Victory Garden Ideas: The Original Grow Your Own

A victory garden was the original grow your own: a wartime plan to get real food out of a small piece of ground, written for people who had never gardened and could not afford to fail. I came to the old plans out of curiosity and stayed because they are better briefed than most modern gardening advice. They had to work.

The short answer

The wartime approach was calories and storage first: potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, beetroot, cabbage, kale, leeks, broad beans and peas, on roughly 50 to 90 square metres. The modern version keeps the discipline and changes the crop list, because the constraint now is value per square metre rather than shipping. That means more salad, herbs, chard and climbing beans, and fewer maincrop potatoes.

What a victory garden actually was#

Worth getting the history right, because the phrase has drifted into meaning any vegetable patch.

During both world wars, governments in Britain, the US, Canada and Australia pushed home food growing hard. Britain's Dig for Victory campaign came with printed plans, radio programmes and a national push to turn lawns, parks and railway embankments into vegetable ground. The US ran a parallel campaign that reached millions of households.

The scale was real. By the mid 1940s these gardens were supplying a substantial share of the fresh vegetables eaten in several countries, which is a genuinely remarkable thing for amateur growers on small plots to have achieved.

What interests me is not the nostalgia. It is that the plans were written under constraints that make them unusually honest: no fridge, no plastic tunnel, limited seed, limited time, and a household that needed the food.

Key points

• Crops were chosen for how many people a row would feed, and whether they would keep without refrigeration.
• Storage was half the plan. A crop that fed you in February was worth more than one that fed you in July.
• Plots were small and worked intensively, typically 50 to 90 square metres per household.
• Successions were built in from the start, because a glut you cannot store is a waste of ground.
• Nothing decorative. Every square metre had to justify itself, which is a useful discipline to borrow.

The original crop list, and why each one earned its place#

Potatoes

The backbone. Highest calories per square metre of anything they could grow, and they store for months in the dark.

Onions and leeks

Flavour for everything else, and onions keep until spring if dried properly. Leeks stand in the ground through winter, which is even better than storing.

Carrots and parsnips

Store in sand or leave in the ground. Parsnips actually improve after frost, which made them a February crop.

Beetroot

Stores well, and the leaves are edible, which mattered when nothing was wasted.

Cabbage and kale

Standing crops through winter. Kale in particular survives almost anything and keeps cropping.

Broad beans and peas

Protein, an early crop, and they fix nitrogen for whatever follows them. Dried peas stored indefinitely.

Turnips and swede

Bulk, storage and animal feed. Grown widely then, and grown far less now, which I think is fair enough.

What I would change for a modern plot#

Here is where I would depart from the old plans, and the reasoning matters more than the list.

The wartime constraint was supply. Getting food to a household was hard, so growing bulk calories at home was rational even though potatoes are cheap to produce commercially.

Your constraint is different. Potatoes, onions and carrots are among the cheapest things in any shop, and they take a lot of ground for a long season. Salad, herbs and soft fruit are expensive, perishable and often poor quality by the time you buy them.

So the modern version inverts part of the list:

Grow more of

Salad leaves, herbs, chard, climbing beans, courgettes, raspberries, blackcurrants, tomatoes. Expensive to buy, better fresh, high value per square metre.

Grow some of

Beetroot, kale, leeks, peas, early potatoes. Genuinely better home grown, and earlies are worth the ground in a way maincrop is not.

Grow for interest only

Maincrop potatoes, onions, carrots, swede. Cheap to buy, long season, a lot of ground. Grow them because you want to, not to save money.

Keep the wartime habits

Successions, storage, using the whole plant, and planning the winter in July. These are the parts that have not aged at all.

A plan for a small modern plot#

Scaled to about 15 square metres, which is a realistic back garden bed rather than an allotment.

Bed 1, roughly 4 sq m

Salad and quick crops, sown in short rows every fortnight from April. Highest value per square metre of anything here.

Bed 2, roughly 4 sq m

Climbing beans on a net, with chard underneath. Beans crop for two months, chard from summer through to spring.

Bed 3, roughly 4 sq m

Beetroot and carrots in blocks, followed by kale and leeks in August for the winter.

Bed 4, roughly 3 sq m

Courgette and a couple of tomatoes, or first early potatoes in a bag if you want the wartime feel.

Edges and gaps

Herbs along every path edge. They cost nothing in space and are the most expensive thing in the shop.

That plan will not feed a household, and I would not pretend otherwise. It will supply the vegetable side of a lot of meals from May to October and something through the winter, which is a real result.

The honest arithmetic on saving money#

I want to be careful here, because this is where grow your own writing tends to overclaim.

Some crops beat shop prices clearly. A packet of salad seed costs a few dollars and produces repeatedly over months; supermarket bagged salad is expensive and short lived. Herbs are the same story only more so. Climbing beans and raspberries are both expensive to buy and heavy croppers at home.

Other crops do not. A sack of maincrop potatoes or a bag of onions costs very little, and growing them takes a bed for most of the year.

And there is a cost side people leave out: compost, seed, water, and the first year of tools and beds. My own view is that a productive garden pays for itself in food eventually and pays for itself in other ways immediately, and that anyone quoting you a precise return per square metre is guessing.

What the old plans got right that we forget#

Three things, and I have adopted all three.

Storage as part of the plan rather than an afterthought. Deciding in March what you intend to be eating in January changes what you sow.

Using the whole plant. Beetroot leaves, pea shoots, radish pods, chard stems. All perfectly good food, all routinely composted now.

Narrow paths. The wartime plans were ruthless about giving up walking space to get another row in. Modern advice, mine included, is much more generous about paths, and for a small plot the old approach is worth considering.

Where this needs adjusting#

If you have containers rather than ground, drop the root and storage crops entirely and go all in on salad, herbs, chard and a climbing bean. The wartime list assumes soil.

In a short season or a cold zone, the winter standing crops matter more and the maincrop potatoes matter less. Check your own frost dates before copying any sowing calendar, including mine.

And if the plot is shaded, be realistic: leaves and roots will manage, fruiting crops will not. That is a light problem and no plan solves it.

Where the guidance here comes from#

The history is well documented in national archive and library collections, and many of the original leaflets are digitised and free to read. I would encourage looking at one, because they are unusually clear documents. For the growing itself, the RHS advice on growing your own covers spacing, timing and storage properly, and Garden Organic is the better source on rotation and soil fertility over several seasons, which is what an intensively worked small plot depends on.

The short version#

Borrow the discipline, not the crop list. Plan for storage and for winter, sow successions rather than long rows, use the whole plant, and choose crops by value per square metre rather than by tradition. That means more salad, herbs and beans than 1943 would have advised, and it is the same idea applied to a different shortage.

Related reading#

• How to start a vegetable garden: the step by step version for a first year.
• Garden planner: the sowing list and rotation this plan depends on.
• Raised bed garden layout ideas: bed sizes and spacing for a small intensive plot.
• Vertical gardening: how the climbing beans in this plan get four times the crop per square metre.