Sewn in the ground

I love gardening. At work digging in our garden is peaceful, but dirty work. Gardening was an essential part of house wives bag of tricks. They suplement a families food resource or income.  Planting things have allowed us to settle in one  place and create villages and cities.

Now gardening has changed over time as  terminology has changed.  When I was growing up my mother tended a small L shaped garden where we grew beans, tomatoes, cucumbers,  corn (on occasion) and zuchinni. It was about the size of the average bedroom but it was our garden. Now my mom's garden is bigger while my personal garden is smaller. She now keeps a raised bed surrounded by blackberry bushes as well as two big fields.

It wasn't untill I was working for a 19th century museum I ran into a raised bed garden with paths in between. Now I don't know where they derive from but I see them every where now. They are raised partly for aesthetics,  partly for ease of use and partly to strengthen poor soil.

Muck piles or compost piles were built using trash from the home, garden, and farm to build up the soil. Surrounded by rocks, scraps of wood, good wood or just left in a mound, these beds were filled with soil, planted and then cared for.

In the 17th century herb gardens, kitchen gardens, and vegetable gardens where all one in the same. Herb garden were filled with pot, physic, salad, and root herbs. Pot herbs were anything you can grow in a pot on a patio, or in your home. So this could include any of the other three.  Physic herbs were useful for illness. Margrim was used for headaches, mints for belly aches,  feverfew for fevers, violets and tanzey to help you make water and stool and wormwood and southern wood to help you cast (vomit). (I suggest you don't try those at home.) Now salad herbs were like letace, cabbages, radishes. Root herbs were like carrots, parsnips and onions. Some of these crossed over in between cattegories. Field plants were anything you grew in great quantity,  like Flint corn, Barley, Rye, wheat, peas, and anything else you can think of. 

Now the biggest challenge for housewives was protecting their precious work. Placing branches or thorns over the beds as seen above kept chickens or rabbits off the seeds and seedlings. Weeding around fences and the gardens also keeps the pests at bay. Plus a good dog keeps them at bay too.

So here is to all those green thumbs out there continuing to keep up the tradition even if is just a pot on their patio.