What exactly was a Victory Garden during...

To help the war effort, citizens were asked by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard to plant vegetables wherever they could find a plot of land to do so. By 1945, the year the war ended, an estimated 20 million victory gardens had sprouted in sidewalk boulevards, town squares, and odd parcels of land in the cities and out in the country. These gardens were producing 40 percent of the vegetables grown in the United States at that time. The term “victory garden” originated in a book of that title from England, published in 1603. During World War I, U.S. patriots planted what became known as “liberty gardens” as well.