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 
