Gardens in unusual places: nostalgia

Soldiers have made gardens in the past. In WW1 they grew vegetables near the trenches. In WW2, POWs had extensive vegetable gardens in some camps. But a lawn!!

This soldier’s lawn in Iraq is apparently not unusual. There’s another patch outside a tent on a Middle East air force base. Each new bunch of guys takes it over….watering in 50 degree heat with their water bottles, providing shade with camouflage cloth, mowing it with scissors.

Creating these gardens needs ingenuity. One soldier tells how he collected timber lying around the base and built a frame. He mixed peat moss, kept on base to soak up Hazmat spills, with local soil to lighten it.

The army’s poop is turned into dried solids. He used that for fertilizer. Watering was set up using plastic water bottles and parachute cord. But instead of writing to his wife to send lawn seeds like the soldier above, he bought seeds from a local. They turned out to be ferns.

March 2018