100 THE WAR GARDEN VICTORIOUS 



to the place. A person renting or buying a piece of 

 property which displays a healthy and prosperous- 

 looking garden is immediately put into a more favor- 

 able frame of mind by the sight of this growing food 

 and is willing to pay more for the place. 



As to the vacant lots which straggled and scrambled 

 along many city streets before the days of war gardens, 

 nothing more than a mere statement of fact is neces- 

 sary to convince any one that the removal of these 

 "sore spots" is advantageous in many ways. These 

 barren lands, with their unsightly briars and weeds, 

 their ugly ash-heaps and piles of litter, detracted not 

 only from the appearance but from the commercial 

 value of all the surrounding property. 



In hundreds of cases it was not realized until an ac- 

 tual enumeration was made, how many acres of such 

 unused land there were in a city. There was scarcely 

 a town of any size which did not contain a total of 

 hundreds of acres of such idle, useless land. With 

 little effort these unsightly lots can be converted into 

 rich gardens to help feed the city and the nation. To 

 clean up all such places, therefore, and to put them to 

 profitable use, is a standing advertisement for the city. 

 Furthermore, the example of one city leads to a dupli- 

 cation of the good work elsewhere and an effort to 

 improve on it. Thus the gain of one is the gain of all. 

 The city benefits, the state benefits, the nation benefits. 



Cleveland surpassed itself in war gardening. As a 

 result of the very active campaign conducted there 

 under the auspices of the war garden committee, a 



