Farmhouse porch with plants in painted lard buckets, Morehead, Kentucky, 1940, by Marion Post Wolcott for U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
I wish we could see the colors of the painted* containers.
Two special supports were built along the front of the porch to display the plants. (There’s a third view of the house here.)
*Here, here, and here are examples of 1930s interior paint color combinations.
enclos*ure 
Interesting. I wonder what keeps them from blowing off, Come a wind ?
What a lot it takes to have clean, orderly farm house, land.
XOT
I hadn’t thought about the wind, but I think they may have stayed in place by sheer weight — if the pails are filled with damp garden dirt, as I suspect, rather than the compost or soil-less mixes that we use these days.
You are right about the hard work of a farm. There is not a bit of ornamental gardening in the ground in the three pictures of the house, so I imagine that the rows of pots were what the farmer or his wife could manage.