16 THE WAR GARDEN VICTORIOUS 



War gardening promised to make many other things 

 go farther. There was the matter of labor. There was 

 only so much labor in existence. As the primary 

 requisite of war, food would have the first call on labor, 

 although other things besides food were needed. Cannon 

 and shells and rifles and cartridges and uniforms and 

 innumerable other articles were demanded in incom- 

 prehensible quantities. After taking four or five mil- 

 lion men away from productive industry, obviously we 

 should not have sufficient man-power left to create all 

 that was needed of these various supplies. War gar- 

 dening, by adding to the food supply, released for work 

 on these lines men who otherwise would have been nec- 

 essary on the farms. In short, war gardening con- 

 served labor by making labor go farther. 



The conservation, however, did not end with lessening 

 the number of men needed on the farms. Commercial 

 foods must pass through many hands before reach- 

 ing the consumer. They must go through the hands 

 of the farmer, the railroader, the wholesaler, the retailer, 

 the city deliveryman. For instance, a cabbage bought 

 in the market is handled by almost all the men enumer- 

 ated. A cabbage grown in the back yard is "Food F. 

 O. B. the Kitchen Door." No one needs to handle it 

 except the person who produces it for he or she is also 

 the one who eats it. Suppose that the average back- 

 yard garden produces only a hundred pounds of food, 

 which is a ridiculously small estimate, as a single 

 bushel of potatoes weighs sixty pounds. Based on 

 this the 5,285,000 war gardens of 1918 yielded at least 



