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The lawn in front of San Francisco’s City Hall is typically studded with napping homeless people. But this July, it was ripped out and replaced with a 10,000-square-foot Victory Garden: raised beds filled with thousands of fruit and vegetable plants, including purple mustard greens, lettuces, kale, and tomatoes. The temporary garden, tended by volunteers, will provide food for donation to the San Francisco Food Bank.

The Victory Garden is a public-works project that’s part of Slow Food Nation, a huge event over Labor Day weekend in San Francisco, sponsored by the organization of the same name that promotes local, sustainable, homemade foods.

What’s the victory? Originally, a Victory Garden was part of World War I– and World War II–era policy in which the U.S. government encouraged people to plant vegetables at their homes, in parks and at schools, and at their workplaces to augment the wartime food supply.

Today, community plots are back, and supporters have begun using the phrase Victory Garden. It refers not to a war win, but to a triumph over what they see as America’s outdated food system. With factory farming and centralized food production starting to look both impractical and harmful, home and community gardeners intend to help people eat more locally, nutritiously, and cheaply.

“Instead of asking people to demonstrate patriotism by going shopping,” says Rose Hayden-Smith, chair of the University of California Garden-Based Learning Workgroup, master gardener, and U.S. historian, “[we should have] leaders that will tell people, ‘This is important, this is a personal action you can take that will have a wonderful impact on the nation.’”

See a slideshow of images from the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden in San Francisco.

Next page: Victory Garden slideshow 1 2 »

Roxanne Webber is an associate editor at CHOW.

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Slow Food Nation’s Victory Garden (cont.)

slideshow

Seedlings growing in West Oakland, California, in preparation for planting in the Victory Garden.

Plans for the Victory Garden show how the beds will be distinctively circular.

Chard seedlings for the garden.

Willow Rosenthal, founder of the Oakland, California-based City Slicker Farms, transplants seedlings at the Ralph Bunche School Nursery site.

Sod at San Francisco’s Civic Center is rolled up to prepare the site for construction.

Organic soil was donated by a landscaping supply store to build the garden.

The garden beds are constructed using rice straw bundles wrapped in fabric.

Volunteers fill the beds with dirt.

Volunteers help plant the roughly 4,000 fruits, vegetables, herbs, and grasses that will make up the garden.

Volunteers plant corn and squash.

About 150 volunteers work in teams at Community Planting Day.

Slow Food Nation Victory Garden designers and planners speak about the history of Victory Gardens. Alice Waters (third from right), Willow Rosenthal (second from right), and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (far right) are also on hand.

The garden is open to the public every day from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Leafy greens like these are harvested by volunteers on Monday mornings to give to the San Francisco Food Bank.

Photographs by Chris Rochelle