Victory Garden 2020

I'm planting my garden this spring like I always do, but it's got extra meaning for me now. 

It's May 7, 2020 and we've been living amidst COVID-19/coronavirus since early March, and in addition to so many other upheavals, food security's come up. Meat-packing plants are shut down due to employees falling ill, food banks have miles-long lines, and restaurant owners are feeding their former bar/restaurant workers. Additionally, there have been some references to the Victory Gardens of World War I and more so from World Ward II. Things are nutty right now, so looking to history, and gardening, can teach us some things.

Gardening is Good for Your Mental Health

Just as COVID-19 really started becoming a reality, and subsequent lay-offs happened at bars, restaurants, etc., I ironically started a job on March 20, 2020.  I'm a warehouse worker at a local garden center, stocking shelves, loading 50 lb. bags of soil and fertilizer [manure] into customer's cars, and answering all sorts of questions.  As a co-worker of mine notes, "Every day is Saturday", given that we've been that busy just about every day for the last two months!  And much of that busyness has been people buying seeds and plant starts to plant food gardens.

Whether they're experienced gardeners, buying a 50 lb. bag of seed potatoes to start some serious potato production, or novice gardeners ("So I put the tomato cage on the ground with the round side down, right?"), I've seen people's emotions ranging from genuine stress/worry about food supply to stress about boredom and "having something to get me out of the house" amid Stay Home, Stay Safe orders.

50 lb. bag of Adirondack Blue potatoes,
from Maine

Time will tell whether or not we all need to plant gardens, but there's a certain piece of mind that comes from growing your own food, albeit just a tiny portion of what you eat (i.e. the grocery store).  Still, it's a welcome challenge and diversion, especially when you're living through a pandemic and all the human tomfoolery that's accompanying it.

Reusing and Recycling Materials Can Be Fun

This photo from WW II shows a woman that likely cobbled together what she could find for her veggie trellis. I found this image, and several other really interesting ones on Sidewalk Sprouts.

For our garden, my wife and I scavenged our local streets and construction dumpsters for scrap wood.  Loading pallets are tedious to deconstruct, but if you've got patience for pulling nails and cutting odd dimensions, you've got low-cost raised bed gardens in your future (I bought new screws to hold everything together, otherwise the wood was free).

Washington, D.C.
A resident of the Southwest section and her Victory garden.  June 1943. 

I also went on Craigslist ("Free", "Farm & Garden") and scored several 5-gallon buckets and some cinder blocks for free.  I also found a person with a huge bamboo thicket in their backyard and cut 100 bamboo poles for $80.  The buckets make great containers for tomatoes, the cinder blocks added water pressure "head" to my rain barrel, and bamboo poles are great for tomato cages, cucumber trellises, and many other garden structures.  Here's a tour of the garden:

Challenge #1: Building on a slope, and
staking-out the raised beds

Let's go get some vampires! Just kidding,
 we need these to stake out our beds.

Pallets have standard measurements (i.e. 4" x 4', 6" x 4'),
so work with these for efficient design and use of materials.

Carpentry Tip: Cut your raised bed posts as stakes,
as this will keep them anchored even on a hill.

Gardening is all about digging. In this case,
it was digging the raised beds into the hillside.
The easy part came later, dumping in bagged
garden soil, plus the hillside soil.

Loretta the Boss Lady, ensuring that everything's
installed level and square.

A friend was throwing out a broken dresser,
so I reused the drawers as planters.

And the Award for Most Creative Reuse of Something goes to this WW II garden in London -
that circle is a Luftwaffe bomb crater!
Source: https://sidewalksprouts.wordpress.com/history/wwii/

You Don't Need a Lot of Space to Grow Food

Okay, so yes, you can certainly grow more food with more space, as this American WW II Victory Garden film demonstrates. [The film location notes "Northern Maryland", so I hope this farmland isn't now a paved-under bit of Bos-Wash sprawl (Boston-to-Washington, D.C. megalopolis).  And here's another good American film. American agriculture was relatively plentiful, but the United Kingdom, being a small island surrounded by hostile seas (German U-boats), faced legitimate food security challenges. Thus, they made a film or two as well. Here's a still (below) from Dig for Victory (1941) - gardening up on the rooftop!  And the Brits also focused on composting - How to Compost (1941).

And kids in New York City were also taking advantage of leftover spaces (below).

May 1943, New York, New York.
Children of the New York City Children’s Aid Society
work on their victory gardens at the West Side Center.

And here's a look at our space. It's 71.25 square feet of the "sun window" in our backyard.  I call it a "sun window" because we're blessed/cursed with trees and thus SHADE.

May 6, 2020 - Everything's got a Wall-of-Water (insulating tool) and or homemade greenhouse
cover for cold evening temps in the 30s!

And here's the rough dimensions/square footage of everything, minus the 5 gallon buckets (those add at least 6 more square feet, so call the garden 77.25 SF). I've been spoiled before with two 10' x 10' plots in Charlotte, NC (200 SF) and a 20' x 20' plot in Gresham, OR (400 SF).

Don't have room for a big greenhouse?  No problem, just get a hold of some old fencing (salvaged from a friend's home/yard remodel) and plastic (got this from garden center where I work - it's otherwise trash after it's removed from shipping pallets of garden supplies).

You Learn to Appreciate the Little Things

Having a garden gives you the ability to grow things that are hard to find at the grocery store or farmer's market.  For me, it's broccoli rabe, a go-to for anything Italian, be it mixed in with pasta or topping on a pizza or Philly cheesesteak.  The garden's also making me thankful for rain, as I bought a 55-gallon rain barrel that's already been filled a few times after decent rainstorms (photo, below).  It's from Epoch Rain Barrels, a Roxboro, NC-based company whose tagline is "Second Chances for Products and People". While I know they're reusing food-grade plastic barrels, I don't know the story on the people part. (I'm guessing their workforce is people coming out of prison?)

Broccoli rabe, or rapini

Broccoli rabe, which I thinned out and transplanted
seedlings to more garden beds.

55-gallon rain barrel. I've been impressed so
far with http://epochrainbarrels.com/