WWII Quarter-Acre Victory Garden Plan

This free printable Victory Garden plan has been carefully recreated from a historic WWII film promoting Victory Gardens.

With instructions for successive early and late crops, it's a detailed plan for a highly-productive ¼ acre garden.

This article was first written in April 2020, and has been updated for 2025.

As food supply issues continue to be a concern, I've found myself more than doubling my original garden plans for this year. In the process, I've been finding lots of inspiration in the old Victory Garden movement that helped encourage families to grow as much food as possible at home, during the World Wars.

A few days ago, I came across this amazing old video from WWII, promoting Victory Gardens, and just LOVED it! I've watched it again, and again, just enjoying everything about it.

It's embedded right here, where you can watch the whole thing:

This particular video lays out an ideal garden plan for a quarter acre garden, which these days we think of as pretty darn big, for a "backyard garden". You can put up a lot of food for winter, from a garden that size!

I loved so many things about the layout of the garden, that I did some sleuthing around, thinking surely there must be a printed version of this garden plan somewhere!

All of the old War Department materials that promoted Victory Gardens are now in the public domain, so it's pretty easy to find old Victory Garden guides.

I searched and I scoured. But nowhere could I find a plan that corresponded with this particular garden that's detailed in this particular film.

So I made one.

It took a little geeking out over the math, to figure out the dimensions of the plot, and I made some assumptions about row spacing based on the particular garden manual that you can see being used in the film.

Want your own copy of that WWII Victory Garden manual from the film? You can actually download it here.

Using spacing based on the manual, and visual clues from the video, I was able to make a row-by-row map of the garden layout, as it's shown in the video. You can download your own printable copy by clicking on the image below.

One neat thing about most Victory Garden plans, and this one especially, is the focus on getting multiple crops out of each row of garden space.

You can see that with the exception of the tomatoes and peppers, each garden crop is immediately followed by another one, which will still have time to ripen in the remainder of the gardening season.

Something that's helpful to know, if you're planning to make use of this particular garden plan, is that the "showcase" garden from the film was located in northern Maryland - Zone 6a.

That means they probably have at least 15 more frost-free days than I do here on my little Maine homestead, where it's Zone 4b.

I can still do the succession planting recommended, I just need to be sure to choose especially fast-growing varieties of each crop.

This article is full of fast-growing varieties of many types of vegetables, perfect for succession planting.

You may need to make similar alterations if you're also in a colder gardening zone.

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While a quarter of an acre is honestly a pretty big garden (and don't we all wish we had those gorgeous horses to help till and cultivate it!), the plan can easily be scaled down to a smaller size.

Just by cutting the length of the rows in half, you can bring this down to ⅛ acre, which for many people would feel more doable.

That's almost exactly the amount of space that I use for vegetable gardening in most years, and I do it on my own as a single mama, with a couple of little helpers.

I hope you enjoy the video as much as I do, and find having a printable copy of the map helpful.

Cheering you on from Maine! ~ Anna

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