World War II Victory Gardens in Clay County
By
Markus Krueger, Visitor Services Coordinator, HCSCC
Moorhead Daily News, May 1, 1943.
It took half the world everything it had to defeat Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan,
Fascist Italy, and the other Axis Powers in the Second World War. Our government
asked a lot of the American people during World War II, and they gave it. People gave
the tires off of their cars. They gave money for war bonds to fund the fight. They gave
their sons, husbands, and fathers. Millions of Americans also gave their lawns to be
turned into gardens.
As soon as Pearl Harbor was attacked, our government knew America needed
more food. So a 20 year-old idea was dusted off: the American government made a
patriotic plea for home gardens. We do not hear much about the “Liberty Gardens” or
“War Gardens” of the First World War that were planted in 1917 and 1918, but they were
incredibly important to the history of American gardening, not to mention the war effort.
It was the idea of Charles Lathrop Pack, a multi-millionaire heir to a lumber fortune who
turned philanthropist. He created the National War Garden Commission in 1917.
In his post-war book The War Garden Victorious, Pack summed up his idea this
way: “The sole aim of the National War Garden Commission was to arouse the patriots
of America to the importance of putting all idle land to work, to teach them how to do it,
and to educate them to conserve by canning and drying all food they could not use while
fresh. The idea of the “city farmer” came into being.”
Now, that may be a bit of an overstatement.
Certainly city-folk have always planted gardens. But in
WWI, a lot of Americans were in a frenzy of patriotism and
gardening was one of the ways of expressing it. People in
cities organized into groups to garden together. They
looked for vacant lots (they called it “Slacker Land”) and
they pressured the owners to let them turn that lot into a
community garden that would be tended by their gardening
group. By working together, these gardeners could share
costs and labor for amenities that a single gardener might
not be able to accomplish alone – things like getting a
tractor in to plow the lot, making an irrigation system, and
stocking a shed full of tools.
Liberty Garden poster
from World War I.
In the April 12, 1918 edition of the Moorhead Daily News,
Susan Lally offered 17 lots she owned in north Moorhead
“free to anyone who will use them for war gardens.”
And it worked! According to the National War
Garden Commission, the U.S. population of just over 100
million people canned 1.45 billion quarts of vegetables in 1918 alone! As 1941 drew to a
close and America was once again plunged into a world war, our leaders knew that we
needed that magic once again.
How Can a Garden Help Win a War?
You might be saying to yourself “Gardening is about the least violent thing I can
think of. How can a garden help win a war?” Well, the simple answer is that gardens
help you make more food, and you need more food in a war. Here is a top five list of
how Victory Gardens helped the American Home Front.
1. Victory Gardens fed people on the Home Front so our Farmers could feed our
military.
We had 16 million Americans in the armed forces in WWII and they needed three meals
a day. Napoleon said that an army marches on its stomach. My brother, a sergeant in the
Army Reserve, says his most important job is making sure his guys have beans and
bullets. The idea for Victory Gardens was to have people feed themselves and their own
families as much as possible with their own gardens so our farmers can send more of the
national food supply overseas.
2. Victory Gardens allowed American farmers to send food to war-torn areas
around the world.
Much has been written about how our factories made America the “Arsenal for
Democracy” for the war, but less is said about our equally important role of being the
breadbasket of the Allied Powers. The farmers of Great Britain could not produce
enough food on their island to feed their people and Germany’s strategy was to starve
Great Britain into submission. It was up to American and Canadian farmers to fill ships
full of food and have these ship convoys run the gauntlet of German U-boats across the
Atlantic to feed the British. Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union, is one of the
world’s finest grain producing regions, but for most of the war it was an unfarmable
warzone or under German control. Our allies in China also desperately needed our help
to feed their people.
Once we started winning the war, the problem only got worse. The empires of
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were sadistically cruel. In both cases, it was their
policy to starve the people they conquered in order to bring enough food back to German
and Japan. Every island we retook in the Pacific, every square mile of Europe we
liberated, we took in more hungry people that the American farmer had to feed. Victory
Gardens helped average American citizens take care of themselves so our farmers could
feed the world.
3. Food grown at home freed up ships, trains, and trucks to be used for war jobs.
Only a few places in the world grew rubber trees, and most of those places were
taken by the Japanese Empire early in the war, so tires were rationed. Gasoline was
rationed. Trains and ships were filled with war materials. Our government asked us
“Hey, instead of sending trains full of tomatoes from California and Mexico, you wanna
help us out and grow your own tomatoes this year? Our trains are busy.”
