The Best Way to Start a Victory Garden

This is a quote from one of my favorite leaders in the local food movement, Joel Salatin. He lives right outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you know I was first introduced to the idea of a kitchen garden in 2006. Today, we are going to talk about the fact that kitchen gardens are now the new victory garden. Today I’m going to explore with you the history of our food, how over the last century it moved from the garden into the supermarket. You are going to learn about the history of the victory garden and how today, in this important time, as we face a global pandemic and lots of challenging times ahead, the kitchen garden can become the victory garden. Food once again can be near kitchens, tables, and bedsides.  

I know you’re going to love this episode and hope it will inspire you to start your own kitchen garden or bring it to the next level. So let’s make kitchen gardens the new victory gardens! I will see you inside this episode. 

Listen to the full episode here. 

First, I want to outline for you a little bit of the history of our food supply. I promise you on the Grow Your Self podcast to talk about the surprising stories behind the food we eat, and a lot of that is talking about the source.

If you go waaaaay back to the very first episode of the podcast, I talk about the three things you can do to change everything.

I have to say, that episode has never been more relevant than it is right now.

But today I want to tell you even more surprising news about how our food began to come to us the way that it does today and how we can make a difference in our food supply right now, even in the middle of a serious global pandemic. If you are listening to this in real time, almost all of us around the country and even around the world are simply staying home. We are just home all of the time, and we are doing it to flatten the curve. For those of us that are home, we’ve never been home this much before. This is a hard time, but one of the positive side-effects that are happening is people are waking up to the wonderful opportunity to grow a little bit of their food at home. In fact, last week the New York Times printed an article all about growing food at home.

The title of the article is “Food Supply Anxiety Brings Back Victory Gardens,” and you can read it here. 

But I'd like to submit the idea that kitchen gardens are actually the new victory garden and the best way for all of us to start a victory garden during Corona quarantine.  

But before we chat about Victory Gardens, let's first talk about how our food moved from the garden into the grocery store in the first place.

how our food moved out of the garden and into the grocery store

Late 1800s and Early 1900s - The First Small Stores

I found this totally fascinating and I hope you will too. I’m going to give you a little history of the grocery store in America. If you’re like me, I was born in the late 70s and I’ve never known anything different than going to the grocery store. I grew up getting 100% of our food from the grocery, and I’m sure most America has felt the same way for decades.  

It hasn’t always been this way. They say the chain grocery store went way back and started with the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company in the mid 1850s. They started to play around with the idea of providing services for larger areas. So, in the late 1800s, a grocery store would be a really small, little building, and would only be focused on just one aspect of food, and generally that was dry goods such as canned goods or dried beans. Then every other part of the grocery, like the bread or the meat, would be found in separate stores.  

Things started to change in the mid 1910s. Piggly Wiggly began in Memphis in 1916 and is really credited with being the first self-service shop. So you could actually go around and pick your own food. Today we take that for granted, right?

But this was really the first of its kind. And then there was a Loblaw in Toronto, Canada, in 1919 that also was doing the self-service deal.

1920s - The First Self-Service Store

In the 1920s, we started to see this introduction of chain stores, and they began to be a more dominant force for grocery stores in America. You may recognize the word Kroger. Kroger actually began around this time. American stores National Tea, Loblaw, and Dominion stores are all known as stores that were really starting to grow with their chains during the 1920s. They're known for running what they called economy stores by the end of the decade. So most of these were still pretty small and just had a counter service and were only staffed by a few people. They did not have meat, and they usually didn't have bakeries. It was still really focused on dry goods. 

1930s - The First Supermarket

In the 1930s and 1940s, things started to really shift. So in California, there's a store called Ralph's Grocery Company that started to get bigger and bigger. Los Angeles was seeing the beginning of a drive-in market where there would be an area for the dry goods store but then there'd also be a baker, a brochure, and a butcher. They'd all be in the same general area, so even though they were each their own stores, the general public kind of viewed it as one store because they were all together.  

In 1930, a big change happened. Michael Cullen, who had been an executive of Kroger, opened the King Cullen Store. Most people see that as America's very first supermarket. He put a supermarket on the fringes of New York City. There was parking and it felt like a bazaar.  

1950s - Supermarkets Take Over

So, by the 1950s, this movement basically took over, and pretty much every city in the US had a supermarket. So that's literally the definition of a super market. Did you know? The supermarket idea is that it's all these markets together rather than just one. A lot of people see the 1960s and 1970s as the golden age of the super markets. This was a time when the stores were bright and shiny and everybody was excited. It was like a big treat to head out to the supermarket.

Ironically, this was a time when my paternal grandfather, Leroy, was a butcher at the local supermarket in Northern Mississippi. So it was really interesting to read the story and realize what my family's place in it was.

My grandfather, Leroy, was becoming a butcher in a supermarket, and my other grandfather was studying horticulture. He became the head of horticulture at Mississippi State University, so he was on the mass production side of food for grocery stores, and my other grandfather was a butcher at a supermarket. If he had been employed I guess 20 to 30 years prior, he would have been working only at a butcher shop instead of a big market. 

