IN THE FURROWS OF FREEDOM 
By Charles Lathrop Pack, President 
NATIONAL WAR GARDEN COMMISSION 
Reprinted from American Forestry Magazine, March, 1919. 
A NATION is as strong as 
its homes. The purpose 
of the various community 
efforts, which today are occupy¬ 
ing the thought of many leaders 
in civic betterment work, is to 
knit together and make more 
secure the home ties. 
• The greatest of all community 
efforts is that of home food 
production. The garden is the 
cement which helps to hold 
in place the foundation of the 
home. There is scarcely a city 
or a town in the United States 
where the question of bringing 
the producer and the consumer 
closer together has not been dis¬ 
cussed and where some sort of 
plan has not been devised for 
bringing this about. But the 
method which has accomplished 
the most and which has proved 
most successful is that of the 
home and community garden. No 
other instruments have been 
found so helpful to the individual, 
the unit of community life. 
‘‘We Americans ought to be a 
nation of gardeners,” says W. E. 
Babb, a Chicago newspaper man 
and apartment - house ‘ ‘ cliff- 
dweller,” who cultivated a gar¬ 
den last year for the first time in 
his life, and found it not only 
profitable from an economic point 
of view, but interesting and edu¬ 
cational as well. “ Nature in¬ 
tended that we should be a nation 
A cuff- of gardeners,” he 
DWELLER’S adds, “ and this 
experience applies to the man 
in the city as well as to the rural 
districts. 
He tells how, after clearing all 
the “ weeds, tin cans and brick¬ 
bats from the vacant lot which I 
‘ borrowed,’ and digging up a 
carload of junk,” he succeeded in 
raising “ enough to supply a 
score of people with vegetables 
all summer, while in addition my 
wife canned a lot for winter 
use.” Thus did he show 
himself both producer and con¬ 
servationist. 
“And there was something 
more,” he declares. “I learned 
that vegetables are interesting 
things to live with. I tried rais¬ 
ing chickens once and got a lot of 
real pleasure out of it, but it 
didn’t compare with the joy and 
knowledge I got out of my war 
garden.” He was awarded first 
prize by the State Council of De¬ 
fense for his war garden. 
Many thousands of other peo¬ 
ple have learned that war gar¬ 
dening is not only valuable but 