4. Victory Gardens grew nutritious food at a time when much food was rationed or
scarce.
Unlike many other countries in WWII, Americans never starved. In fact, our
region produced food like never before, but we had to share it with the rest of the world.
Rationing proved challenging to the women of the house who made the meal plans, but it
ensured everyone received their fair share of scarce resources. Sugar was rationed, meat
was rationed, butter was rationed. Fresh fruits and vegetables were never rationed, but
aluminum cans sure were. Grow your own, can your own in glass jars, so we can save
the metal to make airplanes.
As the Moorhead Daily News said on March 30, 1945, “those who meet their own
needs, even in part, take themselves to some degree out of the food market. The result is
less competition for the produce of the commercial growers. The Victory gardener, at
least, will not go hungry.”
5. Victory Gardens gave everyone at home a way to be part of the war effort.
People’s loved ones were in danger. They didn’t have enough gasoline or sugar
or coffee or shoes. People felt helpless, lonely, scared, emotionally frazzled. It is good
for the morale on the Home Front to give people a way to work towards victory, to keep
busy and occupied. Victory gardens were a perfect way of doing this. With a little
physical work, you nurture the seedlings, they grow bigger, you get delicious food, you
are proud of the food you grew and you are also proud that you did something, in some
small way, to help end the war.
Did it work? Absolutely! In 1943, our government asked for 18 million home or
community gardens. Americans responded with 20 million. The government estimated
that more than 1 in 3 veggies grown in the country that year came from someone’s
Victory Garden.
The history books usually leave the subject of Victory Gardens right there.
People were asked to garden. They did. One in three veggies grown in a Victory Garden
in 1943. A photo of somebody digging up a boulevard. That is usually it. Maybe they
are overlooked because they left no lasting legacy – Victory Gardens turn into lawns or
flowerbeds if not kept up. Maybe it’s because home gardening is not as exciting as the
first thirty minutes of Saving Private Ryan. But Victory Gardening was a craze in which
20 million American families participated. Let’s dig a little deeper to discover the impact
of this craze in one American county on the edge of the prairie: Clay County, Minnesota.
Clay County, Minnesota
Clay County is on the very western edge of Minnesota, right across the Red River
from North Dakota. It was home to about 25,000 people during WWII. Moorhead is the
county’s largest city, numbering 9,491 people in the 1940 census, and it is situated right
across the river from Fargo, North Dakota’s biggest city. Although not large by national
standards, Fargo-Moorhead is an important metro area serving a radius of more than a
hundred miles in every direction on the Northern Plains. After Moorhead, the next
largest towns in Clay County were Dilworth a couple miles east (1,068 in 1940), Hawley
(1,122) another dozen miles further, and Barnesville (1,450) on the southern edge of the
county. Other towns such as Ulen, Georgetown, Comstock, Felton, Glyndon, Sabin, and
Hitterdal all numbered about 500 people or less.
Clay Countians did what everyone else did during the war. They sent their young
men to fight. Classes in Moorhead’s two colleges became more and more female. The
women figured out how to use ration points. They recycled metal scrap to make tanks
and bacon fat to make explosives. The major war industry was the Fairmont Creamery in
Moorhead, where local “Rosie the Egg-Crackers” cracked 100 million eggs per year
during the war to be turned into powdered eggs and sent everywhere around the world.
Farming the fertile black soil was the county’s most valuable contribution to the war
effort.
Many in this agricultural community would have vegetable garden plots, war or
no war, but we do see an increased interest in gardening during the war. Specifically, in
the annual reports of the Clay County extension agency, the county newspapers, activities
of the Moorhead Garden Club, and the opening of community gardens in both Moorhead
and Barnesville.
The County Extension Service
The agents and volunteers of the county extension service were the unsung heroes
of the Home Front, at least in rural communities like Clay County, Minnesota. Again,
our government asked quite a bit from people during the war, and the extension agents
and their volunteers were the ones who taught us how to do what we were asked.
Everything was in short supply. To help people’s clothing last the duration,
extension agents in 1943 held 56 workshops in the homes of people throughout the
county, where 934 local women came to learn things like how to mend, how to darn
socks, and how to make clothing from scratch using less fabric. The agents connected
our farmers with laborers and helped them increase crop yields with new techniques.
