farmdoc's blog post number 316

Just before World War II, Britain was importing 55M tons of food a year. Because the impending war would vastly reduce food imports, the government introduced food rationing, and also a Dig for Victory campaign that called for every British adult to keep an allotment. Lawns and flowerbeds soon became vegetable gardens. Dig for Victory was so successful that during the War, Britons tended 1.4M allotments (compared with only 300,000 today). But due to the financial crisis, rising food prices, and lobbying by Jamie Oliver and others for better food, self-sufficient vegetable growing’s on the march again. In Britain, vegetable seed sales are exceeding flower seed sales for the first time in decades. Enter stage right the National Trust, one of Britain’s biggest landowners, which is creating 1,000 new allotments in its garden properties. The central hub’s the Landshare website. Experienced volunteers will help novice growers. And the predicted crop yield’s £1.5M (A$3.3M) over the next three years. As over 100,000 Britons seek allotments, the National Trust’s initiative will satisfy only 1% of them. But it’s a great start. All power to their digging arms. Here as in Britain, good options exist, even for non-growers: farmers markets, farm gate sales, and community-supported agriculture. Finally a complementary, and more subversive, approach is the deployment of gardening guerrillas. An army of them. All digging for victory.