I can't join your little community party. I have a dreadful headache, and Robert does hate crowds so... The Victory Garden is Bob's hobby, that's all — just for amusement. If you must know, I find fresh vegetables dreadfully boring.
    Broadcast July 14, 1945

    Worth reading because it is the campaign's method in the open. A wealthy woman with the biggest garden in town and two paid gardeners is written as the fool of a fifteen-minute play, opposite a working family who arrive on time with their aprons; the moral is delivered by a child. No bulletin in this archive says out loud that participation was a class question — this script does, by dramatising the snub and then punishing it. Whether persuasion of that kind is admirable or uncomfortable is a fair thing to disagree about; that it was deliberate is not in doubt.

  10. 10

    It is only July

    Still holds
    WIFE: What I mean is, this is only July — July 21, to be exact. Actually, we have plenty of time to start a good part of our garden all over again! YOU: Are you kidding? Do you think I'm crazy?... Here it is July. It's hot. The ground is dry. Nothing's going to come up, not unless we water each little seed and nurse it along like a baby.
    Broadcast July 21, 1945

    The best practical content in the run, and the husband's objections are word for word the ones people still make. They are also answerable. Midsummer sowing needs deeper placement to reach moisture and something over the row to stop it crusting, and after that the second half of the season does most of the work for you: brassicas, roots and salads all size up in cooling weather, and several of them improve after frost. The half of the garden year most people never use runs from late July to the first hard freeze, and knowing when that freeze is due is the only genuinely local part of the calculation.

  11. 11

    The mid-season quit

    Still holds
    We keep talking about our Victory Garden as “a has been”, as though it's all finished... Yes, you think it's pretty funny, all right. A good joke at the office. “Never guess what the little woman suggested now. Wants to plant another Victory Garden now in July.”
    Broadcast July 21, 1945

    The campaign's recurring anxiety, appearing here for at least the third time in this archive — the Leader's Handbook is largely about why gardens get abandoned in July, and this episode dramatises the same collapse from inside a marriage. The diagnosis has not changed: enthusiasm is a spring resource, the work in July is unglamorous, and the reward for continuing arrives in October when nobody is watching.

  12. 12

    A new reason, after the war

    Of its time
    “The threat of starvation in many parts of the world, and the urgent need for food from this country emphasize the importance of continued effort to add to our total food supply this year.” — This is the message to Americans from the President of the United States, Harry S. Truman.
    Broadcast March 9, 1946

    The campaign outlived its own justification and had to find another every year — first the war, then the shortage, then saving money, and finally this: the 1946 famine across Europe and Asia, which was real, enormous, and had nothing to do with whether an American household grew beans. Read alongside the 1945 and 1946 programme documents, it completes the picture of a policy looking for a premise. That it kept finding one for four years is the more interesting fact.

  13. 13

    Victory Farm Volunteers

    Of its time
    Boys and girls from fourteen to seventeen years old are needed again this summer to help out on farms... “I get up at 5:30 in the morning, to milk the cows. It's real interesting the way those milking machines work. I carry milk to the milk house, and feed the cows grain.”
    Broadcast April 13, 1946

    A federal programme placing city teenagers on working farms, presented as adventure and holiday. It is worth being plain about the frame: this was a labour programme addressing a genuine wartime and postwar shortage, and the letter home was chosen for the broadcast. The reason a scheme like it would look different today is not sentiment but law — agricultural work has long carried exemptions from the child-labour rules that apply to every other industry, and how far those should extend is a live question rather than a settled one. The episode is a useful reminder that the campaign's reach went well past the back garden.

“This is only July — July 21, to be exact”

The husband's objections are still the ones people make: it's hot, the ground is dry, nothing will come up. All three are answerable, and the half of the garden year that runs from late July to the first hard freeze is the half most people never use. It turns on one local number.

When is your first frost? →What to sow in midsummer

All 7 broadcasts

In order, each linked to its scan. Every one of them is quoted above.

  • April 24, 1943Quoted

    Ceiling prices and ration points, then a dramatised lesson in garden pests: Jim Potter, his cabbages, and an old farmer called Hezekiah.

  • November 24, 1943Quoted

    Mr and Mrs Turrell of Avalon Park, Chicago, who turned the old city dump into 530 victory gardens and ran a lending library out of their basement.

  • March 3, 1945Quoted

    Seed-catalogue season, with Bob Burns broadcasting from Hollywood. Beefsteak against Earliana, and popcorn beside the sweet corn.

  • July 14, 1945Quoted

    A family drives to the community canning centre. Their wealthy neighbours decline to come, and the programme makes them the villains of the episode.

  • July 21, 1945Quoted

    A man believes his gardening year is finished. His wife points out that it is 21 July. The best practical episode in the run.

  • March 9, 1946Quoted

    The war is over and the campaign continues on a new premise: a message from President Truman about world famine.

  • April 13, 1946Quoted

    Victory Farm Volunteers — a federal programme placing city teenagers on farms, told through a letter home.

More from the archive

We're working through the USDA's victory garden material and marking what still holds. Occasional notes from Eugene, Oregon — an art business with agricultural roots, working its way toward farming.

We'll email you to confirm before sending anything. After that, occasional seasonal notes from Sun & Rain Works — we won't share your address, and every email has an unsubscribe link.

Source: “Consumer Time”, produced for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and broadcast on the National Broadcasting Company and Blue networks, 7 scripts 1943–1946. Digitised by the National Agricultural Library; archive identifiers are linked above. Public domain as works of the U.S. federal government. Annotations are our own and are not endorsed by the USDA. Nothing on this page is home-canning guidance — for current instructions consult the National Center for Home Food Preservation or your state extension service.