Blog Mirror: Vintage Photos Of People Tending To Their Gardens 1930s-1960s

 

Vintage Photos Of People Tending To Their Gardens 1930s-1960s

Saturday, April 1, 1944. The closing curtain for the Axis.

Today in World War II History—April 1, 1944: Countdown to D-day: Adm. Sir Bertram Ramsay (Allied Naval Commander, Expeditionary Force) takes operational control of US naval forces for D-day.

Sarah Sundin's blog. 

There's so much good stuff on her blog today, that I thought about just not posting anything else here.  She notes, in addition to the above:

1.  The Allied Combined Bomber Offensive officially ended due to achieving air superiority over Europe.

2.  The US Fifteenth Air Force began operations to evacuate Yugoslavian partisans, women, and children.

On other topics, Task Force 58 attacked Woleai islands in an ongoing devastating aerial assault in the Caroline's.

In the Admiralities, the US occupied Ndrilo and Koniniat.

Roosevelt spoke on Victory Gardens:

I hope every American who possibly can will grow a victory garden this year. We found out last year that even the small gardens helped.

The total harvest from victory gardens was tremendous. It made the difference between scarcity and abundance. The Department of Agriculture surveys show that 42 percent of the fresh vegetables consumed in 1943 came from victory gardens. This should clearly emphasize the far-reaching importance of the victory garden program.

Because of the greatly increased demands in 1944, we will need all the food we can grow. Food still remains a first essential to winning the war. Victory gardens are of direct benefit in helping relieve manpower, transportation, and living costs as well as the food problem. Increased food requirements for our armed  (cut off at this point)

Patton spoke to US Troops in Northern Ireland.

 

Last prior edition:

Friday, March 31, 1944. Japanese command disaster.

The Agrarian's Lament: Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: War on Weeds

The Agrarian's Lament: Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: War on Weeds: 

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: War on Weeds

Wyoming Catholic Cowboys - raw and real: War on Weeds: Weeds are my nemesis. Left unattended, they'll overrun a guy's place. With last year being such a wet summer around Worland, the wee...

Published here both for its content, and my comment. 

Friday December 19, 1941. Royal Navy Disasters, German Ground Reversals, Japanese Advances, Gardens and Censorship.

Italy achieved what was amounting to a rare naval victory when it attacked two Royal Navy battleships at Alexandria, Egypt, and disabled them, using three manned torpedoes, dispatched from a submarine.  The HMS Valiant and HMS Queen Elizabeth were badly damaged in the bold attack, and the HMS Jervis, a destroyer, was as well.

The HMS Queen Elizabeth.

Because of the way the HMS Queen Elizabeth settled, it had the illusion of remaining afloat, something that was maintained until she could be dry docked and repaired.

HMS Valiant.

The Valiant was a sister ship, both being of the Queen Elizabeth Class.  She'd be reassigned to the Pacific later in the war.   Both British battleships would return to action, but it would take more or less a year to accomplish.

All the Italian frogmen survived and were made Prisoners of War.

On the same day, the British HMS Neptune was sunk by mines off of Tripoli.  The HMS Aurora and HMS Penelope were damaged.  The following day, the HMS Kandahar was hit and had to be scuttled.

The bold and unconventional Italian attack, and the successful minefield laying, reversed the naval balance of power in the Eastern Mediterranean in favor of the Axis.

It also somewhat cuts into the myth that there were no naval surface actions during the war.  In fact, there were a lot of them, and at this stage of the war the naval battle in the Mediterranean remained a heavily surface campaign.

Walter von Brauchitsch was relieved as Commander in Chief of the Germany Army.  Hitler replaced him with Hitler, a tipping point in the war for a variety of reasons.  With this, the German Army's bargain in which it supported the rise of the Nazis in exchange for Nazi support for the Army was essentially betrayed and shown to be worthless, as the Nazi co-opting of the Army was effectively complete.

