Rows of lettuce running to the horizon across a large production field
From the archive · 1943

The 1943 Victory Garden Program

Eighteen million households were asked to grow their own food. This is the four-page document that asked them — and the source every other bulletin in this archive is quoting.

What this is. A 4-page policy statement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Committee on Victory Gardens, chaired by H. W. Hochbaum, reprinted by the U.S. Office of Civilian Defense in March 1943 and distributed to the local committees who ran the campaign. Held by the U.S. Government Publishing Office (govinfo), classification PR 32.4402:G 16/2.

Why we can publish it. It is a work of the United States federal government and therefore not subject to copyright. The PR 32 classification stem belongs to the Roosevelt presidency rather than to Agriculture, which is worth a second look — a USDA document files under a presidential class because it reached the public through the Office of Civilian Defense.

How we transcribed it. The PDF is an image-only scan with no text layer, so the text here is the Publishing Office's own HTML rendering of the same package. It carries the usual scanning errors — “Tn many town” for “In many town”, “schoolgarden” for “school garden”, stray marginal marks, and the printer's code “512701o—43” dropped mid-sentence. We repaired those artefacts and nothing else. Ellipses mark omitted text inside a quotation. Everything in a quoted block is the USDA's; everything beneath it is ours.

What the other bulletins were copying

Read this alongside the other two documents in the archive and the borrowing is literal rather than thematic. The twelve USDA bulletins listed at the end of this program are reproduced in the Leader's Handbook in the same order, with one substantive change: this tells readers to get them from the State Extension Service, the handbook tells them to write to Washington.

The hour-a-day figure travels the same way. It is stated here as policy, repeated to organizers in the handbook as “an hour or so a day”, and read out on the radio in the Homemakers' Chat broadcast as “an hour a day of regular attention”, attributed there to plant scientists. The six-million and twelve-million garden targets make the same journey.

That is the useful thing about publishing the three together. You can watch a single policy decision turn into a leaflet for organizers and then into something read aloud to households, with the numbers surviving intact at every step.

A government doing the arithmetic out loud

What is unusual about this document is how much of its reasoning it shows. It does not simply ask for gardens; it explains that over half the commercial vegetable pack was going to the war, that the railways could not move bulky produce, and that the shortfall therefore had to be grown where it would be eaten.

The propaganda is here too — this was published while the fighting was on, and it reads that way. But underneath it is a supply calculation, and the parts that hold up eighty years later are mostly the parts that were arithmetic.

  1. 01

    The target

    Of its time
    America needs millions of Victory Gardens in 1943. It must have at least 6 million farm gardens and 12 million city, town, and suburban gardens.

    The number the whole campaign hangs from, and the one the Leader's Handbook quotes back. Eighteen million households is roughly half the families in the country at the time. Nothing in modern food policy operates at that scale or with that directness — it is a government telling citizens what to plant, and being largely obeyed.

  2. 02

    Why gardens, specifically

    Of its time
    Thirty-five percent of the 1942 pack of the most important canned vegetables was set aside for Army and Lend-Lease needs. Over one-half of the 1943 commercial pack of vegetables will be purchased by the Government. This means that civilians will have to depend more and more upon fresh supplies through home-garden production.

    Worth reading closely, because it shows the campaign was arithmetic rather than morale-boosting. Half the commercial vegetable pack was going to the war, so the shortfall had to come from somewhere, and gardens were the only supply that needed no tin, no rail capacity, and no rationing to administer.

  3. 03

    Growing close to where people eat

    Still holds
    The wartime burden on the Nation's transportation system will make it impossible to ship over long distances the normal amounts of fresh vegetables and fruits, especially the more bulky vegetables. This will require production of more of the civilian supplies close to consuming areas.

    This is the local food argument, made by the federal government in 1943, entirely for logistics reasons. No environmental framing, no marketing — just the observation that moving bulky vegetables a long way is expensive and fragile. The modern case for regional food systems rests on resilience arguments that are recognisably the same, which is a useful thing to know when the idea gets described as new.

  4. 04

    How much to eat

    Mostly holds
    The Department of Agriculture considers that good food habits require eating from four to seven servings of vegetables and fruits daily.

    Strikingly close to where dietary guidance sits now — the familiar five-a-day figure lands inside this range, and current MyPlate advice works out much the same. What changed is the unit and the reasoning: servings gave way to cup-equivalents, and the rationale moved from wartime sufficiency to chronic disease. The target barely moved in eighty years.

  5. 05

    An hour a day

    Still holds
    An average of an hour a day in such a plot will do wonders in the way of supplying vegetables, both fresh and preserved, for the family.

    The origin of a number that turns up everywhere in this archive. The Leader's Handbook tells organizers to promise "an hour or so a day"; the Homemakers' Chat broadcast tells listeners "an hour a day of regular attention" and attributes it to plant scientists. It came from here. Still about right for a plot this size, and still the figure people most underestimate.

  6. 06

    Cropping for a long season

    Still holds
    This implies managing the garden so that by means of successive sowings and plantings, by means of companion cropping, and by planting late-maturing vegetables like endive, Chinese cabbage, collards, kale, late cabbage, and certain root crops, the garden effort will produce vegetables from early spring until winter.

