104 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW ]15:3— March, 1919 



sumption of home-produced foodstuffs. Fifty thousand teachers 

 have received valuable instruction in gardening through the garden 

 leaflets written by experts in this office and distributed from here. 

 One million five hundred thousand leaflets have been sent out. 



Boards of education and other civic organizations have been 

 influenced to give financial and moral support to the school and 

 home garden movement and to pay extra salaries for supervision 

 and teaching. Hundreds of thousands of parents have become 

 interested in the garden movement and are working with their 

 children in home gardens. In Salt Lake City alone 5,200 mothers, 

 representing 62 parental associations, are actively supporting food 

 production in the schools. Hundreds of civic, commercial, and 

 patriotic organizations have become interested in the movement 

 and are giving it hearty support. One and one-half million 

 children have been given something to do during the summer; 

 something that will help carry the burden of their country in this 

 struggle for freedom, something that will help them to build character, 

 and something that will appeal to and develop their patriotism. 



Home and vacant lot gardening in cities, towns, and villages 

 has been dignified and made popular to a degree that practically 

 insures it a prominent place in the school system of our country. 

 It would be difficult to estimate the educational and material 

 value of such results. No other movement in history promises so • 

 much in aiding the "back to the soil" movement as this. 



Cities and towns offer the most important field for this work, 

 since heretofore the millions of city boys and girls have had but 

 little opportunity to plant, cultivate, harvest, and market food 

 products. That they should learn to do these things has come to 

 be recognized as highly important, because the world's cry for food 

 is increasing in volume while the world's food producers are 

 decreasing in numbers, and because the future of America's citizen- 

 ship, if not the future of the world's civilization, requires that 

 American boys and girls share responsibility, carry their part of the 

 load, and actively participate in the stirring events of this world 

 war. Boys and girls in the country not only have had the oppor- 

 tunity to help, but in most cases they have always been required to 

 do something to help feed the world. City boys and girls have 

 been without this opportunity or necessity and their leisure time 

 was being spent not in helping their country in its time of need, 

 but in actually adding to its present burdens and developing 

 weaknesses in their own characters that boded ill for its future. 



