Topic: ww2 Garden

[dannylewis]

Hi all,

       Does anyone get the Garden News paper or go to the hampton court show?
well if so did you see the WW2 Garden?
       Well... i thought thats was a brilliant idea coz as i have been recently studying WW2 in school and i know a bit about it, and i thought about doin that in my nan's garden, BUT, the thing is i dont actually know what to plant as in flowers, i know the basics like marigolds etc but what else could there have been to make a WW2 Garden brighter, Any Ideas????

Danny Lewis

[wardy]

I think Sweet Peas and Sweet Williams  :)  My old dad always grew gladdys and polyanthus.  There is quite a bit of info on allotments in the past as a new book has been published.  If you Google you should find something.  In WW2 every bit of land was used to produce food for the war effort but flowers would have been sneaked in as well  :)

[Svea]

search on google for 'digging for victory' - should come up with the original leaflet there :)
not sure if flowers were mentioned but it might give you ideas to the type of veg/varieties grown?

[Kepouros]

As one who was actually `digging for victory` at the time I can assure you that most gardens and allotments had a few flowers as well - most allotment holders managed to hang on to a few of their cherished chrysanths and dahlias, and certainly marigolds and many other hardy annuals were popular in small quantities.

However, the main stays were potatoes and greens.  The potatoes were usually Arran Pilot or Home Guard as earlies, second earlies were often Great Scott ( no longer available, but it produced a large crop of enormous potatoes) and the favourite maincrop was Majestic, which was the most widely grown maincrop of the early 20th century and again produced a very heavy crop.

We used to grow a cabbage variety (can`t remember its name but we called it `cow cabbage`) which grew heads as big as a wheelbarrow and had the merit that one head would last a large family for a week.  Early cabbage was usually Ellams Early or Harbinger, and savoys Christmas Drumhead to see us through the winter.  The important thing in those days was not flavour, but how big a crop and how long it would last or keep.

Parsnips were either the Student, Tender & True, or Hollow Crown, and the most popular carrots were Scarlet Horn and James`s Intermediate - both maincrops.

Most people grew a few peas - earlies were generally The Pilot or Gradus, and those of us who could get enough sticks grew a very tall variety (6ft) which I think was called Senator, producing a long picking crop of big pods full of big but rather tasteless peas.  Broad beans were generally Giant Windsor or Bunyards Exhibition.

Runner beans were usually Scarlet Emperor, and everyone grew a lot, which were then salted down in buckets for winter use. French beans were usually Negro Longpod or Canadian Wonder.

And everybody grew huge marrows and lots of rhubarb, because these were the mainstay of jam making - almost all war time home-made jam was either rhubarb, or was about 80% marrow with a bit of rhubarb or ginger or a few blackberries or plums or damsons thrown in for flavouring.

My, this brings back memories!

[Muddy_Boots]

not sure which digging for victory garden you are talking about but the chap who won the bronze in that category is one of our local garden centre owners.  Will try to catch him and ask for suggestions - might be a while though.  Last saw him about two or three weeks ago.   ;)

[dannylewis]

Thanks A lot everyone,
        i am looking foreward to getting the information from Muddy_Boots, it will be a great help, i will keep you informed as i go on but it will take me a long time to do it because i have to persuade my nan to let me do it, and when i will be able to do it i have do transform the whole garden  ???

Thanks again
Danny

[wardy]

I've got a WW 2 air raid shelter in my garden and my husband loves it so much so he has put an extension on it.  Why?  I have no idea other than he's barmy.  It has got two doorways and a sump in the entrance to catch excess water so they didn't get their feet wet during air raids.  A chimney (which rotted but was still kind of in situ but crumbled to dust) It has a plastic water pipe sticking out now for ventilation?  My OH has added more ventilation to it now it's been unearthed as he likes to keep it dry.  Not sure why as it only houses frogs  ;D
We didn't know it was there but just wondered why there was a large mountainous hump in the garden.  Kids and mates had a lovely time digging it out.  We found some gas mask charcoal filter type things in it.  In our wash house we found a 1918 edition of Punch which was very interesting.  My husband has taken lots of pictures of it and he looks at them often.  He doesn't get out much  ;D ;D

[Robert_Brenchley]

They tried to put one on my plot in the war, but it flooded (not surprising given the level of the water table in winter) and they ended up camping in the shed during the blitz, with shrapnel hitting the roof from an AA gun on the railway nearby. I've found the odd bit of shrapnel while digging, and when I did my flood defences I found bits of corrugated which were about four times as thick as the normal sort; some of the older guys on the site told me that was what the shelters were made out of.

[wardy]

You're an old guy then RB  ;D  Sheltering in the shed during the blitz.  They don't make people like that nowadays  :)  My air raid shelter is brick built and has a really thick concrete roof.  That was covered over completely with earth  :)

[Rosa_Mundi]

Have you thought of writing up some of your memories on somewhere like the BBC war site, Kepouros? You've put a lot of detail into your account which is difficult to find, and I'm sure you could add a lot more. Such an account would be fascinating to read.

[Kepouros]

I`ll bet you say that to all the old fellas

[adam04]

errrrm, suppose you cant forget dig for victory so maybe peas and things like that?? or lupins, corn flowers etc.

[wardy]

The BBC is collecting stories and anecdotes from WWII.  They had postcards in the library recently for people to jot stuff down and return to the Beeb.  My sister and I visited the exhibition at our local library and there were ladies there from the WI who had baked cakes etc from the Bero book using only the ingredients available at the time (didn't know you could still get powdered egg) We picked up some cards there and wrote down some of mum's memories of her time in the ATS   My  father was in the war but he used to tell us his stories but hugely elaborated to make them more exciting.  He was taken prisoner though and nearly starved to death  :(

I think the BBC web page is still up and running and it's well worth a look  :)

[Rosa_Mundi]

It is, Wardy, at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/

Kepouros, it's the size of those cabbages that got me interested  ;D

[Kepouros]

Rosa, they really were absolutely enormous.  I don`t think I ever did know the correct name, and I think the seed came from an agricultural source, because they were grown by quite a lot of local farmers for cattle feed.  They were rather coarse to eat, and I never saw them grown for human consumption after the war, and the last time I ever saw them was in (I think) 1959 - grown by a smallholder for livestock feed.

Re the Anderson Shelters - these were the favoured sites for the marrows.  If you had a big mound in the back garden where your lawn or back yard used to be, what better place to plant your marrows so that they could trail all down the sides.

And Wardy`s dried egg was our Sunday morning breakfast treat along with a slivver of bacon.  When cooked in the frying pan in the bacon fat it formed a sort of yellowish and slightly rubbery pancake and, of course, looked nothing like an egg, but it made a change from porage.

[Robert_Brenchley]

You're an old guy then RB  ;D  Sheltering in the shed during the blitz.  They don't make people like that nowadays  :)  My air raid shelter is brick built and has a really thick concrete roof.  That was covered over completely with earth  :)

I wasn't around then, but the people who had my plot wrote an account of the site, which includes the story of how they managed to set the shed roof on fire, and then had the ARP warden round making a fuss about breaking the blackout!

[wardy]

Put that light out!!!!!  ;D