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Miss Hattie Ator, a member of the Lipan Home Demonstration Club in Hood County, shows the "Victory Garden" in her flower bed to Extension Agents. Mrs. Myrtle Negy, Hood County Home Demonstration Agent, called it an excellent "Victory Garden" in a flower bed. Miss Ator harvested a year's supply of three kinds of peppers from the plants in her flower bed. The plants behind Miss Ator appear to be tomatoes. Many Texans who planted "Victory Gardens" and became "Victory Demonstrators" signed pledge forms in which they promised to do their "best to help win the war" by producing "food, feed, and fiber to assure good health" for themselves and their families. They also pledged to take good care of "food, clothes, furnishings, equipment, machinery, buildings, livestock, and the soil as well as scarce articles such as rubber and metals." Note that many of the plants are in containers. Some city dwellers of the 1980s have found container gardening to be a good way of providing limited quantities of fresh vegetables without a great deal of work preparing the soil and keeping it free of weeds and grass.
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Mrs. E. E. Parsons of Bandera harvests fresh vegetables from her frame garden in Bandera County. She cultivated the three frame gardens shown here to provide vegetables for her family of four. Judging from the very rocky soil in the background, frame gardens filled with top soil may have been the only practical way to grow vegetables in Bandera. In the upper right there appears to be a pile of top soil to replenish the frame gardens or to make another one. Some frame gardens were sub-irrigated by burying clay pipes in the soil and pumping or draining water into them. The soil in Bandera appears to be too full of rocks to make such a technique possible.
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