Instructions in gardening for ladies

by Mrs. Loudon

When there is only one detached kitchen garden, it is usual to surround it entirely, or on three sides, with a piece of ground called a slip, consisting of a fruit-tree border, and a walk with perhaps a narrow bed beyond it, bounded by a low hedge. This is done in order that fruit-trees may be grown on both sides of the wall. The vinery and forcing houses are generally placed facing the main walk of the garden; and what is called the melon-ground, which forms a small walled garden, is often placed behind them. This, however, is not essential; but the melon-ground should always be as near as possible to the stable-offices, for the convenience of carting manure; and both it and the kitchen garden should be near the house, and have a convenient road to it concealed from the pleasure-ground. In small suburban gardens there should always be a convenient, and, if possible, partially concealed, road for servants to bring in vegetables; and there should be a little plot of ground for thyme, mint, sage, parsley, &c., very near the kitchen door.

Walks.—The obvious use of walks in a garden constructed on a general principle of utility, is to enable the gardener and others to reach every part of the garden as speedily as possible, without treading on the beds; and for this reason, though the walks are made to intersect each other at right angles, it is customary in many gardens to round the central beds adjoining them at the corners. Paths two feet wide are also made between the beds into which the compartments are divided; and the beds themselves are never wider than a man can conveniently reach across to the middle to rake or hoe. These paths, however, as they vary according to the nature of the crop, are never made of any permanent materials; and the whole compartment is generally dug over when necessary, without paying any regard to them, and re-divided into fresh beds every season.

The walks, on the contrary, being intended to be permanent, are of a very different nature; and, in addition to their obvious uses, it is essentially requisite that they should be hard and firm. This is necessary, as the manure, &c. wanted in a kitchen garden, is generally distributed through the garden in a wheelbarrow; and the weight in the act of wheeling is principally thrown upon a very narrow wheel, which, on soft walks, literally ploughs its way through the gravel, leaving an uneven furrow, extremely offensive to the eye. To avoid this inconvenience, the walks in kitchen gardens, where expense is not an object, are frequently made of cement or asphalt, or laid with bricks or flag-stones; but as all these materials give the idea of a court-yard, rather than a garden, most persons prefer gravel walks. Where gravel is to be employed, the intended walks are marked out with two garden lines; the space between is then dug out, generally in the form of an inverted arch, from one foot to two feet deep in the centre, according to the nature of the soil, and the expense it may be thought advisable to incur; and the excavation is filled to within six inches of the top with brick-bats, stones, or any other hard rubbish that can be procured. If the excavation be made in the shape of an inverted arch, in filling it up the extreme point of the arch should be left hollow to serve as a drain; and if it be made rectangular, a drain is generally left on each side. In filling in the rubbish the largest pieces are thrown in first, then smaller ones, and lastly pieces broken very small, which are rammed down, or rolled, so as to form a smooth surface immediately under the gravel. This is done both to give solidity to the walk, and to prevent the gravel from being wasted by trickling down between the interstices of the stones. As walks can never be firm unless they are kept quite dry, in all cases there should be at least one drain to each walk. The gravel before laying down should be sifted, and all stones, larger than a moderate-sized gooseberry, should be thrown out or broken; and as soon as it is laid down and evenly spread, it should be well rolled, previously to which, if it should be very dry, it ought to be sprinkled with water. If the gravel be at all loose, it should be mixed with equal parts of brick-dust and Roman cement before laying it down; or the gravel should be mixed with burnt clay powdered, in the proportion of one wheelbarrow full of clay, to a two-horse cartload of gravel; or if the gravel be already laid, and it is wished to render the walk more firm, powdered burnt clay may be strewn over it, and raked in. In all these cases, the walks must be immediately well watered, and afterwards heavily rolled. Sometimes the clay is mixed with water before applying it to the gravel. Tolerably firm walks may be made of sea gravel, or powdered sandstone, where good gravel cannot be procured, or even of sand by this treatment. The clay may be burnt by making it into a heap, intermixed and surrounded with faggot wood; or, as a substitute for burning, it may be dried by spreading it on the top of the furnace or boiler employed to heat the hothouses. Gravel walks are generally slightly raised in the middle, to throw off the water to the sides; and they are very frequently supplied with gratings, to prevent large stones, or any kind of rubbish, from being washed down by the rain into the drains so as to choke them up. When the walks in a kitchen garden are formed of flag stones, artificial stone, or brick, the material used is laid on brick arches or piers; and when grass walks are employed, they require no other preparation than marking them out on the ground, consolidating it by pressure, and then laying them with turf. Grass walks were formerly common in kitchen-gardens, but they are manifestly unsuitable, being more injured than any others by the wheelbarrow, and unfit to walk on in wet weather.