Moreover, it showed an increasing strain in the German war effort as the dawn of realization that not only had Operation Barbarossa failed started, but it was obvious that the Soviets were not only not defeated, but they were beginning to reverse German fortunes for the first time in the war.  The obvious fear that Germany had overstretched herself and now the decline would become general was developing.

Von Brauchitsch was effectively retired by the act and never received another command.  He was imprisoned after the war on war crimes but died in a British military prison before he could be tried.

Hitler, who was already Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, would remain CiC of the Heer for the rest of the war.

The Indian 4th Division took Derna, Libya, where the Germans were also experiencing setbacks.  It was a victory, but the Germans had pulled out before they could be trapped and defeated there.

The Japanese invaded Davoa, in the Philippines.

Sgt Maj. John Osborn of the Winnipeg Grenadiers won a posthumous Victory Cross for falling on a Japanese hand grenade at the battle for Hong Kong, making him the first Canadian soldier to receive that award during World War Two.

His citation read:

At Hong Kong on the morning of 19th December 1941 a Company of the Winnipeg Grenadiers to which Company Sergeant-Major Osborn belonged became divided during an attack on Mount Butler, a hill rising steeply above sea level. A part of the Company led by Company Sergeant-Major Osborn captured the hill at the point of the bayonet and held it for three hours when, owing to the superior numbers of the enemy and to fire from an unprotected flank, the position became untenable. Company Sergeant-Major Osborn and a small group covered the withdrawal and when their turn came to fall back, Osborn single-handed engaged the enemy while the remainder successfully rejoined the Company. Company Sergeant-Major Osborn had to run the gauntlet of heavy rifle and machine gun fire. With no consideration for his own safety he assisted and directed stragglers to the new Company position exposing himself to heavy enemy fire to cover their retirement. Whenever danger threatened he was there to encourage his men. 

During the afternoon the Company was cut off from the Battalion and completely surrounded by the enemy who were able to approach to within grenade throwing distance of the slight depression which the Company was holding. Several enemy grenades were thrown which Company Sergeant-Major Osborn picked up and threw back. The enemy threw a grenade which landed in a position where it was impossible to pick it up and return it in time. Shouting a warning to his comrades this gallant Warrant Officer threw himself on the grenade which exploded killing him instantly. His self-sacrifice undoubtedly saved the lives of many others. 

Company Sergeant-Major Osborn was an inspiring example to all throughout the defence which he assisted so magnificently in maintaining against an overwhelming enemy force for over eight and a half hours and in his death he displayed the highest quality of heroism and self-sacrifice.

Osborn was born in England, reflecting a Canada in which the English speaking population still had strong connections to the United Kingdom and in fact a fair number were English born.  He'd served in the Royal Navy during World War One.

US War Cabinet meeting, December 19, 1941.

The United States started the Office of Censorship.

It censored communications during the war coming into and out of the country.

The National Defense Garden Conference commenced to encourage growing your own.

Both of these last two items are from here:

Today in World War II History—December 19, 1941

Also on that site, you can read about Victory Gardens as well, here:

Victory Gardens in World War II

The endless series of nearly meaningless declarations of war continued, with Nicaragua declaring war on Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.

Blog Mirror: Growing Resilience

An interesting effort to promote gardening on the Wind River Reservation was mentioned in the Tribune this past week.  The program goes by the name Growing Resilience.

Growing Resilience

We read of course about community gardening efforts including those in the West.  But this effort is part of a research project and therefore unique.

Foods, Seasons, and our Memories. A Hundred Years Ago: The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

The last garden I put in, 2017.

Another interesting entry on A Hundred Years Ago.

The Last Fresh Vegetable Month

I've touched on this here in the past, but one thing that's very much different from our current, refrigerated, freezer, grocery store frozen food, transportation directly from Mexico, world, is the way we eat.

And by that I don't mean the latest wacky food fetish (you know, don't eat that, eat this, no don't, no do, um,. . . ).