Extension taught farmers how to make labor saving devices using scrap wood. They also
taught townspeople how to turn their flower gardens into vegetable gardens.
The extension reports are fonts of statistics. Here
are a few. Out of Clay County’s population of just over
25,000, extension agents in 1944 reported assisting 2,730
families in increasing their food production. “Can More in
‘44” was their motto at the county fair that year, a goal
they attained by teaching 2,860 families classes on food
preservation. The outreach numbers are impressive
considering teaching one mother to can tomatoes basically
teaches the whole family to can tomatoes, and the
extension agents reached more than one in ten people in
Clay County. Those 2,860 families canned more than half
a million quarts of fruits and veggies. They dried or froze
more than half a million pounds of fruits and veggies. That
same year, extension taught pressure canning classes
attended by 876 women.
Clay County Extension
Service Agent G. E. May
was active during the
war years.
Oakport Township pressure canning class, 1946.
Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County.
The goal of the Victory Garden project was to increase American vegetable
production to help families be more self sufficient. Edythe Klokseth, an extension
volunteer, was able to turn a profit on her Victory Garden. She, her husband George, and
their kids lived on a 120 acre farm northeast of Glyndon, but the garden was her domain.
After canning 610 quarts of food for her family’s use, Edythe sold an extra 368 quarts of
canned fruits and veggies and 40 pounds of dried peas and beans to Leeby’s Food Store
in Fargo for a total of $145.70 (for those of you familiar with Fargo-Moorhead, the old
Leeby’s Food Store is now Zandbroz Variety Store). “Come again soon and I’ll show
you where I spent my money,” she told the extension agent interviewing her. “We’re
going to have dental work done and then what’s left goes to putting in a work bench and
cupboard along my south kitchen wall.”
The extension service also runs 4-H. 4-H was very active in vegetable gardening.
Over half of all 4-Hers participated in the Victory Garden project in 1943. Of the 293
kids who participated, 188 completed the paperwork to get credit for the project. Those
188 gardened a combined 30 acres of land and canned 1,242 quarts of food. The
following year, 13 year old Bradly Lamb of the Downer O.K. Club wrote in his report
“Our garden has contributed to the war effort because we have not purchased one can of
vegetables from the store.”
But 4-H kids are usually farm kids and a lot of this county extension’s work
would be aimed at farmers who would already be planting vegetable plots for home use.
Next we are going into town, where Victory Gardens stand out more.
Community Gardens
In the country, it is not hard to find room for a garden. Moorhead, however, had a
lot of apartment buildings, houses on small lots, and two colleges. In 1943, the
Merchants and Professional Men of Moorhead sponsored a community garden for those
without a yard of their own.
Moorhead Daily News, May 18, 1943
The Moorhead Community
Victory Garden was located on the east
side of the 600 block of 11th Street
North in Moorhead. This was the edge
of town. An areal photo from 1939
shows no houses, but by 1943 there
were a few built, including the house of
August and Mabel Becker at 604 11th St
N. Becker was a manager selling cars
for W.W. Wallwork. “Come between
the hours of 7 P.M. and 9 P.M. – the
rental agent August Becker…will help
you select your plot,” the ad said. Their son, Bob Becker, was too young to remember
the Victory Garden, but he suspects his mother would have been more involved than his
father in the garden. Mabel Becker was the one with the
green thumb in the family.
We do not know how big the garden was. We do
not know how many plots there were or how much it
cost to rent one. Really, all we know about the existence
of the Moorhead Community Victory Garden came from
this one ad stating that only 20 plots remain. We see
from tax records that the plot of land in question was
owned by several different people but still had very few
houses. The Moorhead Chamber of Commerce either
rented people’s land or appealed to their patriotism to
turn over their “slacker land” for the war effort. We see
no mention of the Moorhead Community Victory
Garden in 1944 or 45, so it may have only been active in
1943.
August and Mabel Becker,
courtesy of Bob Becker
Similarly, we know from a notice
in the Barnesville Record-Review that
Barnesville also set aside some land for
people to garden north of the county
fairgrounds. Those interested in a plot
were to see chief of police George
Wardeberg. We are not sure of the exact
location of the plots “North of the fair
grounds,” but it was likely either still part
of the lawn of the fairgrounds or under
the houses across the street.
