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I was actually looking for videos starring Barbara Damrosch but only found one, that I already linked too previously. She is co-owner of Four Season Farm and I read that she appeared in the PBS series The Victory Garden. My search lead me to this old, old video about victory gardens in the US during WWII, that I want to share instead. This is old school vegetable gardening, from a time when it was a matter of life and death.

I don’t think much have changed regarding gardening techniques – the instructions in the video could just as well be used today. But the battle for victory is different as I see it. It’s still a battle, but it’s for your health. Growing your own food is just healthy. Plain and simple. Exercise, sunshine, vitamins. It reminds me why I even bother writing this blog, but what it all boils down to is preventing muscle atrophy and depression and avoiding fast food.

Although the quality of the video is poor it still moves me. Young people doing meaningful work in the field – exercise, sunshine, vitamins. They even work with a horse in the garden. I can’t remember the last time I even touched a horse. (… no, Jim, not in that way.) Completely disconnected from nature. I think it’s unhealthy and dissatisfying. Look at the amount of vegs they pull from that ½ acre (2000 m2)!

In the video they talk about:

• Early vs. late crop
• Crop rotation
• Fighting pests (with some nasty looking spraying I doubt would be legal today )
• Crazy over-sized swiss chard (what IS that?)

And remember what grandpa said:

No work – no garden. Get what that means. No work – no spuds. No work – no turnip, no tank, no flying fortress, NO victory. Bear that in mind, all you victory gardeners, and work – for VICTORY!

… Your good health, that is.

As the lawn is beginning to look more and more like a real kitchen garden I’m collecting lots of material suitable for composting. I picked a spot next to my rain collector for my new compost pile:

Four pieces of round pressure treated poles are placed in each corner:

I’m using metal chicken wire to form a box. In the picture below you can get sense of the heavy sloping of the garden down towards the stream at the lower end. There’s a 10 cm (4 inch) gap in the right corner of the box due to the slope of the ground:

The lazy man’s guide to fixing chicken wire to a pole (I really have to cut down on my use of plastic cable binders – they don’t decompose well):

Finally I have room enough to store composting material separately before building the entire compost heap. Notice the open field in the background. It’s a pleasure to be this close to nature, instead of the bricks and concrete I was used to:

The reason for storing the different composting materials before building the heap is that the different materials will be more likely to get good contact with each other, because you’ll be able to spread out thin layers of each type:

In the past I used to throw in a very thick layer of grass cuttings each time I mowed the lawn (‘greens’), and much later I would throw in a lot of ‘browns’ and the materials would not get mixed and start to decompose. In small places a compost tumbler would be preferred as this would ensure that greens and browns would get properly mixed.

I watered my new compost heap after building so if everything goes well it will start to heat up and turn the waste materials into new compost to be used in the garden.