Victory Gardens by Abraham Lincoln

Few people would believe that most families grew vegetable gardens and called them “Victory Gardens.” Somehow, by growing our own food, we helped the war effort — that was the propaganda.

Food was scarce in Gordon. There was no more ice cream and no chocolate candy. That was the food I missed the most. We couldn’t grow it in the Victory Garden so we went without.

Mom did make “snow ice cream” using fresh, clean snow and while it did look like the real thing -- like Spam, snow ice cream tastes more like snow and vanilla extract than real ice cream.

Oh boy was it ever great to eat a chunk of real meat off the farm. Yum. Nothing like sugar cured ham. The only meat we ever had was when mom killed an old laying hen that ran out of eggs.

But Bonnie and Milbert, farmer friends of ours, butchered once or twice each year and she made the best sugar cured ham in the world (my mouth is watering now, just thinking about it). As a little kid, I would ride my tricycle out into the country hoping to arrive in time for breakfast and a taste of that ham. That was about a mile, round trip. I have done a lot farther. Three miles on a tricycle?



Don’t laugh at that trike ride. I used to ride it three miles to Ithaca to swim in a mud hole. I could never keep up with the kids my age on regular bicycles. So they went on with encouragement in their trailing voices.

When I arrived an hour later at the mud hole, the rest of the kids were just about ready to leave to ride the three miles back home.

I do remember that my mother told me to stop riding my tricycle that “far.”

My dad finally got me a bike from Western Auto in Arcanum and while it was not the elite Schwinn I hoped for, it sure beat riding the tricycle.

The Lage family in Gordon was my best seed customers. I sold Victory Garden Seeds each spring and instead of money, got a prize.

My best prize was a Roy Rogers Cap Pistol and Holster. I got a photo of me wearing them and a straw hat on my head. I look pretty big to be wearing things like that.

Lage’s always bought fresh, new seed. Mom and I got the seeds nobody wanted but for the most part, we saved our seeds from one year to the next.

Mom always squashed tomatoes on newspapers on the porch and left the seed pulp to dry for next year. She also let onions go to seed and green beans and peas. We used those seeds the next year and never bought my seeds.

We even had a pen out back where we sometimes raised a runt pig someone gave us.

That butchered meat kept us going when times were tough. Mom cooked and canned the meat and cured some.