No, I mean that it varied seasonally, by necessity.  And beyond that the seasons dictated to a certain extent what you ate at all.

On prior entries here you'll find photographs of  grocery stores with signs painted on them noting that they "bought vegetables".  Indeed, at the courthouse in Sheridan Wyoming there's a great photograph of downtown Sheridan in its early days with a store painted on its side with that it "buys and sells" vegetables.  I.e, it was doing the locavore thing by necessity.

Indeed, that local produce history, dimly remembered and somewhat inaccurately recalled, is one of the founding mythic memories of the Locavore movement, that movement which, as an environmental ethos, demands that you "eat local".

Pueblo Indian, 1890, living the lifestyle I would, were it an option.

I'm not dissing this.  Indeed, in my imaginary world in which I get to live just the way I'd want to, I'd be one of those guys who ate local as much as possible.  I'd put in a big garden every year and for meat I'd eat the fish, fowl and game animals I shot during the year.  Yes, I'd go full 1719 if I had the option.

Shoot, I might even brew my own beer.

My wife, who doesn't want to live in 1719, and prefers 2019, keeps this from occurring, although in years past I have put in a big garden (I'm on year two right now of a well failure I haven't addressed) and as we raise beef, we have a lot of grass fed beef that appears on our table.  But the idea remains attractive.

Anyhow, one thing about having in the past having sort of lived that lifestyle, first by necessity and then by design, and because I'm a student of history as well as everything else, I know that the concept of "eating local" isn't quite what a person might suspect, if they really apply it.

That's because you have to eat local, based on where you live.

"Modern Street Market", 1920s.

And that's at least partially what almost everyone did, in varying degrees, up until the 1950s.

Put another way, people had fresh vegetables in the summer and fall, as that's when they were available.

Let's consider the humble cabbage.

Cabbage probably isn't your favorite vegetable (I like cabbage, but my wife really dislikes it).  But cabbage doesn't keep all winter.  Planted in the spring, it's ready to eat about 80 days later. So that makes it available sometime in late spring or early summer depending up where you live.  And a lot of places it would be available all summer long into the fall.  But once it started to frost, that would be it.

So here, if you planted it, it would be first available in June, and last in September.  That's it.

You can't keep it after that.

And this would be true of most fresh vegetables.  You'd have them when they first matured.  If they are a crop like cabbage, lettuce or spinach that you can keep growing, you'd have them all summer.  If they were a crop like corn, peas, green beans or peppers, they'd be ready and fresh just once.  In some places, you'd get a second crop in, in others, not.

Well what about after that?

Just truck it in, right?

Well, not so much.

In 1919 the road system, as we've seen, did not allow for transcontinental transportation of fresh produce.  Indeed, an irony of the road system in the country is that it had deteriorated as the railroad system was so good.

Of course that would mean that shipping by rail was an option.  It had certainly been done for meat, and beer, in refrigerated rail cars dating back to the mid 19th Century.  I can find no evidence, however, that it was done with vegetables, and there's probably reasons for that.

If it was done, it was apparently not done much, but I'll take correction on that.

So no vegetables in the winter?

No, that was not the case at all.  It's just that they were not, as the item noted, "fresh".

1918 poster urging people to turn their backyards into gardens.

For one thing, canning was already a thing, both commercial canning, which was common, and home canning, which was also common. So you could buy canned vegetables all year around.  And this time of year thousands of people. . . mostly women, were busy canning their own garden produce.

Poster urging home canning from World War One.

The process for canning had been worked out in the mid 1800s, and it spread fairly quickly, in part due to armies picking it up to feed their troops in the big wars of the 19th Century.  One thing armies did, I'd note, is to can meat as well, in British parlance "potted meat", which few average people do, but the mother of my father in law did in fact do just that, the only individual person I've ever known to do that.

Famine was a real specter in World War One and World War Two. This Second World War urged home canning to combat it.