Barnesville Record-Review, May 6, 1943
We at the historical society would
very much like to know more about these
community victory gardens in Moorhead and Barnesville, or any other community
Victory Gardens set up in the area. If you know anyone whose family gardened there or
anyone who has photographs of these gardens, please let us know.
If You Can’t Grow It, Can it!
Farmer Charles Peterson had his own spin on Victory Gardens, as we can see
from this ad from May 4, 1943. Charles Peterson was a truck farmer, meaning he grew
veggies and drove them into Fargo-Moorhead for people to
buy. Truck farmers are the people you see at Farmer’s
Markets today. Peterson was successful, one of the biggest
landowners in the county. “We have planted hundreds of
Victory Gardens. You Are Invited To Pick The Crop,” the ad
said.
Carol Ekre told me the story of her mother, Ruth
Langseth, going to Peterson’s farm to pick some tomatoes.
Mrs. Langseth approached a group of men with hoes and
asked if she was in the right place. The men shrugged in
confusion. When an armed guard came to join them, Mrs.
Langseth realized the she was talking to German soldiers from
Moorhead’s POW camp! The Petersons and other families
employed German Prisoners Of War to help in the fields
during the war’s labor shortage.
An article on Victory Gardens in the Moorhead Daily
News on February 25, 1944, referred to Peterson’s Self
Service Victory Garden Plan, stating “In addition to the large
number of private ventures, there were many families who
relied upon the commercially-grown, community-harvested
garden idea which was originated in Moorhead last year. Still
others bought in unusual quantities from the regular truck
gardeners and packed it away for the winter.” Those who
cannot garden were not off the hook. Patriots with “black
Moorhead Daily News,
thumbs” were encouraged to buy extra from local producers
May 4, 1943
so they could preserve it by canning, drying, or freezing.
Fresh fruit and veggies were never rationed during
WWII, but aluminum cans sure were. Buying fresh veggies
when they are in season and canning them in glass jars is great for the war effort because
it reduces the need to ship trainloads full of canned tomatoes from California to
Minnesota all the winter. Canning local food in glass jars saves aluminum, saves trains,
saves fuel, saves tires for delivery trucks, and everybody still gets fed. Although the
word “locavore” had not yet been invented to describe it, eating locally was patriotic and
necessary during the war.
The Old Trail Market at the Probstfield Farm, 1936 and 2013
Those interested in reliving some local food history can go to the Probstfield
Farm just north of Moorhead on 11th Street and about 43rd Avenue North. The farm itself
is older than the cities of Fargo and Moorhead, established by early pioneers Randolph
and Catherine Probstfield in 1868. By the 1940s, the farm was operated by their
grandson, Ray Gesell, and his two aunts Millie and Josie Probstfield, pictured above at
their vegetable stand, the Old Trail Market.
Today, their farm is operated by the non-profit Probstfield Farm Living History
Foundation, which seeks to keep alive the agricultural history and heritage of the Red
River Valley while also exploring where farming can go in the future. The 118 acres
include historic buildings, land rented to a conventional farmer, the Probstfield Organic
Community Garden, and garden plots for experimental crops and educational initiatives
(such as 4-H). Legacy Gardens, operated by Randy and Toni Bach, continues the
tradition of truck farming at the Probstfield Farm. Buying their fresh veggies at the Old
Trail Market stand is one of the most delicious and wholesome ways you can relive
history this summer and fall.
How Common were Victory Gardens?
Newspaper reports from the time suggest that Victory Gardens were common
during the war. “It’s going to be quite a satisfaction to most Moorhead residents to find
their summer’s work stored up in colorful rows on the shelf, ready to be used without the
need of ration points,” reported the Moorhead Daily News, Sept 21, 1943. “What is
more, these people have helped their nation at a time when food is in great demand and
most of the commercial pack can be used overseas and in the military camps.
Congratulations to the Victory gardeners!” While we have to make room for
exaggeration in this quote, saying “most Moorhead residents” were gardening leads us to
believe that growing your own and canning your own was pretty popular during the war.
The quote goes on to say that “Last year was frankly experimental for many
people,” and with with more experience, 1944 will be even better better. It wasn’t only
die-hard gardeners who were digging up their yards. There were a lot of first-time
gardeners during the war.
The people of Hawley also had garden fever. “Folks here in Hawley have taken
to Victory Garden like ducks to water and the indications are that this will be a banner
year,” reported the Hawley Herald on April 26, 1945. “The call for 20,000,000 such
gardens this year will not go unanswered if every community in the nation goes as nearly
all out as we’re doing.”
