Planning the Victory Garden
Gardening inspiration from WWII
The veteran gardener knows that the best time and place to start a garden is on a cold winter’s night in front of a warm fireplace.
~ Robert Geiger, The News (MD) 12 March 1942
The day after Christmas, Boxing Day, I was in my basement planting onion seeds. I had heard from some British gardeners that this was the best day to start onion seeds because they take so long to grow. I tried it for the first time last year and it worked amazingly well! This year I tried it again. There’s something so hopeful and thrilling about planting seeds in December. My onion seeds have already sprouted, which is pretty exciting!
If you’re anything like me, I’ve always loved the drawings for garden plans from wartime. And these images are pretty popular online too! They’re so orderly and look so perfect. Not a weed in sight! Ha! Of course, it’s definitely much more work than that, but the drawings are so satisfying to study, especially to see what kinds of things they suggest you grow.
Today I’m sharing a small collection of wartime garden plans I’ve found. As you plan your garden this year (even if it’s just in containers) I hope you find these as inspiring as I do!
BTW, It seems a lot of these plans are for 50’ - 100’ gardens. WOW.
These 3-D style illustrated ones are so awesome! They make it really easy to visualize all that food you’ll (hopefully) be growing.
The Ohio History Connection has a digital copy of the ABC of Victory Gardens pamphlet. These are two images from that pamphlet. (Shoutout to The Historian in the Garden for their post that included these images.)
Next is a very popular picture of a victory garden plan that I see circulating the internet all the time. You might have seen it before yourself. I obtained this image from Eastern Illinois University. (Not everyone sites where they get these images. I do my best to hunt down an original source, but it’s not always easy. Thankfully, I got lucky with this one!)
The following two images come from a huge gardening tome in my collection. I like the hand-drawn quality to so many of these victory garden plans.
If you’re wanting to grow more small scale, here’s an interesting plan for growing in a cold frame. This is definitely one of my gardening goals!
And finally, here is an endearing, hand-written, prize-winning garden plan created by a West Virginia teenager! You can see a photo of him below along with a small article where he describes how he planted his victory garden.
If you’d like to learn more about Victory Gardens, you can listen to my 2 episodes on the topic HERE and HERE.
On my blog, History Preserved, I also did extensive research on which wartime varieties of vegetable seeds you can still find to grow in your own garden! You can read all about it HERE.
And if you’d like your own modern planning guide, I love my good friend Amy’s homestead and garden planning book. She’s got SO much information in there and I love that she includes sections for recording how much food you harvest and preserve. It’s very satisfying writing down all the fruits of my canning labors! You can find the print version HERE and the digital version HERE.
REFERENCES:
All newspaper article images were accessed via Newspapers.com
ABC of Victory Gardens from Ohio History Connection
The War in My Kitchen - Victory Gardens
Boy cultivating vegetable Victory garden with his mother during World War II. Vegetable Garden, Breeze Hill, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. National Agricultural Library, 1943. https://www.nal.usda.gov/exhibits/speccoll/items/show/7552
🥹 gorgeous
Thanks for sharing this delightful piece!