It's time to start planning that garden!
Good for body and soul, good for the planet, gardens can produce LOTS of food
As of this writing, Thursday, February 6th, Donald Trump has put more than 100 EPA employees on administrative leave. Further cuts and hobbling of environmental agencies will most certainly be forthcoming from this administration. While politics is not the emphasis of this Substack, if I can contribute to following any of these important environmental stories, I will. Until then, I will concentrate on following new science and other developments on the environment. If you are interested in following Substackers who are keeping an eye on this administration, check out at Popular Information, Ruth Ben-Ghiat at Lucid, ’s Letters From an American, or and Civil Discourses. Others do some excellent writing on Trump and politics, but these are the folks I follow the most.
The goodness of gardening
Throughout North America and other northern latitudes, winter is still hanging on. But early February is usually when serious gardeners start looking forward to tilling and planting their first vegetables. It’s still cold, but the days are getting longer, and soon it will be time to do more than peruse the seed catalogue.
For everyone who has enjoyed fresh, homegrown tomatoes or bitten into a cob of corn picked only hours ago, you know how delicious garden-grown food can be. For most folks, that’s all the motivation they need to make a trip to the nursery and turn a spade in their backyards. But as it turns out, gardening, or even participating in an agricultural project of any sort, can bring not only tasty vegetables but good mental and physical health and benefits for the planet.
Gardening for physical and mental health
Researchers in Japan found that among people with heart failure, those who gardened were more able to stand the strains of illness and injury than non-gardeners. The scientists explain this difference by the increase in general activity folks get from poking around in their gardens.
Allotment gardening has been part of the UK for centuries, a practice in which plots of land are rented to individuals for growing produce and flowers. Gardeners, usually urban folks who don’t have their own land, rent from allotment associations or local municipal councils. A study just published this month in the journal Urban Forestry and Urban Greening found that lower-income folks in the UK who took advantage of allotment gardening said their gardens gave them a sense of empowerment and a stronger sense of community. They also said that gardening gave them a greater sense of safety.
People may not even have to work a hoe or stake tomatoes to enjoy health benefits from gardening. Just being associated with a garden in some way helps. Community-supported agriculture takes a number of forms. Usually individuals subscribe to a farm or farmers for a fee. In return, the subscribers receive a weekly delivery of produce. Other trading practices include landowners allowing folks to garden on their property in exchange for some of the bounty, or individuals helping with the care of a garden in return for a portion of its produce.
In a study of community-supported agriculture in the UK and Norway, researchers found the more folks participated in their CSAs, the more positive results they found. Simply subscribing and receiving fresh produce once a week, resulted in improvements in members’ life quality, vegetable intake, and physical and mental health. Participants with less education often found new types of vegetables for their dinner tables. And everybody learned how to cook rutabagas, kohlrabi, and other vegetables. Dozens of other studies have also found a link between gardening and better health.
Reducing greenhouse gases
I used to believe that transporting produce was not a significant factor in the carbon footprint of food. That was based on research going back to the early 2000s. More recent studies have found that, yes, indeed, trucking tomatoes or potatoes for hundreds of miles does in fact make a significant contribution to our greenhouse emissions.
By reducing transportation to zero, your backyard garden really does make a difference to the planet. Gardening also reduces emissions in other ways. In part or in total, gardens replace lawns, which have their own environmental problems, including emissions from mowers. When folks fertilize their gardens with compost from their kitchen scraps, that waste is not being hauled off to landfills, where those potato peels and apple cores rot and give off methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than CO2.
Our gardens can make LOTS of food
Some folks might think that putting in a garden is more trouble than it’s worth. Trips to the nursery to buy up seeds and spades and spending weeks tending and tilling might seem like a lot of time and money for a handful of turnips and string beans. But our gardens can actually make a lot of food.
During times of crisis, the United States, as well as other countries, has responded to crises with gardening campaigns. The government sponsored Liberty Gardens during World War I, Relief Gardens during the Great Depression, and Victory Gardens during World War II. The largest and most successful of these were the Victory Gardens.
Upon entering WWII, the federal government wasted no time getting Victory Gardens up and running. In December 1941, while the wreckage of Pearl Harbor was still smoldering, Claude Wickard, Secretary of Agriculture, and Paul McNutt, Director of the Office of Defense, Health, and Welfare, held a conference laying out the national gardening program. Other federal agencies and state governments became involved as well. The National Institute of Municipalities made model ordinances for cities and municipalities, and almost all states formed their own Victory Garden Committees.
The government motivated the populace through a broad campaign that appealed to more than folks’ enjoyment of gardening or having fresh food. Government advertisements, pamphlets, and films stressed that gardening was patriotic, not only because Victory Gardens fed civilians while vital foodstuffs were being shipped to aid allies, but because gardening was an outstanding example of American independence. This propaganda suggested to Americans that growing a great portion of one’s own food demonstrated one’s connection to the self-sufficient pioneer. Government gardening documents and films emphasized the neat order of garden rows, countering the disorder that had engulfed the rest of the world. Below is a Victory Garden film from WWII.
Businesses and volunteer organizations took part in the Victory Gardens effort, and large corporations promoted the cause. Westinghouse, for example, promoted the Health Through Victory Club with radio shows and advertisements and sponsored employee clubs through the donation of land to gardens. Magazines, including House and Garden and Better Homes and Gardens, printed advertising and featured articles with such titles as “Knotty Problems that Confront Victory Gardeners.”
The campaign was extremely successful. During the war, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that half the families in the country cultivated Victory Gardens, resulting in more than 20 million gardens that put into productive yield about four million acres, a total landmass greater than the state of Connecticut. Although drought brought failures in Oklahoma, portions of Texas, and the Washington, DC, area, the rest of country enjoyed a bounty. The combined amount of food produced from the Victory Gardens totaled eight million tons, enough to feed the entire U.S. Army, or about 125 pounds of produce for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. This immense productivity was achieved before the use of industrial fertilizers and other “green revolution” technologies.
So how about you? Do you garden? Are you ready to plant those onions and lettuce? Should we have a campaign similar to Victory Gardens to mitigate climate change?
Thank you for this essay, a lift for my spirits during this temporary insanity.
Allotments are so important - the benefits are numerous, it's just a shame that in some areas they are under threat from development or increasingly, flooding