Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: Vintage Photos Of People Tending To T...

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: Vintage Photos Of People Tending To T...:   Vintage Photos Of People Tending To Their Gardens 1930s-1960s

The High Plains Seed Library is back at the Albany County Public Library in Laramie.

 The High Plains Seed Library is back at the Albany County Public Library in Laramie. 

Agrarian of the Week: The Victory Garden.

The television show, not the World War Two institution from which it takes its name.

Somewhat quirky and odd, the long-running show commenced in 1979 and was hosted by the late James Underwood Crockett originally.  I recall it from the Roger Swain era, however, which apparently from the mid 1980s to 2002, which surprises me as I recall watching it with my father, and not thereafter.  He died in the early 1990s.  Swain, with a huge red beard and suspenders was ahead of his time in the hipster movement, held a PhD in biology, so he knew his stuff.  It apparently ceased production in 2010.

One interesting thing I'll note is the name, The Victory Garden, which takes its name from the gardens people were urged to plant in World War One and World War Two to counter food shortages.  While both wars were obviously horrific, this aspect of the home front remains fondly remembered, and therefore the name is familiar.

Canadian World War One Victory Garden poster.

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. 

Blog Mirror: PLANTING ONIONS TO SAVE YOUR GREENS AND CABBAGE

If I live long enough to get my garden back in annual existence, I'm going to try this:

PLANTING ONIONS TO SAVE YOUR GREENS AND CABBAGE

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 1, 1943. Canning and rationing

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 1, 1943. Canning and rationing & The...: 

Monday, March 1, 1943. Canning and rationing & The Rosenstraße Protest.

Sarah Sundin notes a number of interesting things on her blog, including the Rosenstraße Protest in Berlin, in which gentile women married to Jewish men took to the streets to demand the return of their husbands.  Ultimately, 1,800 men were released.

She also notes the U.S. Office of Price Administration implemented rationing of canned goods.  Canned meats were wholly unavailable.

As Sundin explains on the rationing link on her blog, the rationing was designed to save tin, not food.  It did serve to emphasize growing your own food and preserving it at home, however.

When I was a kid, vegetables that we had that weren't home-grown, were usually canned, probably expressing the habits of my parents. Frozen vegetables were available, but we usually didn't get them.  When my father started a very large garden in the 70s, however, we froze peas ourselves, which only worked so so.

Commercially frozen vegetables weren't really a thing until the Birdseye company started its "flash freezing" process in 1929.  The popularity of frozen foods expanded during World War Two, but collapsed again after the war.  Interest started to recover in the 1950s, and then took off in the 1960s.  Personally, I didn't really wasn't exposed to them much until the 1980s, when a university girlfriend was shocked that I bought canned peas and canned corn, as frozen was so much better.

Frozen really is better.