Gardening in America

Back in the 1940s, during WWII and the homefront effort to support the troops, Americans did a really amazing thing.

They grew their own food. They killed their lawns. They pulled together, sacrificed, and made themselves sustainable.

They called this effort the Victory Gardens. Over a third of all wartime vegetables grown in America came from small scale victory gardens. Can you imagine a third of Americans growing their own food? Tilling their lawn, composting, sowing seed and harvesting the fruits and vegetables of their labor, the 1940s citizens were much more connected to their food than contemporary gringos.

Could we ever get back to a point where so many of us took responsibility for our own nourishment? In a nation with more people in prison than there are farming the land, it seems an unattainable goal. But with rising food costs, gas prices threatening to make long distance distribution unfeasible, and more and more Americans out of work in a service economy that isn't manufacturing or growing anything worth buying (weapons and genetically modified monoculture notwithstanding), its conceivable that in my lifetime more than 1% of Americans will be growing something useful or edible.

Unfortunately, the falling number of farmers threatens the loss of the age-old growing techniques of our grandparents. The last 50 years has shown an enormous population shift from the rural heartland of America to cities on the coast. Many of these farms and homesteads have gone been sold from their citizen owners to new corporate industrial farms. But can we trust corporations to manage the future of our food?

I'd say no. Try to grow it yourself. Check out the Freedom Gardeners for a community of modern Victory Gardeners dedicated to doing just that. And we'll keep you posted at growcology on ways to live more sustainably, now.