The President last evening called upon every citizen of these United States to take up the spade and hoe in defense of the homeland, declaring in a fireside address broadcast from coast to coast that "every backyard from Bangor to Bakersfield must this season become a battlefront." With the Strait of Hormuz closed to commercial traffic for the eleventh consecutive week, and the price of a single pomegranate having reached the unconscionable sum of forty-two cents in some markets, the Administration has issued an urgent national appeal: Plant a Hormuz Garden.
The newly-established Bureau of Domestic Pomegranate, created by executive order on the third instant and headquartered in temporary quarters above a millinery shop on Pennsylvania Avenue, has set as its first-year objective the cultivation of twenty million Hormuz Gardens by the autumn harvest. Mr. Eustace P. Plumb, Acting Bureau Chief and a personal friend of the Vice President, addressed the assembled press on the steps of the Department of Agriculture and offered the following stirring words:
“The Strait is closed to our tankers, but it shall not be closed to our tables. Every spadeful of American earth turned this spring is an answer rung from the soil itself — an answer the Ayatollah cannot un-ring. Mrs. Homemaker, your trowel is a weapon. Junior, your watering-can is a torpedo. Let us all of us together fill the larder, and through the larder, the holds of our merchant marine.”
Bureau officials confirmed that planting bulletins, with diagrams suited to plots of as little as six square feet, will be made available without charge at any United States Post Office, County Agent, or Civilian Defense ward-station upon presentation of a Form 7-B and the citizen’s 1944 Ration Book. Particular emphasis is to be placed upon those varieties whose importation has been most cruelly interrupted: the pomegranate, the saffron crocus, the Persian mulberry, the cucumber, and that hardiest of patriots, the cabbage.
The Office of Hormuz Defense, in coordination with the War Food Administration and the newly-formed Civilian Cucumber Corps, will host enlistment drives this Saturday in 412 cities. Boys and girls of school age are warmly invited to pledge themselves to the Junior Hormuz Cadets — "Saffron in Every Sandlot" being the watchword of the youth division — and adults of all ages are reminded that the Crop Corps welcomes volunteers regardless of prior experience with the soil.
Critics of the program, what few there are, have been answered with vigor by Mr. Plumb himself, who reminded reporters that during the late conflict American Victory Gardens produced upwards of forty per centum of all vegetables consumed on the home front. "If our mothers could feed a continent with a window-box," he declared, his fist striking the rostrum with such force that two reporters were obliged to retrieve their pencils, "then surely we can feed a navy with a vacant lot."
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