A Victory Garden for Trying Times Read online

  By the growing season of 1943, the government gave in and officially supported Victory Gardens in backyards and on public lands. The Health League of Canada started a Vegetables for Victory campaign focusing on the nutritional value of vegetables. While its slogan — “Help Canada and have fun, too!” — was far less dramatic than the British slogan, by 1943 more than two hundred thousand Victory Gardens had sprouted in Canada, up about 25 percent from the beginning of the war.

  It took the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to get Americans not only into the war but back into their gardens. Twelve days after the attack, the government hurriedly brought back campaigns and started new institutes to educate the public on how food would bring victory. “Food fights for freedom,” President Franklin Roosevelt said. “For food — American food — can be the deadliest weapon of all. It may save thousands of American lives. The course and length of the war may depend on how successfully we produce it — how willingly and widely we share it — how carefully we save it, how wisely we use it.” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt did her part by having the White House lawn dug up for a Victory Garden. And once again vegetables appeared on posters as heroes, this time bombing a swastika. “You can make this kind of ammunition,” one poster exhorted.

  Annual conferences with representatives from all levels of government outlined the goals for each growing season: Let’s increase the twenty million Victory Gardens of 1943 to twenty-two million. Let’s have twenty-six million home preservers. Let’s manufacture sixty million pressure cookers. The main message: Victory Gardeners can and must do a still better job.

  Conference organizers held sessions on canning beets, on the shortages of rubber hoses and seeds. They discussed the best pesticides to use to surmount shortages caused by the war. “The supplies of lead arsenate, nicotine sulphate, the newer cryolite seem to be adequate,” said one report. They encouraged gardeners to get the most out of the limited supply of rotenone insecticides — insecticides that kill leaf-eating caterpillars and, incidentally, fish — by getting out earlier in the season with dusters and sprays, “while the bugs are fewer and more susceptible.”

  I got a lot of practical ideas about my Victory Garden by reading reports from the conferences. I learned not to grow too many different types of vegetables in the garden so I wouldn’t get overwhelmed with the knowledge required to care for each kind. I learned to divide the garden between leafy vegetables that could be eaten in the spring and summer and root vegetables, tomatoes, and squash that could be preserved or stored for winter. I learned that successive sowings of seeds stretched the abundance of the garden, lengthened the season, and controlled waste. And I read it was wise to leave corn and potatoes to the farmers who had the space. But I already knew that.

  I also decided, as I read conference reports, what I would do differently. Wartime Victory Gardens were intended to produce the heaviest crops possible. The only way to achieve that was through pesticides. Lots of them. I already knew that part of my victory would be in creating an organic garden that didn’t tax our health or the environment, even if I didn’t get enough vegetables for an entire year.

  I still can picture my father in his sweaty T-shirt and cap driving the tractor up and down the rows of cherry and peach trees on our farm, pulling the sprayer behind him. I remember the sprayer as a big tank that spewed out chemicals I could smell from the back porch of our house. I remember one of the chemicals my father used was Captan, later identified as carcinogenic. I don’t remember my father wearing any special gear or mask; I’m sure it never occurred to him. And although he never developed cancer, he did have weak lungs and a propensity for pneumonia throughout his later life. In his eighties, his lungs were so scarred that during his last bout of pneumonia, he could no longer breathe. Just as I’ll never know if Captan led to my father’s lung ailments, I’ll never know what role environmental toxins played in giving Peter cancer. But my Victory Garden would be pesticide-free, a small contribution to clean air.

  After 1945, the conferences ended; campaigns disappeared. Surprise, surprise. The war was over. The term Victory Garden largely disappeared from government material, resurfacing occasionally in the media in times of political and economic uncertainty. As author Cecilia Gowdy-Wygant points out in her book Cultivating Victory, postwar gardens were more about personal survival than they were about patriotism and helping others, more about protecting an individual’s world than creating community. “Many modern adaptations shun such ideas as aspects of a bygone era and instead move toward self-preservation.”

