WASHINGTON — Here and there across America, remnants of World War II victory gardens have been peacefully feeding body and soul for 50 years.
"You grow a lot more than vegetables here. You grow friendship and warmth. You feed your soul," says Adrienne Stanley of the small patch of the Glover Park community victory garden that she has nurtured every March through September for eight seasons in a residential neighborhood of northwest Washington.
Why? "It's in your soul. It's something from childhood," Stanley says. "I remember my mom, a Red Cross nurse during the war, talking about her victory garden in Providence, (R.I.). Spring comes. It's time to put seeds in the ground."
At their peak in 1943, 20 million victory gardens sprouted up in vacant lots, back yards, railroad right of ways and rural communities across the nation. They produced 40% of all fresh vegetables consumed in the United States, worth about $1 billion. In Michigan, acres devoted to victory gardens outnumbered those used for commercially grown vegetables.
Victory gardens were one of the most popular home-front programs developed during the war. The U.S. Office of War Information put out posters promoting the gardens: "Plant a Victory Garden. Our Food Is Fighting. A Garden Will Make Your Rations Go Further." The Department of Agriculture broadcast a national, weekly 15-minute radio program, "Calling All Victory Gardeners."
"Victory gardens were a grass-roots phenomenon of the war and a concrete and practical response to rationing and shortages," said James H. Madison, an Indiana University history professor who teaches a course called "The American Home Front during World War II."
"But victory gardens were also a way of getting the American people involved in supporting the war effort," Madison said. "They were a symbolic way of selling the war."
Ron Ostrow, who was 10 in the spring of 1942 and living in the shadow of the Presidio in San Francisco, just across the Pacific from Japan, recalls fondly:
"Victory gardens were a unifying force. While others were off in the Army fighting the war, they drew people together who probably never would have gotten together in our mixed neighborhood. They gave us a common purpose.
"There was frustration about what we kids could do besides collecting tinfoil from chewing-gum wrappers. We were always searching for something we could do for the war."