The Hawley Herald, Barnesville Record-Review, and Moorhead Daily News all
ran regular nationally syndicated articles that featured gardening tips, recipes, photos of
happy gardeners and cartoons that appealed to the gardener. Advertisements both local
and national sought out the business of gardeners.
Barnesville Record-Review, May 20, 1943 (top)
Moorhead Daily News, June 21, 1944 (right)
The Moorhead Garden Club
The spirit of the 1940s Home Front was volunteerism. What can YOU do to help
the war effort? How can we get more gardens? Ask the Moorhead Garden Club to help.
The club’s scrapbook and meeting minutes, preserved in the Clay County archives, show
the ways they used their gardening skills for the war effort.
The Moorhead Garden Club was formed in 1930 for the purpose of city
beautification. Their big event every year was judging a best garden contest in the city.
In 1943, they added the category of Best Victory Garden – that is, vegetables, not
flowers. They awarded first and second place prizes and honorable mentions in each of
Moorhead’s four city wards.
The Grand Prize went to Christian and Anna Dosland, both active members in the
Moorhead Garden Club and known for their fine garden just north of Concordia College.
He was a prominent lawyer and former mayor of Moorhead, but the sources indicate that
Anna deserves the most praise for their perennially beautiful garden. In 1943 the couple
exchanged flowers for veggies in their garden. They had a son and a grandson serving in
the Pacific in the Navy. Norwegian immigrant Anna also no doubt worried about family
and friends living under Nazi occupation in her birth country.
The people who won first place in the four wards show a cross section of society
were honored in the contest:
First ward: Herman (Laborer) and Lena Sayre
Second ward: Leverett (worker at Fairmont Creamery) and Lulu Prindle
Third ward: Adam (foreman for Midnite Express Inc) and Nancy Magloughlin
Fourth ward: Nelmer (salesman for Leo Johnson Furniture Co.) and Hilda Nelson
S.G. Reinertsen from a prewar
Moorhead High Yearbook.
Moorhead’s S.G. Reinertsen
Elementary School is named for
him.
The club occasionally had outsiders speak on garden related topics. In September
of 1944, Moorhead school superintendant S. G. Reinertsen reported local women grew,
canned, and donated 1400 quarts of tomatoes and 500 quarts of beans for school lunches.
Victory Gardens after Victory
“These wartime gardens are well named. But victory is not their only product. From
now on they will be increasingly gardens for peace.”
Moorhead Daily News on March 30, 1945
This passage was written as Allied soldiers were pushing into Germany and
American forces were island-hopping ever closer to Japan. One month after this quote
was printed, Adolph Hitler killed himself in his bunker as Russian soldiers pulverized
Berlin above him. Our military leaders expected it would take at least another year and
perhaps double the number of Americans killed and wounded before Japan surrendered,
but in early August, as the tomatoes and cucumbers were in full production, two atomic
bombs utterly destroyed two Japanese cities and the war was over.
Victory Gardens were not needed after victory. Within a few months of war’s
end, food rationing ceased. As soldiers flooded home, the agricultural labor shortage
eased and the smaller military needed less food shipped overseas. The government had
no need to keep up their gardening campaign. There were no Victory Gardens after the
harvest of 1945, there were just regular old peaceful gardens.
My favorite quote also comes from that last spring of the war:
“It is surprising how many people never realized what fun there is in working in the soil;
what pride one takes in the vegetables one produces, until the war made these gardens
necessary. Now the growing of vegetables not only serves the purpose of aiding the war
effort, but it gives many men and women a pleasant, healthful hobby. Add to that the fact
that there is nothing more appetizing than crisp, fresh vegetables taken from one’s own
garden and you have plenty of reasons why Victory gardening is not likely to want to any
extent when the war is over.”
Hawley Herald, April 26, 1945
Although we have no reliable numbers to make an exact count, it is probably safe
to say that most of America’s wartime backyard and boulevard Victory Gardens turned
back into lawns or flower beds after the war. A great many people were introduced to the
“pleasant, healthful hobby” of gardening during the war, however, and any gardener will
tell you how addicting a hobby gardening is once you get a taste of those fresh tomatoes.
