Poster encouraging households to grow their own vegetables. The left
hand one photographed in the Museum of Nottingham Life and the right
hand one in the Lincolnsfields Childrens Centre, Bushey.
In the early 1940s Britain of World War Two, all the country's resources
went into the war effort. Many foods were rationed, and even vegetables which
were off-ration were often out of stock in the shops. So householders grew their
own in their back gardens, while usually keeping a small patch of ground for
brightly coloured flowers to add some cheer to the gloom of the home front and
the austerity which continued into the 1950s. This page is about how people
got hold
of the seeds and grew them into viable plants.
Buying seeds WW2 Britain
I don't ever remember flower seeds being sold
during World War Two.
Vegetable seeds could be bought from seed merchant
shops, which were in most high streets, and from allotment association shops.
The seeds became available around the times when they
needed to be sown and not at other times of the year.
There were no packets of seeds. The shops had their
seeds in large containers. Small seeds were sold by weight and large seeds
such as peas, broad beans and runner beans were sold by the pint. They were
weighed or measured out and sold in brown paper bags.
Seeds were not rationed, but they were not always in
good supply.
Seed potatoes were available in the spring at seed
merchants and in Woolworths. The shop would place a notice in the window
saying when the seed potatoes were to be sold and everybody got there early
and stood in line waiting for the shop to open. Seed potatoes were not rationed
as such, but you had to queue up for ages - and once the shop was sold out
that was it.
Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson has good recollections of buying seeds in wartime Britain -
see the box on the right. As his recollections are of the area around Edmonton
in north London, the seed merchants that he remembers were probably the
corn
chandlers that my mother wrote about in the early 1900s.
Peter's recollections jolt my memory in that I do just remember my father
belonging to the local Allotment Association, where he presumably bought seeds.
Whether this was in the early years of the war before he was called up into
the army - when I was still only a toddler - or just after the war, I cannot
be sure.
I don't think that there were seed merchants shops in Edgware where I grew
up, but it was a relatively new community which was part of the expansion of
the commuter belt in the 1930s. Peter Johnson mentions Woolworths, and I
remember from the late 1940s that they had a very good and cheap gardening
section. My mother bought many of her plants and bulbs there.
There was a small nursery in Edgware, opposite the
British
Restaurant (the site that later became the public library), but I only remember
it vaguely because it closed quite early on in the war.
Saving and swapping seeds
Rather than rely on finding a shop that might have seeds to sell, it was common practice
to save some from the previous year and to swap with friends and neighbours.
Saving seed from one year to another worked well in
the first half of the 20th century because few if any seeds were hybrid.
Hybrid seeds are specially produced each year, and are common in today's
seed catalogues because they are said to give better quality results. Saved
hybrid seeds do not come true to the parent plant. This means that they
need to be bought fresh every year.
Saving seeds required leaving one or more plant to flower and set its seed.
At this stage, it looked quite tatty. Nevertheless it was important to wait
until all the sap had left the seed case so that the seeds were quite dry. Then
they were collected and stored in labelled brown paper envelopes. In the 1940s,
there were no plastic bags, but even if there had been, they would not have
been suitable for storing seeds. Plastic 'sweats', whereas the paper bags
were slightly absorbent, so keeping the seeds dry.
The envelopes of seeds were
kept somewhere free from mice and reasonably dry to over-winter. Damp seed goes
mouldy and is no longer viable.
Home-made seed compost
It was normal for householders to sow their seeds in seed compost that they
made themselves. This needed to be much finer than compost straight off the
compost heap. It could be sieved, but his was no quick or easy task.
I imagine that seed merchants and Allotment Association shops may have sold
suitable compost, but it was probably not readily available. Anyway, it was
cheaper to make one's own.
While my grandfather was still living in town, he would collect the silt
that had accumulated around at the edge of the roads and use that for sowing
his seeds. Later, when he had moved to the country, he collected the fine soil
dug out by moles which had left disfiguring the countryside as mole hills.
He also used sifted
worm casts. I don't know whether he added any form of fertiliser.
Sowing seeds in the early 20th century and before
Some seeds could be sown directly into open ground, but others had to be
treated more gently.
Plastic flower pots started coming into the shops in the mid 1950s. Before
then, sowing was in any suitable shallow container or clay pot, and planting
on was into clay pots. These pots were handmade by potters using local clay.
(Pots were produced in potteries in areas of naturally occurring clay - see
for example my mother's
family pottery in north London. Where there were no potteries, the pots came in by road or rail.)
Three clay pots of increasing size. The smallest, known
as a 'thumbs' was for very young seedlings. The ruler is a foot
long, ie 30.48 centimetres.
Small seeds and young seedlings were put into tiny clay pots known as 'thumbs', which
measured only about 3 cm at their widest point. As the plants grew, they were
moved into progressively larger clay pots until it was time for them to go
into open ground.
The clay pots were very brittle. They cracked when dropped and in freezing
temperatures. So there was no shortage of broken pottery in most
gardens, which must have given rise to the practise of putting broken crocks
into pots to aid drainage.
Feeding growing plants: the old ways
I am not sure what was available in the way of fertilisers for feeding the
growing plants, but it was normal to have a compost heap or bin in the garden.
Vegetable waste, weeds and any chicken and rabbit manure were all added, and
by the next year had turned into good compost. Leaves rotted down more slowly,
so they tended to be composted separately into leaf mould.
During the war period most things were delivered by
horse drawn vehicles. There was a unwritten law that if the horse was outside
your house when he did his business then it belonged to you. So everybody
had a shovel and bucket ready for action. As a horse came down the street
everybody would be waiting see if he did his business. If he did,
outside your house, it was rather like winning
the lottery.
Most people had a water butt in the back garden. This
was either an old beer barrel or an oil drum. The fresh horse manure was
put into an old sack and suspended in the water. The result was a deep brown
liquid similar to Baby Bio and was later put onto the soil with a watering
can.
Something that was common but never spoken of in history
books was the use of urine. Most people had a bucket in the
air raid shelter,
or a chamber pot under the bed. Urine was collected to be diluted and watered
around the base of growing vegetables. Many parts of the world such as China
still do this on a vast scale. Even today people put diluted urine on their
lawns to obtain a fantastic green colour.
Peter Johnson
There was another cheap and effective common practice. Peter Johnson describes
it well, and I just remember my mother collecting horse droppings while the
dairy still delivered by horse and cart.
This website Join me in the 1900s is also known as
Join me in the 1900's and is © Pat Cryer.
The 1940s and 1950s are also written as the 1940's and 1950's.
