“My mother planted her first Victory Garden in April of 1943. Eighty-three years later, I’m still in it.”

Why a 79-year-old Iowa farmer’s daughter has spent six decades keeping the same wartime garden alive — and what the rest of America forgot.

Most people remember Victory Gardens from a history book or a black-and-white photograph. What almost nobody knows is that a few of them are still going — and what one Iowa woman has been quietly tending in her backyard for the past sixty years has more to teach modern American families than every gardening book published this decade.

Dorothy Hofmann’s garden outside Carroll, Iowa — planted by her mother Margaret in April 1943 and continuously cultivated by three generations of the same family ever since.

In 1942, the U.S. government did something it has never done before or since. It told twenty million American families that the country could not feed them anymore — and that they were going to have to feed themselves.
 
It printed planting guides. Distributed seeds. Mailed pamphlets to every household. By the end of the war, Americans were growing nearly half of the country’s vegetables in their own backyards. The program was called the Victory Garden.
 
When the war ended, the government stopped printing the guides. The seed distribution shut down. And one by one, those twenty million gardens disappeared.
 
A few of them didn’t.