The Parish Magazine January 2022

HOME & GARDEN — 2
The Parish Magazine - January 2022 35
The Dig for Victory garden at Quorn & Woodhouse is set out as it would have been in the 1940's
Help our planet by digging for victory!
That's the message The Royal Horticultural Society
(RHS) wants to get across to everyone with a garden
with a modern-day ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign aimed at
helping to tackle climate change.
The original ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign was set up during
World War II by the British Ministry of Agriculture. It
encouraged everyone, men, women and children, to grow
their own food, and in doing so, help overcome the harsh
rationing of food caused by the war.
Open spaces everywhere were transformed into
allotments, from domestic gardens to public parks — even
the lawns outside the Tower of London were turned into
vegetable patches. A massive propaganda leaflet campaign
aimed to both ensure that people had enough to eat, and
that morale was kept high. The current recession, as well
as a new awareness of ‘food miles’ and climate change,
Peewam, dreamstime.com
has increased the demand for vegetable growing plots and
the trend is supported by new, comparable government
initiatives.
In response to this, The RHS is asking the UK’s 30
million gardeners to consider digging up their garden
paving and to plant trees, grass and bee-friendly flora,
instead, but this time, rather than for human survival, the
'Dig for Victory' campaign is to help nature survive.
The RHS has calculated that if every gardener in the
UK grew at least one medium-sized tree in their garden,
then that would be the equivalent of storing the carbon
produced from driving 11 million times around the planet.
Research from a YouGov survey has found that only
19% of gardeners have adopted sustainable gardening
practices, so there is lots of room for improvement!
IN THE ARK AT ST ANDREW'S CHURCH
Sunday 16 January at 3pm
Our theme is HOPE — we HOPE to see you there!
revkate@sonningparish.org.uk