Victory Garden Tomatoes

The growing held. The preserving did not.

1. 01

   Grow tomatoes before anything else

   Still holds

   No matter how small your garden is... no matter what other vegetables you have to slight... no matter if you have only a flower border to grow them in.... be sure to have tomatoes.

   Still the right first crop, though for a reason the script does not give. Tomatoes are near the top of any list by value per square foot, but the stronger argument now is that tomatoes are the crop where homegrown and shop-bought are least alike: supermarket fruit is picked at the mature-green stage and ripened with ethylene so it survives shipping, which fixes the colour without ever developing the sugars and volatiles. Almost nothing else in a garden beats its supermarket equivalent by that margin.

2. 02

   How many plants

   Of its time

   The answer is: Anywhere from a dozen to 15 plants for each member of your family. Have some early-variety tomatoes and some intermediate or late variety. That will give you tomatoes all season long.

   Forty-eight to sixty plants for a family of four, which sounds absurd until you notice what the script is budgeting for. This is not an eating figure, it is a canning figure — enough fruit to carry a household through to the following spring, in a year when canned goods were rationed. For fresh eating alone the modern rule of thumb is two or three plants a person. The staggering advice underneath it is untouched: early and late varieties together are still how you avoid a single overwhelming fortnight and nothing either side of it.

3. 03

   Tomatoes as a vitamin C source

   Of its time

   Tomatoes rank up at the top of the list for vitamin C. Ripe or green, fresh or canned, tomatoes are rich in C.

   As a ranking this is wrong and was wrong then: a raw tomato carries roughly 14 mg of vitamin C per 100 g against about 89 mg for broccoli and well over 100 mg for a sweet pepper. As a wartime argument it is sound, and the difference is the word canned. Tomatoes are acid enough that a large share of their vitamin C survives processing and storage, which is not true of most canned vegetables — so with citrus scarce and shipping rationed, tomatoes were the vitamin C you could actually still be eating in February. The claim is about logistics wearing the clothes of nutrition.

4. 04

   Bury the stem

   Still holds

   Set the plants fairly deep, 3 or 4 inches in the ground. The best are stocky bushy plants, 6 to 10 inches high. If your plants are long and spindling, bury part of the stem along with the roots. That will make stronger plants because new rootlets will come out along the buried stem.

   Completely current, and the single most useful sentence in the script. Tomato stems carry dormant root initials the whole length, so buried stem becomes root — which is why a leggy transplant is a recoverable problem rather than a wasted one. Strip the leaves off whatever you bury. The reason this is worth calling out is that it is nearly unique: bury a brassica or a squash to the same depth and the stem rots. Tomatoes and their close relatives are the exception, not the rule.

5. 05

   When to set plants out

   Still holds

   Be sure all danger of frost is past before you set plants out in the garden. Tomatoes like it warm rather than wintry. But set them out in the cool of the evening or on a cloudy day so they can establish themselves before they have to take the sun.

   Both halves still stand, and the second is the one people skip. A transplant has lost most of its root hairs and cannot yet replace the water its leaves are losing, so an evening or overcast planting buys it a full dark period to recover before it has to face a sunny afternoon. West of the Cascades the binding constraint is usually soil temperature rather than frost — a tomato set into cold ground sulks for a fortnight and is overtaken by one planted a fortnight later.

6. 06

   Paper collars against cutworms

   Still holds

   Guard against them by putting a paper collar around each tomato plant as you set it in the garden. The paper collar should go down into the soil and also stand 2 or 3 inches above ground.

   Still the standard control, and the dimensions given are the right ones — the collar has to go below the surface, because a cutworm reaches the stem from underneath, not over the top. Worth reading alongside the Department's own insect guide of the following year, which gives the same instruction for the same insect. Two USDA documents a year apart both landing on a strip of newspaper is a fair indication of how well it works.

7. 07

   Poison bait

   Superseded

   The best way to kill cutworms is with poison bait, but in a small home garden paper collars are easier.

   The baits meant here were arsenical, and every one of them has since been withdrawn from garden use; arsenic does not break down, so ground treated with it stays contaminated. What is striking is the second clause. The script recommends the chemical and then, in the same sentence, tells a home gardener to use the piece of paper instead. Eighty years of integrated pest management arrived at the same ranking and dropped the first half.

8. 08

   Water the ground, not the plant

   Still holds

   Sprinkling tomatoes is not the best way of supplying water to tomatoes. Sprinkling wets the leaves and fruit... is likely to encourage disease and crack the tomatoes. A better way to water is to run water into a furrow beside the plants, or run it directly into the soil from a pipe or hose.

   This is drip irrigation, described in 1943 in the only vocabulary available. The reasoning is exactly the modern one: early blight and septoria leaf spot both need free water on a leaf to establish, and both arrive by splash from the soil, so overhead water does the spreading and the wetting in one action. Water at the base, water in the morning, and mulch to stop the splash — that last step is the only thing the script leaves out.

9. 09

   Blossom-end rot

   Mostly holds

   One of the troubles in growing tomatoes is blossom-end rot. This is due mostly to an uneven supply of water. You can help avoid blossom end rot by keeping the soil evenly and moderately moist.

   The advice is right and the diagnosis is incomplete in an interesting way. Blossom-end rot is a calcium failure at the far end of the fruit, but the soil almost always contains enough calcium — the problem is delivery. Calcium moves only in the transpiration stream, so a plant that swings between dry and flooded cannot get it into a fruit that is expanding fastest. That is why even watering fixes it and why the calcium sprays sold for it usually do not. The 1943 script names the lever that works without naming the mechanism, which is the better half to get right.

10. 10

    Staking and pruning to a single stem

    Mostly holds

    Save space in your garden by staking tomato plants and pruning them to a single stem. That way you can set plants as close as 2 feet in each direction.

    Correct for indeterminate varieties, which is nearly all of what a 1943 gardener could buy, and wrong in a way that will cost a modern reader their crop if applied to the wrong plant. Determinate — bush — varieties stop growing when the stem ends in a flower truss and set their whole crop on a fixed number of those; prune one to a single stem and you have pruned off the harvest. The packet will say which it is, and that is a check the script's audience never had to make.

11. 11

    Phosphorus

    Superseded

    But tomatoes do best in ground prepared with plenty of rotted manure, with superphosphate added... or with a balanced garden fertilizer, high in phosphorus.

    The manure half is fine. Adding phosphorus as a matter of course is not, and the reason is the manure. Compost and manure carry phosphorus in far higher proportion than a crop removes it, so ground that has been gardened and fed for years usually tests high in phosphorus already, and adding more does nothing for the plants, suppresses the mycorrhizal associations that help them take up other nutrients, and leaves in run-off. The modern instruction is one word long and unglamorous: test first. A soil test through your extension service costs less than a season's fertiliser.

12. 12

    Write to Washington

    Of its time

    Write the U. S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C. for either of 2 free bulletins that will give you more details on growing tomatoes and other Victory Garden vegetables. Write for the “Farm Garden” or the “City Home Garden.”

    The address no longer does anything, but the arrangement it describes is the reason this archive exists. A household heard a fifteen-minute broadcast, posted a card, and a federal bulletin came back free. The bulletins survived that system — they were scanned by the National Agricultural Library and are readable now without the card or the wait, which is the only part of the process that got better.