The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-08-19
KIDDIEs GUARD GARDEN

tAe-AANNeA NN-~ C% St. Eouis.
 KIDDIES GUARD GARDEN
 'The police tried to protect the gar dens, but we soon organized the Junior Garden Protective league, band of school children, to help them, and now woe betide the rash persons who tries to steal a radsh or a head of lettuce The kiddies are marvellous watchdogs
 with the exception of one interested husband who gave $100o the work of the committee has all been financed by women. The elimination of waste and the conserving of food is our work They cannot do in Washington what we are doing. They can tell people what to do to make money and food go farthest, but we show them''
 If you will pardon my mention of garbage again on so warm an afternoon should like to tell you that these femi- nine conservers of St. Louis have all ready reduced the waste from Mary Ann's domain by 20,000 tons
 They have, In a manner of speaking, substituted the soup pot for the garbage can. "The French cook" they declare puts everything in the soup pot; the American cook puts it in the garbage can. Economy has not been the fashion Women can make 1t so-and we are going to do it!'
 To quote from the committee food conservation bulletin Mo- 8:
 KEEP SOUP POT BUSY
 What it queries. do you do with your potato parings? The ends of the carrots, radish tops and the outside leaves of cauliflower, cabbage and let tuce? What do you do with pea and bean pods. the vegetables left over in the bottom of the vegetable dish and the scrapings of the cereal cooker? What becomes of the scraps of meat and bits of gravy?
 They all make excellent soup. Save them and put them together Sometimes it turns out to be vegetable soup and sometimes it Is a good meat soup. Even the water in which rice and ether vege tables have been cooked should be used for soup. It is high in mineral salts and gives pleasant flavor"
 The bulletin goes on pleasantly about how to utilize fats, drippirigs and fry ings. It tells how to remove the burnt taste from fat by cooking a raw potato in it Gf the stock markets up and you can afford a potato), and how to make soap (both diving and floating) out of your hoarded fat.
 There are fascinating pages devoted to the utilization of leftovers. It instructs
 
 and tells how to feed family of six for six days at s1 per day. It sug- gests cotton seed meal as flour sub stitute and tips you off that shorts or less perfectly boted flour is-or are cheaper by one-third and more nutri- tious than the usual flour
 THEIR THRIFT INBORN
 I read that bulletin with honest in terest and I dare you to send to room 227, Boatmen's Bank building, St. Louis, Mo-, for one and not start new regime in your kitchen.
 The women in that hot and hustling office did more in 10-minute talk to dispel my notion that St. Louis was cross between Brooklyn and the suburbs of Berlin than 1000 booklets issued by local real estate boosters could have done.
 The women are fair of face, with tawny hair, pink cheeks and eyes of Saxon blue. Most of them bear names one might hear on Friedrichstrasse or Unter den Linden, names identified with the upbuildfng and growth of St. Louis for loi these many years The men and women they designate see mborn with a talent for efficiency and good citizen- ship. They are Americans, with Amer ican generosity grafted upon European thrift
 They live in quiet. elderly city in the center of the country, far removed from fevered fields of war. Yet they were among the first to offer service, and of kind that will outlast war. Con- servation is patriotism.
 There! If it isn't just like me to have forgotten the main item in the story the community cannery that these St Louisettes are running. If it wasn't so hot a day I'd go back and write it all over again.
 This cannery was donated to the wom- en's central committee on food conser- vation by the Collier estate which could have rented it to any number of indus trial tenants at $40,000 a month Mrs Gellhorn assures me.
 MOTORISTS ARE DRAFTED
 We are a bit proud of the system we have built up for running this cannery." she admitted. Everybody whose daily automobile route into town runs near the canner and our planted land, collects the beans, beets, fruit and berries we raise, loads them into his car and leaves them al the cannery. We have nearly 6oo automobiles that do this volunteer work for us. We call it the Mdsum- mer Goodfellow movement We have scores of women from near by neghborhoods who do the canning, receiving the canned foodstuffs as their 1 pay at the rate of about $1.25 day.
 This cannery is practically a school for the thrifty housewife Edna Kiei, the mayors daughter was chief inau- gurator of the cannery and of the col l |