Colonial gardeners paid more attention to environmental cues to help them get their vegetables from garden to table.
After tussling through another season trying to grow a decent patch of vegetables, I wonder how people managed this in the days before Miracle Gro and garden sprinklers.
Here we’ve got an arsenal of modern gizmos and concoctions, yet it’s still not easy to bring a back-yard crop from seed to table.
How did our foregardeners do it?
How did we not starve to death generations ago?
How did the human species not lose out to cabbageworms and groundhogs?
The answers lie in a fascinating new book by Wesley Greene, founder of Colonial Williamsburg’s Colonial Garden and Plant Nursery.
Greene has spent 30 years researching historic plants, tools and gardening techniques, and he’s laid out age-old secrets in “Vegetable Gardening the Colonial Williamsburg Way” (Rodale, 2012, $30 hardcover).
What hit home most to me is that Colonial gardeners went about things in a smarter, more understanding way than we do.
Not because they were smarter or more understanding – it was because they had no other choice.
Wesley Greene’s new book on “Vegetable Gardening the Colonial Williamsburg Way.”
We’re trained to buy products when things go wrong.
They had to use their wits and whatever solutions they could improvise.
A good example is the issue of beating bugs to the vegetable feast.
We’re so accustomed to sprays that we wonder how anyone could possibly grow cucumbers without spraying for cucumber beetles or squash without spraying for squash bugs and vine borers. Certainly the Colonists didn’t have carbaryl or permethrin.
In defense of us, Colonial gardeners didn’t have nearly the variety of bugs that we do – potato beetles, cabbageworms and Japanese beetles in particular. Those came along later.
One big difference, though, is that they had much more tolerance for imperfection than we do.
Let a codling moth make one mark on an apple and we consider it ruined.
The Colonial gardener, on the other hand, cut out damaged parts and ate the rest.
They also did a lot more monitoring and hand-picking of bugs than we do. Again, in defense of us, they had time that wasn’t chewed up on Facebook, fixing the cell phone and keeping tabs on college football polls.
When things got out of hand, they turned to improvised solutions.
They found that a dousing of lime water killed aphids, that sprinkling ashes on damp squash leaves kept the squash bugs at bay and that laying a board on the ground was great for collecting slugs after a night munching the lettuce.
It’s not that the Colonists wouldn’t have loved to get their hands on a bottle of diazinon if given half a chance, says Greene.
“The 18th-century gardener was an organic one without any interest in being one,” he writes. “The common philosophy was to kill anything that hopped, wiggled or flew, but the Colonists just weren’t very good at it.”
They also spent a lot more time watching the weather and other environmental cues for ways to not only outsmart bugs but to get the longest-lasting and best-performing crops.
A favorite technique was to match an observation with a planting or cultivation rule.
For example, Colonial Virginia gardeners figured out that they got their best carrots when seed was planted when the daffodils bloomed, then again when the dogwoods and lilacs bloomed, then in late summer when the phlox and asters bloomed.
They knew it was time to harvest new potatoes when the potato plants started flowering.
They knew turnips worked best as a fall crop, and that you could help summer-sowed cabbage by shading their south and west sides with cut evergreen boughs.
John Randolph considered “collyflower” so finicky that he said you had to plant it exactly on April 12 for a summer crop and Sept. 12 for a fall crop.
This approach actually has basis in science because bug arrival, disease outbreaks, flowering times and such are all interdependent on the same environmental vagaries. There’s a field called “plant phenology” that studies the connections.
Greene’s book shows us how clever our foregardeners were in solving problems.
Instead of buying heat mats, they speeded seed germination by shoveling manure under the soil in “hot beds.”
This Colonial Williamsburg garden shows how early gardeners used oiled paper to protect their vegetable plants from cold nights.
Instead of buying $20 packs of spun-bonded polyester fabric to protect crops from frost, they covered their plants with oiled paper.
Instead of buying cages and trellises to support their peas, tomatoes and broad beans, they used branch prunings and made 2-foot-tall “tables” out of interwoven sticks.
And instead of buying the latest hybrid or genetically modified seed variety, they watched for even minute genetic improvements and saved the seed from that particular pod or fruit.
Imagine that… thinking your way to a better garden.
Maybe those people weren’t so archaic after all.
George Weigel Garden Tip of the Week: Trouble With Tomatoes
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