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 