It’s pretty crazy to see how things changed, right?  

1970s - Discount Stores

The 1970s came, and things started to shift a little bit. Things started to move to this idea of a discount store or a warehouse-type store. I'm sure you have had some exposure to this kind of feeling, right? In our day and age, we have stores like Sam's or Costco, where you can get food in bulk for a very cheap price. This became the new thing in the 70s. So you can you see where we’re heading? Suddenly price and presentation is the driver, rather than the quality of the food. 

1980s - High End and Discount Stores

Then in the 80s and the 90s, during the time I was growing up, we had a split. Some grocery stores went up with their pricing, and they were starting to market to a higher-price-point demographic, and then the other grocery stores went toward warehouses and discounting. I'm sure you all have experienced this. You have the Whole Foods, which is the more expensive grocery store, and then you have the less expensive stores like Sam's or Costco. This happened quite a bit in the 80s and 90s and really created the situation we are in today. 

Now, most of our food is coming from these two types of stores, and that’s how the general public gets 100% of the food that they purchase. There's now this vast middleman between you and your food, instead of your food going directly from the grower to the eater. That, my friends, is the situation that we find ourselves in today. 

how and when did the victory garden movement begin?

So now that we've talked about the history of our groceries, let's now talk about the Victory Garden.

America was somewhat in the middle of the supermarket change when the Victory Garden came about during World War II. During this time, especially in America, people were being taxed in all sorts of ways, and most of the supplies, especially canned foods and things that were already prepared, were really being reserved for those actually fighting or supporting the war efforts up close.

The government and other leaders proposed this idea for the general public to start growing a little bit of their own food.  

Victory Gardens were also called "war gardens" and some called them "food gardens for defense."

Victory Gardens were vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens that were planted at homes and public parks all over the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany during both wars.

They say that the governments actually were the ones that were encouraging people to plant the Victory Gardens. This was not just to supplement their rations, but also to boost morale. I love that point, and it’s so important.

So, George Washington Carver wrote an agricultural track and promoted the idea of what he called a "Victory Garden."

Most people were using these rationing stamps and cards that limited the amount of food that any one person or family could buy and maybe even had rights to get some of it at a discount. I'm sure you're seeing this at the grocery stores now. There are certain items that the store now has limit marks on such as limiting how many rolls of toilet paper you can buy and stuff like that. 

So the Victory Garden was brought about to not just help reduce the pressure of the rations, but also to help people feel better. They say that this was a serious morale booster and that gardeners were actually empowered by their contribution of labor, and rewarded by the produce that they grew. This made Victory Gardens a part of daily life on the home front.

The stories say that it made people feel like they were doing something to help when they otherwise couldn't.  

They say at the beginning, when Victory Gardens were first suggested, most people laughed it up. But so many people took the challenge to heart, that at one point, they think that maybe 40% of the fresh vegetables in the US were being produced in home and public park gardens.

The reports note that as many as 20 million gardens were literally set up as Victory Gardens during the war effort.

Isn't that amazing? I mean if that is not a positive side effect of something totally horrible, I don't know what is.  

what's the best way to start a victory garden?

Now I want to finish up with my argument about why kitchen gardens are actually the new Victory Gardens.

So, back then, in the 20s and 30s, people were a lot more ready to grow. These people were more closely connected to their food than we are today. My grandmother was a child during this time, and her parents were literally farmers. So when the government asked those people to start a garden, that wasn't something that was so unattainable for them. They were still pretty connected to the garden, and I'm guessing the idea of planting seeds and watching them grow to food wasn't nearly as overwhelming as it is for us today.

I know for myself that I never once learned how a seed grows into food. And most of the general public in the US is probably right there with me. Show of hands? Even though we eat these foods all the time and we shop for them at the grocery every week, most of us don't know how to grow them. But it's okay! There's a simpler way for us to all start our own version of a victory garden.

here’s why the kitchen garden is the best way to start a victory garden  

From what I’ve seen in photos, Victory Gardens were set up as row gardens, as in-ground gardens, but a kitchen garden is not.

Kitchen gardens are set up in raised beds. These raised beds are a smaller setup, and you're going to grow more vertically, rather than horizontally. You're going to plant more in a small space.  

So for those of us that don’t have connections to our family that farmed, I want to suggest that kitchen gardens are really a better Victory Garden for us.

the first reason a kitchen garden is the best way to set up a victory garden is because of simplicity

Raised bed kitchen gardens are easier to create than a traditional row garden victory garden. A kitchen garden with a raised bed is something that you can create literally in an afternoon, and we all seem to have an afternoon at home right now, right? 

One of the reasons we've always created raised bed kitchen gardens for our clients is because most of them have never had exposure to tending a garden before, and working in a raised bed is so much easier than working in a row garden. First of all, you don't have to stand in the muck when you're working on a hill or a mound. You get to stand on level ground around your bed. It's easier because the plants are elevated, so especially if you have a back that hurts sometimes or you just get tired from leaning over, it’s going to be a great option for you. It's so much easier to tend a bed that's one or two feet tall.  

the second reason a kitchen garden is the best way to set up a victory garden is because of space 

Kitchen gardens make the most of a small space. A hundred years ago, people's yards were bigger than ours and their cities were not as packed as ours are today.

