Victory Gardens

JohnT keeps up his excellent crunchy-Catholic blogging, this time advocating reviving a World War II tradition: the Victory Garden. Instead of getting all Henny-Penny about how the sky is falling -- even if it really does sorta look like it is -- why not reject being paralyzed by despair, and get out in your backyard and plant a winter garden? During the war, Victory Gardens were planted to help Americans feed themselves, and to reduce pressure on the food supply. We don't have that kind of need now, of course, but a broader Mideast war that caused another oil shock could make it a lot more expensive to feed ourselves. Getting into habits of self-sufficiency now is smart. Besides, gardening can be a lot of fun. Unless you have the backyard we do. Our house -- our neighborhood -- was in disrepair for decades, and though it's come back, and continues to come back, we still find shards of broken glass sometimes in the backyard, working their way back to the surface.