At Historic Waynesborough
Besides my home garden, I help tend the kitchen garden at Historic Waynesborough, the house museum where I’m a volunteer.
Kitchen gardens were an essential of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life, especially in areas where people had little or no access to street markets. Depending on the number of mouths needing to be fed, such gardens could be as small as a backyard plot or as large as five acres or more.
A typical garden consisted of many of the crops we grow at home today. There were lots of herbs—parsley, sage, thyme, mint, rosemary and basil, to name a few—and vegetables such as beans, peas, squash, radishes, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, lettuce and kale. And fruit, of course, two favorites being berries and melons.
At season’s end, the harvest would need to be preserved. Herbs were dried and stored, vegetables were salted or brined and shelved away in the cellar, and fruits might be made into jams.
But a kitchen garden was more than just a source of food. It also supplied medicinal plants—feverfew for headaches and fever, poppy for pain, Echinacea for infections—and plants used to make dyes, soaps and oils, and other household items. At Waynesborough, we’re growing rose campion, whose fuzzy leaves were once used to make candle wicks.
We’re also growing a nice assortment of herbs and vegetables, along with marigolds and zinnias for color and pollination.