The final quote comes not from World War II, but from our old friend Charles
Lathrop Pack of World War I’s National War Garden Commission:
“Unquestionably, community gardening will continue. It will be the peace-time
descendant of the war garden.”
Charles Lathrop Pack
War Gardens Victorious
1919
Pack’s prediction came true, just not right away. The Liberty Garden craze of
World War I and the Victory Garden craze of World War II brought the creation of
countless community gardens throughout the nation, the vast majority of which reverted
back to “slacker land” soon after peace was declared. The field that was once the
Moorhead Community Victory Garden was covered with houses in the city’s post-war
building boom. The site of the Barnesville Community Victory Garden is now either
covered with houses or part of the lawn at the county fairgrounds. A few remained.
Dowling Community Garden in downtown Minneapolis began in the spring of 1943 and
is thriving more than ever today.
The concept of the Victory Garden, of gardening for the greater good, of
gardening in a city together with your neighbors, this continued to have resonance. A
generation after the war ended, community gardens started sprouting up again across
America again. In the Spring of 1975, some 4-H gardens at Yunker Farm in North Fargo
were converted to community gardens (the gardens moved to their current location in
1977 after the city built a water tower on the site of the original plots). The Baby
Boomer community gardeners were able to draw upon the experience of people who had
already participated in community gardens during the war. The new community
gardening movement finally spread back Clay County in 2004, when the Probstfield
Farm Living History Foundation opened the Probstfield Organic Community Garden on
their land just north of Moorhead’s city limits.
Americans look back at World War II as “the good war,” although no one who
experienced it would have considered the war good at the time. Every generation since
has drawn inspiration from those who joined together and made real sacrifices to
accomplish astounding things in order to make sure good triumphed over evil in the
1940s. For the children, grandchildren and now great-grandchildren of the ones we call
the Greatest Generation, the years 1941-1945 are often seen as the fulfillment of
America’s potential, an example of what Americans can achieve if we were just a little
more selfless, if we could just work together.
A 1944 Victory Gardens poster from the National Archives was the inspiration for Joe
Wirtheim’s poster 70 years later. If you like this sort of thing as much as I do, visit his
site www.VictoryGardenOfTomorrow.com.
Here is one example of how we continue to be inspired by WWII’s Home Front.
On the left is a Victory Garden poster from 1944. On the right is a modern poster made
by Joe Wortheim of Portland, OR, for his company called Victory Garden of Tomorrow.
Just as women’s rights activists are inspired by Rosie the Riveter, gardeners of today’s
Urban Agriculture movement are inspired by Victory Gardens. Just go to the new release
section of your local library and you will find a plethora of new books on topics like
“urban homesteading,” raising chickens, beekeeping, and scores of cookbooks telling you
how to use your produce. Gardening is hip nowadays, a hobby that combines elements of
the DIY craze (“Do It Yourself” projects) and the Foodie craze (which fetishizes local,
fresh, and unique food). Urban gardeners in Minneapolis have pushed through a lot of
changes to city codes to allow what amounts to small-scale farming on empty city lots,
large composting operations, and the ability to keep chickens and bees in the city. Local
demand now has city officials debating whether to allow goats in Minneapolis!
The movement has spread to the Fargo-Moorhead metro area as well. Citizens
like the Moorhead for Urban Chickens Facebook group recently tried (unsuccessfully) to
change city ordinances to allow chickens in town. The community garden at the
Probstfield Farm is thriving and more community gardens are opening in the metro. The
Probstfield Farm annual U-Pick Heritage Squash and Pumpkin patch draws foodies with
the promise of 20 rare or historic varieties you cannot find in a supermarket. More and
more restaurants are opening that pride themselves on buying locally grown food. Our
museum has joined with several other organizations to challenge the Dilworth-Moorhead-
Fargo-West Fargo metro area to register one million square feet of edible gardens and
fruit trees in 2014 as part of FM GardensAlive. Go to www.FMGardensAlive.org to
make your garden count.
Why are we part of a gardening challenge? To mark the 70th anniversaries of the
events of 1944-45, we came up with a new spin on the tradition of planting a flower in
memory of a loved one. For the people we are honoring – our friends and family who
lived through the war years – we think that instead of flowers, it would be far more
appropriate to plant a vegetable. Planting your own edible Victory Garden as a living,
delicious monument is not only a way of honoring the experience of your friends and
family during WWII, it is a way to experience one of their experiences. What do you
say? Will you do your part?