I'll be frank that home canning scares me and my family never did it, for which I'm thankful.  I'm not afraid of canned anything at the store, and I'm rather fond of some canned items, but home canning always makes me a bit queasy.  Too many stories, perhaps, that I heard as a child.  Anyhow, home canning was still widely practiced when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, again all by women.  I know very few people who do it now.

This World War Two era poster urged growing more at home and canning.

My parents always froze some of their garden crop.  But this wasn't an option for people a century ago.  People didn't have home freezers like so many do now.  For that matter, the overwhelming majority of people had an ice box.  Refrigerators weren't a common thing at the time.

Exceptionally nice ice box.  Most homes didn't have one this large or elaborate.

We've dealt with this before, but ice boxes kept stuff cool, not frozen, and had to be regularly replenished with ice for that purpose.  People were still using ice boxes into the 1950s although their days were rapidly waning then.  At any rate, suffice it to say, if you could only keep things cool at home, you clearly had no means of keeping things frozen. No frozen vegetables at any time of the year in 1919.

Some vegetables keep a long time, however, if kept correctly.  Potatoes, for example, keep a really long time.  I've kept potatoes that were harvested in September or October all the way through until late February or March, when I was nearly ready to plant the next crop.  

That emphasizes why a crop like potatoes was such a big deal at one time.  They keep.  And a potato that's kept isn't much different in February, if kept properly, than it was in October.  "Meat and potatoes" weren't a staple as people lacked imagination or something.  You could have potatoes with your meat pretty much all year long.  And there's a few other crops in this category.

Additionally, some crops dry well. Beans are one, and so do peas.  Cowpeas (Cow Peas) were an 18th Century staple.  You probably know them by the name "Black Eyed Peas". Still a popular food in the United States, particularly  the South, they are a food staple in some parts of the world.

Other legumes and beans keep dried really readily as well.  The old jokes you hear associated with cowboys and soldiers about repeatedly eating beans are based on the fact that they keep and transport readily.  If you are on the trail, flour and beans are easy keepers. So "biscuits and beans" and "bacon and beans" would have been common foods out of necessity.

So during the summer you'd eat fresh heart vegetables, right?

Well, yes.  At least they were available during the summer most places.  If you were far enough south, they'd be available all year long.

But that's only part of the story.

Gardening Costs

Earlier this week I ran this item:  Lex Anteinternet: August 28, 1919. Austin to Eastgate, Nevada. 80 ...:

August 28, 1919. Austin to Eastgate, Nevada. 80 miles in 12.5 hours.

Gasoline Alley for August 28, 1919:

When I posted it, I cross posted it on Reddit where somebody asked, "are they making fun of him for gardening?"

I suppose they are, but the costs of gardening, and nearly all of the comments that are included in this Gasoline Alley cartoon, are ones I've heard myself.  It's interesting to see how the costs of gardening are summed up in just this fashion by those who don't, and apparently have been at least since most people ceased to live rural lives.

Of course, while the intangible costs of gardening are noted by those who don't garden, the intangible benefits of gardening, are not.

Having noted all of that, I didn't get a garden in this year.  The electrical service to my well had a disruption early last Spring and I still haven't gotten it repaired.  I need to.

Front Yard Gardens and the Law

From the ABA Email List:

A couple’s appellate loss in their quest to grow a front yard vegetable garden has attracted the attention of Florida lawmakers.
The Florida Senate passed a bill in March that would bar counties and municipalities from regulating vegetable gardens on residential properties, report the Miami Herald, and the Tallahassee Democrat. The House is also considering a bill to do the same thing.

Honestly, who worried about gardens being in the front yard? Aren't there enough problems in the world to worry about?

March 15, 1919: The busy post war Red Cross, a busy Poncho Villa and a League of Nations.

Female American Red Cross personnel in Paris, France, March 15, 1919.

French women employed by the American Red Cross repurposing bed linens in Paris, March 15, 1919.

