Victory Gardens

I just saw an interesting article on Apartment Therapy. Apparently the University of California Cooperative Extension is offering classes on how to grow a Victory Garden.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, "Victory Garden" came up during World War II and was an initiative created to encourage families to grow food at their private residences, in public gardens, and any other spot they could find in order to reduce the strain on the food supply that was focused on feeding hungry troops. You can read about the full (well, the Wikipedia) history here.

The public community gardens in Boston's Fenway Park (the actual park....not the baseball field) started as a victory garden and is still active today. I actually used to walk by them every day on my way to school when I was at college in Boston!

A few years ago, my father gave my mother a victory garden kit from Botanical Interests and my mother spent the next year creating vegetable beds and learning to grow everything that came in her kit. She blogs about her adventures at the Carolina Victory Garden. She gets to feed her family fresh produce on a regular basis while reducing her grocery bill.

So what's the point of all this? As our economy is recovering and many of us are still struggling to make ends meet, doesn't it make sense to grow some of our food ourselves? Do you consider vegetable gardening a major part of green living, since the food we produce ourselves requires little to no fuel in shipping, trips to the grocery store, etc? Do we have a responsibility to become as self-sufficient as possible? What do you think of the Victory Garden initiative?

You can read the full article from Apartment Therapy here.