# What was the point of victory gardens? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 11, 2026, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813 "2026-06-11T02:35:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/21 "2026-06-11T13:31:06Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > How many of the people currently having trouble with food prices have responded by starting gardens? There are plenty of people who are short of food. But there hasn’t been any government program encouraging people to start gardens. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/22 "2026-06-11T13:33:21Z")
There are actually still a number of government-run programs to try to encourage people to garden, and to make it easier to do so. They’re not as publicized now as they used to be, though. Probably the easiest way to get into it is to join a “community garden”, where there’s a large area of land somewhere divided into family-sized plots, where you can pay a small fee to get use of one of those plots for a year (the deal might also include a requirement to do some amount of community work, use of communal tools, or restrictions on some techniques or products you can use). ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/23 "2026-06-11T16:19:10Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I guess what I was wondering is why people needed to be encouraged to start gardens. You’d figure that if food was scarce, people would be growing extra unrationed food out of self-interest and nobody would need to push them in that direction. Also – and I just learned this yesterday, while reading up on the subject – in WWII, many victory gardens were planted on public land, not just in people’s back yards. Which suggests to me that there were many people (likely in cities) who did not have personal land on which they could plant gardens, but that local governments helped to facilitate planting gardens on shared space. (\*Edit: I see that Chronos mentioned “community gardens” in the post above mine.) > [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > There are plenty of people who are short of food. But there hasn’t been any government program encouraging people to start gardens. This being FQ, I will simply say that the current government seems to not be prioritizing people in need. And, prior to this administration, the more typical solution has been food pantries and similar programs. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/24 "2026-06-11T16:31:31Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#): > > This being FQ, I will simply say that the current government seems to not be prioritizing people in need. And, prior to this administration, the more typical solution has been food pantries and similar programs. We didn’t see home gardens being promoted under the Biden, Obama, or Clinton administrations either, which suggests this isn’t just an issue with the current administration’s ideology. And if food pantries have become the preferred solution to the problem, it suggests that the current issue is unequal access to the food supply rather than an overall shortage of food. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/25 "2026-06-11T16:33:25Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#): > > Also – and I just learned this yesterday, while reading up on the subject – in WWII, many victory gardens were planted on public land, not just in people’s back yards. That’s a good point. Use of public land for growing food requires a government policy permitting this. ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/26 "2026-06-11T16:35:01Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > And if food pantries have become the preferred solution to the problem, it suggests that the current issue is unequal access to the food supply rather than an overall shortage of food. We certainly don’t have food shortages to any significant degree in the U.S. at this point in time. It’s more about the cost of food, which has only gotten worse with inflation over the last few years; yeah, that could be described as “unequal access.” Plus, in some lower-income areas, lack of access to actual grocery stores, particularly for fresh food. However, the current administration, compared to prior administrations, has chosen to make it even more difficult for low-income people to access resources like the SNAP program. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/27 "2026-06-11T16:38:39Z")
I mean clearly the primary purpose was propaganda, as with all those kinds of things. In America that’s pretty much all there was to it. At no point were they in danger of not handily satisfying domestic food consumption and having plenty of surplus to export to their allies. Probably slightly less so in other countries, like the UK and the “dig for victory” campaign. The danger of the uboat threat literally starving the UK into defeat was overblown, but their supplies lines were definitely strained by the battle of the Atlantic, and every bit extra food that’s grown locally frees up space on a ship that can be used for arms, fuel, etc. It’s an interesting point actually. Of all the campaigns in the different countries fighting in WW2 for civilians to provide food, metal, rubber, etc for the war effort, did any of them actually make a difference in the military supply chain? Or were they all just propaganda? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/28 "2026-06-11T16:45:31Z")
I think that most of the governmental promotion of gardening is at the state or local level. Around here, there’s a state Extension Service (which provides both education on gardening, and starter plants/seeds, and probably some other services), and the city has a zoning code specifically for urban agriculture. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/29 "2026-06-11T17:10:29Z")
People often just aren’t that much into initiative or putting the pieces together for doing something. Sometimes you need to tell people to do the obvious. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/30 "2026-06-11T17:14:25Z")
Here’s a pretty good cite about US Victory Gardens from an authoritative source: > **[Victory Gardens: Food for the Fight](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/victory-gardens-world-war-ii)** > > Victory gardens became (and remain) an iconic image of life on the Home Front during World War II. Which pretty well reprises what folks have said: - Propaganda and morale - Actual food for civilian consumption - Reduce transportation resource use that’d otherwise be needed for moving commercial produce from farmers to civilian customers. ---
**Author:** ![Filbert](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/filbert/32/3433_2.png) [@Filbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Filbert)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/31 "2026-06-11T17:26:13Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > Probably slightly less so in other countries, like the UK and the “dig for victory” campaign. The danger of the uboat threat literally starving the UK into defeat was overblown, but their supplies lines were definitely strained by the battle of the Atlantic, and every bit extra food that’s grown locally frees up space on a ship that can be used for arms, fuel, etc. Cite that it was overblown? It was averted, certainly, but Britain imported over half its food before the war. Every relative I’ve had who lived through that era talked of shortages, my grandparents on Dad’s side, who lived in a large mill town, kept a carefully rotated store of canned food for the rest of their lives. My other grandpa was still growing vegetables well into the 90s. There doesn’t seem to be accurate figures available for the UK home production, but most records I’ve come across suggest that turning over all spare ground to vegetable production made a huge difference to food availability. It’s possible to grow a lot of food in a relatively small space with a bit of care- I can go most of the summer without needing to buy any vegetables, and that’s despite not having a huge area and using a lot of the space for flowers. Scale that up to the 1.4 million allotment holders during the war and all the people with vegetable patches and that’s a lot of land, labour and machinery potentially freed up for other uses. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/32 "2026-06-11T17:43:50Z")
> [@Filbert](#): > > Cite that it was overblown? My Googlefu is failing me but as I understand it, if you look at the numbers, even at the height of the uboat campaign, the number ships destroyed were not close to the level that would threaten UK food imports to the point of causing starvation. Of course there is a difference between “not starving” and “having sufficient supplies to wage a major war across several continents”. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/33 "2026-06-11T17:44:05Z")