    Succession sowing, interplanting and a deliberate late block — this is season extension as taught today, in one sentence, and the crop list is the right one. Kale and collards standing through frost is not a recent discovery. West of the Cascades the mild winter makes this whole paragraph unusually achievable.

  7. 07

    Not overwhelming a beginner

    Still holds
    Directions for the farm vegetable garden should not lay too much emphasis on a large number of kinds of vegetables, and thereby discourage the farm family not now producing much garden stuff for home use.

    An instruction about how to write instructions, and a good one. The campaign understood that a comprehensive planting guide reads as a workload and loses the reader it most needs. Anyone publishing growing advice now is making the same trade, usually without noticing.

  8. 08

    What a city could do

    Of its time
    In Chicago last year, there were 547 community gardens, in which 8,105 families participated. Already 162 additional areas have been set aside there for 1943 and are now being plowed.

    A concrete measurement, which the propaganda-heavy material around it mostly lacks. For scale: few American cities now run community garden programs a tenth that size, and the land that made it possible — vacant industrial margins and undeveloped subdivision tracts — is the part that did not survive the post-war decades.

  9. 09

    Running an allotment site

    Still holds
    As soon as possible the free use of such areas should be obtained, the land cleared, plowed, and fitted; plots should be staked off, and assignments made in accordance with certain prescribed rules and regulations. … If conveyance is at all possible, water should be brought to the area. The cooperation of the city council may be desirable in passing ordinances to protect allotment gardeners from vandals or thievery.

    A community garden operations manual compressed into a paragraph, and every item is still on the checklist: secure the land, till it before you assign it, write the rules down, get water to the site, and expect theft. Modern community gardens fail on exactly these points, usually water and tenure. The one dated assumption is that the land would be free.

  10. 10

    Row spacing

    Of its time
    The labor situation on the average farm is such, too, that the garden plan must be a relatively simple one. Long, straight rows, spaced far enough apart to allow for horse cultivation, are most desirable.

    The clearest date stamp in the document. Row spacing set by the width of a horse is why old garden plans look so wasteful of ground now — the aisles were sized for the animal, not the crop. Farm labour had gone to the war and the machinery was not there to replace it, so the horse came back.

  11. 11

    School gardens

    Still holds
    Summer care and cultivation must also be provided by hiring boys and other help, under the watchful supervision of the instructor or a gardener.

    The single hardest problem in school gardening, named and budgeted for in 1943. A school garden peaks in August when the school is empty, and programs that do not plan for who waters it in July are the ones that quietly stop existing. That the program specified paying someone is more realistic than most modern proposals manage.

  12. 12

    Safe canning

    Mostly holds
    Pressure cookers make the canning process easier and, above all, safe. Without them, the kinds of vegetables that may be canned safely are largely restricted to the acid vegetables.

    The same rule the Leader's Handbook gives its organizers, stated here as policy, and still current: low-acid vegetables must be pressure canned. The caveat is the one that has moved since. Tomatoes counted as reliably acid in 1943; many varieties grown now do not, so current USDA guidance is to add lemon juice or citric acid before water-bath canning them.

  13. 13

    How much to put up

    Of its time
    A well-managed garden will produce enough vegetables and fruits so that from 100 to 125 quarts for every member of the family can be put up.

    Worth pausing on. A hundred quarts per person means a family of four preserving four hundred jars in a season, and the document treats this as a reasonable expectation rather than an extraordinary one. It is a measure of how much of the year's eating was expected to come off that plot, and of how much labour the household had available to do it.

  14. 14

    Nothing wasted

    Still holds
    Not one bit of garden produce should be allowed to go to waste. All surpluses from home gardens, or where available, local market surpluses of good-quality vegetables and fruits, should be canned or otherwise preserved for use in homes, school lunches, or for welfare purposes.

    Written as a wartime injunction, but the structure — route surplus to school lunches and to people who need it — is what food recovery organisations do now, and they still find fresh produce the hardest category to place. The program treated gleaning as national policy rather than charity, which is the part worth borrowing.

  15. 15

    Where to send people for answers

    Still holds
    Every State Extension Service, likewise, has published circulars and bulletins on gardening that are freely available. These many helps should be taken advantage of. We cannot afford to waste time, labor, seeds, and fertilizer because of ignorance and careless methods.

    Twelve USDA bulletins are listed above this line, and the Leader's Handbook reproduces that list in the same order — with the distribution instruction changed from the State Extension Service to writing Washington directly. Extension is still the right answer to a local growing question, and in Oregon that means OSU Extension, with Master Gardeners in Lane County.

“The most favored spot with respect to moisture”

The program tells farm families to site the garden where the water is, and to expect summer dry spells to wreck a planting that goes in at the wrong moment. It could not tell anyone when that moment was — the timing question was handed to the state extension services, because Washington had no way to answer it for every county at once.

That part is now instant. The same government publishes thirty years of frost records for the weather station nearest you.

Find your frost dates →

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: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Committee on Victory Gardens (H. W. Hochbaum, Chairman), “The 1943 Victory Garden Program”. Reprinted by the U.S. Office of Civilian Defense, March 1943. Superintendent of Documents classification PR 32.4402:G 16/2; retrieved from U.S. Government Publishing Office (govinfo). Public domain as a work of the U.S. federal government. Annotations are our own and are not endorsed by the USDA.