  Gowdy-Wygant writes that self-preservation gardens popped up after crises, such as the hoarding period leading up to Y2K and during the wars that came after 9/11, when the world order made little sense. But I found my favourite survivalist garden movement online. The Zombie Victory Garden website offered insight into growing vegetables to prepare for the zombie apocalypse. Their motto: “The Zombies Are Coming! Quick! Plant Something!”

  And then in 2009, a second Victory Garden appeared on the White House lawn. This one had nothing to do with a shortage of food, but rather with an overabundance of the wrong kind of food. First Lady Michelle Obama introduced her organic garden to educate children about the dangers of obesity and diabetes. Her battle was against processed food laden with sugar, salt, and fat; her rallying cry was “Let’s hear it for vegetables!” She could have used Charles Lathrop Pack in her campaign. Kids would have loved his kick-ass vegetables.

  The spirit of the Victory Garden survives in urban community gardens that offer fresh produce to locals who might not otherwise have access to it. And it lives on in the marketing of developers who have caught on to consumer interest in sustainability. Those developers are creating housing communities across North America, known as agrihoods, communities not built around golf courses, wide-open green spaces, or water features, but around gardens and orchards that can supply the needs of those who live in the neighbourhoods.

  After I read all I could about wartime Victory Gardens and their legacy, I had no illusion mine would influence anyone’s eating habits, keep me safe in an apocalypse of any kind, or effect positive change in the world. But maybe, secretly, I hoped that if I worked hard to create something good, something good would come to us in the form of a cure for Peter’s cancer. But that secret, that twisted logic of magical thinking, was buried deeper in my mind than the garlic cloves in my garden.

  Throughout my reading, I discovered no single person who could become my gardening inspiration. Not even Charles Lathrop Pack, the man on a mission; I just couldn’t imagine such a rich man getting his own hands dirty. But as a loner, I’ve always found it hard to find mentors. And I knew I’d have to go it alone in my garden without a great figure from history watching over my shoulder. As I filed away my notes and articles on the wartime Victory Gardens, I realized that it didn’t matter. I didn’t need some unknown character as my inspiration. I had memories of a grandmother — my mother’s mother — who grew vegetables in a kitchen garden inside a white picket fence. And I had my father. Everyday people, my ancestors, who wanted to take control of their own food and feed those they loved. They would be my silent models as I began to turn the soil in my garden and carry out my own fight for victory.

  Chapter Four

  WHAT WAS I THINKING?

  By late January, I wondered. I didn’t feel I’d ever be organized and focused enough to carry through with my plans for a Victory Garden. We still had no word on whether the radiation and chemotherapy treatments had done their job and Peter could have surgery. No appointment for that crucial CT scan with its thumbs-up or thumbs-down. And here I was plotting a Victory Garden.

  Who was I kidding?

  It would be too self-deprecating for me to suggest I haven’t accomplished things in my life, completed difficult projects, even been successful now and again. And over my lifetime I’d developed the muscle to get up and get on after failure. But the word victory seemed too strong, and, in winter, a Victory Gar
den too grand an ambition. The possibility that I could design and source the garden and then nurture all those plants overwhelmed me when I looked out my office window at the cold, barren vegetable patch. Especially with the gnawing fear in my belly about the odds of victory over cancer, especially when, in the depths of winter, all I really wanted to do was read cozy mystery novels, rewatch favourite series on DVD, and stay in bed as late into the morning as I could.

  There’s a book I love about writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. In it, her father calms his panicked son who has left a school project on birds until the last moment. “Bird by bird,” he tells him. That story taught me that while I needed to keep the whole problem, the whole project in mind, I’d have to approach it bird by bird, word by word, step by step. So I started with the smallest piece: the seeds. At first I thought that was clever, so when I sat down at my computer, instead of looking at cancer statistics, I searched online catalogues for inspiration and ideas about the plants and varieties I’d want. And I did feel that exhilaration of taking a first step.

