Growing Vegetables Required Enclosed Garden

Growing vegetables required enclosed garden.

Recently I received a gift of a seed starting kit with several vegetable seed packets.

Unfortunately, I cannot grow vegetables in my garden because we have too much shade.

Today with influence from groups like the Farm-to-Table social movement, the interest in growing vegetables is becoming more extensive.

The kitchen garden, or vegetable garden as it became known, has a long history in the story of gardening, but often meant a walled garden area.

In her book Keywords in American Landscape Design Therese O’Malley writes about the meaning of the words “Kitchen garden.”  She says, “In garden periodicals and treatises of the 1840s, the kitchen garden saw a resurgence as an element of newly marketed plans for suburban domestic landscapes.”

Every Victorian home had to have a kitchen garden.

O’Malley continues “All citations emphasized the need to enclose a kitchen garden with a wall or fence.”

“[Several treatises] preferred a regular shape like a square or rectangle.”

George Washington loved the English garden tradition. At Mount Vernon he included a walled kitchen garden to enclose the area where vegetables would grow. [below]

Such an enclosure protects the plants from winds and of course from certain animals.

For decades here in America we had to plant vegetables behind the house, or in the back yard, and often with a fence around the area.  That tradition followed the English example of a walled kitchen garden.

 

 

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