The Spirituality In Gardening


by davidbunch - Date: 2010-07-10 - Word Count: 455 Share This!

What to grow in 1946 was a question being pondered by many a home gardener ill this first peacetime season in live years. Having battled with spray gun and hoc for four years to help win one of the most astounding home-front victories of all times, he is no longer faced with an urgent patriotic need for all-out home food production. This year he can relax a bit and grow what he likes, or put away the shovel and the hoe, if be chooses, in favor of the nib lick or the camera. However, most of us who have green thumbs, or think we have, will keep on digging. Many of the eight or ten million Victory Gardeners had their first taste of homegrown vegetables during the war. They will keep it up because they now know how good "garden fresh" vegetables can be. Corn that is sped from row to pot, or tomatoes with the warmth of the sun still in them, or snap beans that really snap are something special.

Also, we must not forget the millions of starving and undernourished people who must be fed with our help. For this we need to grow a surplus. The $3,300,000,000 worth of vegetables grown by Victory Gardeners in four war years was a contribution to the war effort that is unparalleled in the history of this or any other nation. And there are those who believe that, if home gardeners should suddenly let down, we could easily run into serious food shortages in this country this year. Taking the long view, M. L. Wilson, Director of the Extension Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has expressed a hope that the great impetus that gardening gained during the war will not be lost. In gardening he sees spiritual as well as physical benefits we need as a nation.

With our feet rooted in the soil of our ancestors, we can attain and enjoy "the more abundant life." And we can help to create that right in our own dooryards, without legislation or subsidy, if we so choose to do. In Nashville, Tennessee, lives a plain American Jim Brown, winner of the 1945 grand national award in the Green Thumb Contest of the National Victory Garden Institute. With his assistant gardener he inspects some of the produce of his 100- by 150-foot plot, which keeps him virtually self-sufficient the year around, with some left over for friends, neighbors and relatives whom I admire, and even envy a bit. I almost feel that be is a friend, although we have never met. I know him only through reading what he put in his garden record for 1945, a record entered in the National Green Thumb Contest

Related Tags: victory gardeners, home food production, home gardener, national green thumb contest

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