  One morning I found a seed company online that was offering free shipping for orders placed by February first. It seemed like a sign to get busy. I quickly filled a virtual shopping cart with seeds to beat the deadline, even though, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew buying seeds was not the right “bird” to start with.

  By the time I had nineteen dollars worth of seeds in the cart — some old standbys, some untried — I was ready to check out. It was then I noticed that the free shipping was only offered for shipments of one hundred dollars or more. I closed the site, relieved that I hadn’t got ahead of myself. I ended my morning by bookmarking other promising seed catalogues so I wouldn’t feel I’d wasted my time. And, when companies had them, I ordered print catalogues like the ones my father had read again and again, with pictures I could circle and margins I could write lists in so I could ponder my choices, not rush into them.

  When the first catalogue arrived, I was disappointed. Although Heritage Harvest Seed, based in Manitoba, called their small booklet an “illustrated catalogue,” its pages held only a scattering of black-and-white historic-looking drawings, perhaps designed to assure buyers the seeds sold were as pure as some imagined past. But I’m a visual person — a photographer, a former documentary producer. I wanted full-colour photos of shiny red tomatoes, deep-green chard, and cucumbers shot so close I could see the prickles on them. I told myself I’d wait for other catalogues, the ones from the big seed houses. I was getting used to waiting anyway. Most of the days of late January were spent that way, wondering whether the stray cancer cells in Peter’s lymph system, the ones that made his cancer Stage 3, had been bombarded out of his body as the tumour was zapped.

  The glossy catalogues were slow in coming, so I found myself on the last Saturday in January sitting with the sun streaming in through the windows of the great room, a cooling cup of coffee at my side, immersed in the Heritage Harvest Seed catalogue and its seventy-four pages of “UNTREATED NATURAL SEEDS.” Even though I was far from finalizing my seed selection, the booklet got me thinking about how many plants I would start from seed and how many I’d buy as seedlings from a nursery. Vegetables like radishes, chard, carrots, and lettuces grow easily from seed, but others, like onions, tomatoes, and squash, would grow faster from seedlings, and without a greenhouse, I didn’t want to take on the task of germinating all my seeds indoors, timing their growth for the right moment for transplanting into the earth.

  I marvelled at the number of seeds listed by Heritage Harvest Seed that I’d never heard of. “Very rare.” “Seed exclusive.” “EXTREMELY RARE.” Some seeds seemed worth buying for the seller’s narrative alone. Take this pole bean, Tung’s bean:

  Preserved by the Kerr family of Long Beach, BC since the early 1900’s. In 1906 James D. Kerr immigrated from England and settled at Long Beach on Kootenay Lake. He hired a Chinese laborer, by the name of Tung to help him on his new 50 acre property. Mr. Tung was in charge of the vegetable garden and planted these beans that he had brought from China. After 25 years Mr. Tung returned to his homeland and the beans were preserved by the Kerr family.

  My God, I thought, there’s a global novel in that seed.

  How did the Kerrs treat Mr. Tung, I wondered. Why did he leave China and then go back after a quarter of a century? If I grew the beans, would I be able to taste what Mr. Tung had tasted? I felt especially sad for Mr. Tung’s displacement. Living with someone with cancer, seeing how many people struggled in and out of the Juravinski Cancer Centre every day, often left me weepy.

  As tempting as the narrative for Tung’s beans was, I’d already decided on Kentucky Wonder for my pole beans because of my own narrative. They were my father’s beans, the ones he and my mother blanched and chilled for the freezer. And I’d grown them for years from seeds I overwintered in the basement. An envelope was waiting in the dark cold room for the spring.

  The other choices in the catalogue were simply overwhelming: 189 types of tomatoes and 26 types of lettuce, including one called Drunken Woman, described as an “Italian leaf lettuce with reddish edges.” It was the first seed I circled. I had to have it if only to point it out to visitors while we sipped red wine in the yard.