Ours has a suggestion that you donate roughly 10% of your harvest to the church’s food bank, which is used to feed anyone who shows up. > [@Velocity](#): > > People often just aren’t that much into initiative or putting the pieces together for doing something. Sometimes you need to tell people to do the obvious. As easy as it actually is to grow vegetables, people are woefully ignorant and do zero research. If they did, Home Depot and other garden centers would actually have stuff that’s adapted/optimized for your particular area, instead of selling fool stuff like 90 day heirloom tomatoes and lemon trees in DFW. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/34 "2026-06-11T17:54:00Z")
@Little_Nemo, in response to post at the bottom of this post that I can’t seem to get to show up in the right place: I was responding to this: > [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > guess what I was wondering is why people needed to be encouraged to start gardens. You’d figure that if food was scarce, people would be growing extra unrationed food out of self-interest and nobody would need to push them in that direction. which question doesn’t seem to have much to do with whether or not there’s government encouragement at any particular time. The encouragement I’ve seen over the last couple of decades has generally been local — as has been mentioned, community gardens and such. I expect that’s more common in some areas than in others. > [@griffin1977](#): > > mean clearly the primary purpose was propaganda, as with all those kinds of things. > > In America that’s pretty much all there was to it. At no point were they in danger of not handily satisfying domestic food consumption and having plenty of surplus to export to their allies. We know that — though it’s also true that was accomplished in part by rationing. And by those victory gardens. Nothing much happened at midnight of January 1 2000, either — but not because nothing was done about it. But even more to the point, they didn’t know that. Nobody at the time knew that there would be no serious attacks on USA soil. (There were attacks, but they didn’t get very far.) Nobody at the time knew that distribution of food throughout the country — which was already heavily dependent on long distance transport — wouldn’t be prevented by major attacks on the highway and rail system. Nobody at the time knew for sure that we wouldn’t be invaded. And, as has been said, you can’t wait till the problem occurs to decide to plant gardens. You won’t even have baby greens and radish for at least a month. You won’t start harvesting most vegetable crops for two to four months from planting (most fruits take years.) And that’s if the need conveniently becomes apparent in mid to late spring. If it becomes apparent in September, nobody in the Northern states is going to get anything out of those gardens for most of a year. > [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > There are plenty of people who are short of food. But there hasn’t been any government program encouraging people to start gardens. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 6:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/35 "2026-06-11T18:14:07Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#): > > They were meant for personal/family consumption, in a time when retail food supplies were tight, and when resources for commercially growing and transporting food could be used for other things. > > Also, they were intended to be a morale booster, to help Americans feel like they were doing _something_ to contribute to the war effort, even if they were not serving in the military or working in a factory building war materiel. Additionally, some things were rationed because of shortages. Oops, I see you mentioned that. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/36 "2026-06-11T18:18:09Z")
> [@bump](#): > > As easy as it actually is to grow vegetables, people are woefully ignorant and do zero research. I mean, it is easy to grow vegetables if you have land. But not if you are one of the millions cursed with living in a small concrete box in a tower of concrete boxes packed side-by-side with other concrete box towers in a sea of asphalt. ---
**Author:** ![Horatius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/horatius/32/3572_2.png) [@Horatius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatius)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/37 "2026-06-11T18:26:47Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I guess what I was wondering is why people needed to be encouraged to start gardens. You’d figure that if food was scarce, people would be growing extra unrationed food out of self-interest and nobody would need to push them in that direction. The problem with gardens is, you have to start them well before you have food shortages, because if you start them after, you can go several months before getting any kind of useful harvest. It wasn’t that long ago that we had a surge in home gardening at the start of the pandemic, when there was lots of speculation about food systems breaking down. I started my garden in May, when things were still working. It never got bad, but there was no way to really know that at the time. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/38 "2026-06-11T18:34:15Z")
I’m not talking about window boxes or anything like that. I’m talking about people who otherwise have a yard, community garden plot, allottment, or whatever. Most of them _still_ don’t do much or effective research and end up having poor results. > [@Horatius](#): > > The problem with gardens is, you have to start them well before you have food shortages, because if you start them after, you can go several months before getting any kind of useful harvest. The real problem is that they’re largely supplemental. You have to have a pretty large field to supply most of the calories for a family. A 16x8 backyard plot isn’t going to do much more than set you up with ripe vegetables for a little while- almost more like spice in your diet, rather than staples. Which isn’t nothing, but it’s a long way from getting you and your family away from food insecurity in uncertain times. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/39 "2026-06-11T20:50:04Z")
FIL v.1.0 had plenty of land. I recall his growing tomatoes, asparagus and various berries. This meant Wife v1.0 and MIL v1.0 canned tomatoes. A lot. The result was having canned tomatoes and frozen berries in Winter. It was not a significant contribution to our diet. I believe victory gardens was an effort to make citizens feel they were doing their part; aside from losing their sons, in my Grandparent’s case. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [June 11, 2026, 8:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813/40 "2026-06-11T20:56:20Z")
Growing up, most of our veggies (which we ate a lot of) did come from Mom’s garden… but then again, she never had less than 400 square feet of garden space, sometimes up to double that (over triple your example 16x8 plot). Even then, it might not have been most of our Calories-- she still bought potatoes and grain products. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-the-point-of-victory-gardens/1030813.md?page=3)