American Red Cross hostel, Paris, with beds pulled from former hospitals.

 American Red Cross rest camp for American servicemen near the Eiffel Tower, Paris.

Americans getting a hot meal in Paris.

The war may have ended, but the duties of the Red Cross kept on.  Thousands of servicemen remained in Europe and their needs continued on, as did those of the thousands of refugees that were displaced as a result of the war.  For those folks, the Red Cross kept in operation.

Closer to home some were dreaming of their 1919 gardens.

And some were imaging adventure and probably romance.

J. C. Leyendecker was imagining fruit filled homecomings.

Villa was imagining a victory in Mexico and took some hostages towards that end..  The Mormons had a colony in Mexico at the time, and Villa apparently didn't take kindly to it, or at least saw it as an opportunity.

And alcohol interests were imagining a few more months in business to try to keep up their struggle to keep their product legal.

Woodrow Wilson was imagining the League of Nations as part of a treaty to end the war, which all the former warring parties were now working on.

February 2, 1919. Beating the high cost of living, Wyoming troops returning home. Senate passes land bill for soldiers. Donuts.

The Wyoming Tribune advised on this Saturday, February 2, 1919 that with a good cow, a flock of hens and a small garden, you could beat old "Mr. H.C.L.", that being the high cost of living.

It's an interesting and possibly accurate observation in some context.

And men from the 41st and 91st Divisions would be back in the U.S. shortly.

The U.S. Senate was anticipating that some of those returning me would want to become agriculturalist, which was in fact correct.

In light of that fact, the Senate's bill did something to give homesteading returning servicemen an advantage, although I frankly don't know what that was.  The various homestead acts were still in existence, so they could have homesteaded anyhow.  The impact of the law, however, was a real one as I know of at least two instances of individuals who took advantage of this provision and I knew one of them.  By reports, this was a fairly popular option for returning World War One servicemen, but a similar effort to reopen the homestead act, on a limited basis, for returning World War Two servicemen, on certain designated grounds (at least some of which were Indian Lands) would not be.

Returning soldiers were celebrated on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, depicting a soon to vanish means of transportation in use by somebody who is probably supposed to be an aged farmer.

Leslie's, on the other hand, was looking back to World War One still and celebrating the Red Cross and Salvation Army donut girl, although having said that the efforts of the Red Cross were still in full swing in Europe, although a lot of those women were now returning home.

If that illustration looks familiar, it's because it was from an actual photograph.  And if you have a hankering for trying Great War donuts, here's your chance with the recipe.

The donut girl was one Stella Young, serving in France.

I don't know anything else about her, but I'd note that, while a person isn't supposed to make such observations, she has a classically English appearance and my guess is that was her nationality.

Friday Farming. War Gardens, 1918.

Friday Farming: School Victory Garden, September 1917

Garden Disaster

First, I had no time this year.  My two helpers from last year weren't around, and I was too darned busy, and sometimes really too tired, to put in the attention I needed to.

Then a storm blew down the electrical panel that serviced my pump, taking out my supply of water.

That finished it off.

Still got a lot of potatoes, and radishes, but that was about it.

So,  an old school agricultural disaster this year.

The Garden, 2017

The snow finally melted enough and t he ground dried out enough to use the rototiller.  Of course, we had snow as recently as late last week and not a thing is planted.

Garden Progress

The return of the garden

For the first time in many years, maybe a decade, we put a garden in.

We put it in late, I'm afraid, but we put it in.

Some of us here in the household have wanted to do this for some time, but one thing or another prevented it.  This year, however, all the denizens of the household save for one wanted to do it, and in addition that section of the household demographic recently graduated into full adulthood, together with a colleague in a similar situation, expressed a desire to do it and to contribute labor to the same, as part of an effort to reduce their anticipated costs this fall.

And hence it was planted.

The return of row crop agriculture to our familial efforts.