  I stopped in the middle of counting the number of squash seeds available and wondered how my father had made his choices. Did he ever just pick a seed for its name or by its description alone? I knew he liked to experiment; he tried planting peanuts in Ontario before others did, grew gourds before they started to appear in market shops each fall. He sent me back to university with oddly shaped green and orange bumpy gourds that became a source of wonderment and amusement to the residents on my dormitory floor. After my father, a self-taught musician who played multiple instruments, read how Africans make music with gourds, he dried his own so that when we shook them the seeds knocked against the taut skin. To my embarrassment, he even cut an oversized dry gourd shaped like a banjo in half, painted it gold, and stuck some cotton batting and a plastic Santa Claus in it. It hung by a red ribbon on our dining room wall as a Christmas decoration for years.

  When I was in my twenties, married, and living in a basement apartment with my first, still-student husband, I appealed to my father’s sense of experimentation. I’d bought into the seventies’ back-to-the-land movement. Big time. Even though I had no land. In an old-style food store in Guelph with wide and worn pine floorboards, my husband and I ground our own peanut butter. We baked with honey, soaked beans and legumes. We gave up sugar after reading the fear-raising book Sugar Blues and trusted in the power of herbs after reading the classic Back to Eden.

  I don’t remember seeing tofu in the grocery stores back then, but I came to believe we had to have soya beans in our diet. So I asked my father to plant some for me, and he did. That fall he showed up on our doorstep with several bushel baskets full of long drying pods. I shelled them and put the small white beans in big glass jars. Where they sat and sat. I tried making soups with them, tried disguising them as Boston brown beans. But as they slowly cooked, they filled the apartment with a loathsome odour. It didn’t matter how I spiced them or sauced them; they always came out tasting like gasoline. I pushed the jars to the back of the cupboard where they stayed out of mind until our next move, when I could feel good about clearing out my shelves.

  But no matter how willing my father was to try new plants, he always made sure he made enough room for his standbys in his garden between the cherry trees. And in that, there seemed to be a good lesson for me: the garden for the joy of play and experimentation as well as the serious business of feeding a family. After that realization, I knew I’d have rows of standard beets and carrots embracing the Drunken Woman.

  Before I could figure out my mix of reliable and chancy varieties, I knew what I had to do as my first bird, my first step: measure my two vegetable beds and see how they compared to the old Victory Garden map I’d found. Only then could I begin drawing my own map with the number of rows I could
have and see what vegetables I could reasonably include. I knew I had to do that, but I didn’t do it. For days, “measure the garden” was on my to-do list stuck to my computer monitor and was the one thing left undone when I turned off my desk lamp at night. The ground was bare; I could see the space I had to measure from the back windows of the house, but still I didn’t do it. The days were a bit colder the last week in January but not that cold. Call it inertia, fear of failure, whatever. I just couldn’t take that necessary step.

  At least, by that stage in my life, I’d come to recognize that January is my worst month, a month when I can’t really accomplish anything. In the heart of winter, my doubts and my sense of failure are always strongest. How many jobs have I walked away from? How many friendships have I screwed up? How many opportunities have I wasted? WILL I EVER GET ANYTHING RIGHT?

  In January, there is a stillness that calls for introspection. The bare limbs of the trees speak of basics, of the essence of things. When I drive in my new home territory of Niagara in winter, the rows of stark grapevines and fruit trees, without the clothing of leaves, reveal their primary shapes, their skeletons, and demand that I look beneath the layers of my daily activities, my plans, my wishes, to my deepest core. And that January, when the hold was tenuous on all we had, as we waited for Peter to heal enough for his CT scan, my bones felt completely exposed. Peter always empathized with my winter depression. That and his fear of walking on ice with his unsteady gait were why we had designed our new lives to include a month away each winter.