I'm also guessing their gardens had more exposure to the sun and just more space to spread out. So a row garden was perfect for them.

For us, however, in smaller spaces with less sunshine, a kitchen garden is a better fit.   

So a kitchen garden is great because it's a raised bed, and it's going to make the most of your small space. I like to compare a kitchen garden in a raised bed to a row garden with a suburb versus a city skyscraper. So in the suburbs, the buildings are generally one or two stories high, and they go really wide out because land is not at a premium, but inside the city, all the buildings go up and down so that they can pack as much as they can in a small space.

Well, the same is true when you compare a kitchen garden to a row garden. A raised bed is going to let your plant roots grow down deep, and when you use trellises, your vines will grow straight up and down out of your raised beds. You can really pack in the plants and make the most of a smaller space, whereas a row garden is really going to need to spread out wide and long in order to get the same amount of production.  

the third reason a kitchen garden is the best way to set up a victory garden is because of production 

These beds are going to be producing more regularly for you. Generally a row garden or a farm is set up to produce all at once, whereas a kitchen garden is more set up for you to come out and pick a little bit from it regularly.  

the fourth reason a kitchen garden is the best way to set up a victory garden is because they make you happy

The fourth reason why kitchen gardens are our Victory Garden--and this actually is where both of them are the same--is that a kitchen garden provides a getaway for us when we just can't get away.

I can see this story playing out when I read the articles about the Victory Garden, that this is totally a morale booster. I know it was that for me when I first had my kids and was stuck at home all of the time. Creating a garden outside can really make you feel like you get to leave, even though you can't. 

three steps to set up your own kitchen garden as the new victory garden

Step One to Set Up Your Kitchen Garden

The very first thing you need to do is to choose the best location for your kitchen garden. Choosing a location can be the most challenging step, especially if you have a lot of locations or possibilities, or it can be tough if you feel like you have none that are great.

Wherever you are on the spectrum of thinking, all I have to say is that kitchen gardens always are a possibility, no matter where you are. I generally say with my Kitchen Garden Academy students that if you've got 16 square feet of space, you have enough space to set up a kitchen garden.  

So, pick the location. Generally you want to prioritize the sunlight, of course, but please know that even if you don't have optimal sunlight, you can still have a kitchen garden. In fact, I just wrote a blog post on this called, “How much Sun Does a Vegetable Garden Need?” and I share my thoughts on how much sun you need. You can give it a read here. 

Step Two to Set Up Your Kitchen Garden

The second step for setting up your kitchen garden is to build a raised bed.

Now I realize most of us are in a shelter in place, so let me give you a few options for doing this. You can call ahead to the hardware store (at the time of this episode they are still in business) and give them your supply list. Tell them what you need, and most of them will bring the order straight to your door. You can call a local lumberyard or you can call the big box stores. If you're looking for a step by step, I have a great guide for you to build a bed for under $100. It's a cedar garden bed, and you can find that on the blog as well here.   

So, you can do that by ordering ahead and just having them deliver them to your car when you drive up, or you can even just use the supplies you have around your home.

In my recent Kitchen Garden Workshop, I talked about just using bricks or stone or wood or anything you can find to build up around a space, and you can legitimately call it a raised garden. I say at a minimum you want to have a six inch tall raised bed--that would be for greens and herbs, which would totally be worthwhile. 

step Three to Set Up Your Kitchen Garden

 Learn your climate and plan your plants. All of us are in different places. I have a unique perspective because I’ve lived in so many different places, so I've kind of seen it all. What I've learned in working within all of these different climates is that you can always make something work, you just have to time it right. 

So before you head out to the plant store or decide the things you have to plant, you first want to start to study your own climate and understand what grows best during the current season, wherever you live on the map. Now is a great time to start learning the high and low temperatures of every month in your town, and then start to match the plants that love that temperature. 

I'm sure that sounds super simplified, but really I've learned that the simpler you can make this step, the better, and then you can just come back in and fill in the details.

So that really is all there is to it: choose a location, build a raised bed, and then learn your climate and plan your plants. 

Simple, right? So, the kitchen garden is our new Victory Garden. I am ready to see a kitchen garden revival. And who knows, maybe this very difficult time of all of that sheltering in place might bring about the kitchen garden revival nine years before I thought it would happen. Perhaps this could be the time where all of us need to learn what our ancestors knew three or four or five generations ago: how to have food growing right inside the kitchen and right outside our back doors. I know this is a super tough time, and we're all going through so much, but if we could look back and see that one result of this difficult time is that we all got reconnected with our food, we started to buy food from our local farmers and growers, and we reorganized our food system, I would say I would be super proud to know that I was a small part of that.  

Alright, friends, there you have it. Let’s take this time to start a kitchen garden revival. Are you with me?