When gravel walks want renovating, the gravel should be loosened with a pick, turned over, raked, and firmly rolled, adding a coating of fresh gravel wherever it may be found necessary. Weeds may be prevented from growing on gravel walks by watering the walks with salt and water. The salt will also kill the weeds already there, and, if these are large, they should, of course, be hoed up and raked off.

Box edgings are better than any others for gravel walks. They are generally planted in March or April. A garden line being first drawn tightly along the earth bordering the walk; a shallow trench is then opened close to the gravel, and the earth from it thrown on the bed. The box is pulled into separate plants, and the branches and roots of each trimmed till all the plants are very nearly of the same size. The plants are then put into the trench, with no earth between them and the gravel; and the trench is filled up by drawing the earth into it, and pressing it close to the roots, so as to make the plants quite firm. Nothing else is requisite but a few waterings, till the box begins to grow; and the only difficulty is to keep the plants in a straight line, with the points of their shoots at an equal distance above the soil. When box edgings are pruned, they should always be cut in with a knife, and never clipped with shears. They should also never be suffered to grow too high without pruning; and they should be occasionally taken up and replanted wider apart, when their stems appear to be becoming naked below.

Cropping.—The crops grown in the open air in a kitchen-garden are of two kinds,—those produced by the fruit trees, and those of the herbaceous vegetables; and the latter are again divided into the permanent crops, and the temporary ones. The permanent crops are those which remain for a number of years in one place, producing a crop, year after year, from the same roots; such as asparagus, artichokes, rhubarb, &c.: while the temporary crops are those that require sowing or fresh planting every year, and these should never be sown for two years in succession on the same ground.

Permanent Crops.—In regular kitchen gardens, it is of very little consequence where the permanent crops are placed, as every part of the ground is generally alike accessible from the walks, and alike suitable for cultivation. But in small gardens the case is different; and there are generally some awkward corners, which are best set apart for the lasting crops. The part to be sown annually should be always divided into compartments, in order to manage properly the rotation of crops.

Asparagus Beds.—Of all the permanent crops grown in a garden, the one which requires most preparation is asparagus. It is not perhaps generally known that this plant is a native of Britain; but the fact is, that it grows wild in several places both in England and Scotland. The cultivated plant is, however, of course, very different from the wild one; for, while the latter is meagre, insipid, and very tough, the former is not only succulent and finely flavoured, but grows to an enormous size. There are three sorts of asparagus grown for the London market: the Battersea, which has a thick whitish stalk, only just tipped with a pinkish head; the Gravesend, which is much more slender, and has both the stalk and head green; and the Giant, which is an enormous variety of the first. Asparagus is always raised from seed; but, as the stalks are not fit to cut till the roots are two or three years old, persons wishing to plant an asparagus bed generally purchase one-year or two-years’ old plants from a nurseryman.

Asparagus plants require a light, rich, sandy loam, and the ground in which they are to be planted is always first trenched from three to four feet deep, or even more, and plenty of stable dung is buried at the bottom of the trench; the beds are then marked out four feet wide, with paths two feet wide left between, and the plants are planted in rows about six inches deep (the crown of the root being left about two inches below the surface), and nine inches apart. The beds are generally covered during winter with rotten manure, which is forked in, and the beds raked in spring; and this treatment should be repeated every year, or every two or three years at farthest, the beds being slightly covered, in the intermediate years, with litter, leaves, &c., which may be raked off in spring. The stalks should not be cut till the third year after planting; but, after that, the roots will continue to produce freely for twelve or fourteen years. Asparagus is cut generally a little below the surface, with a sharp knife, slanting upwards; and the market-gardeners cut all the shoots produced for two months,—say from April till Midsummer,—but suffer all the shoots that push up after that period to expand their leaves, in order that they may elaborate their sap, and thus strengthen the roots. Whole fields of this plant are cultivated by the market-gardeners near London, to the extent, as it is said, of from eighty to a hundred acres, chiefly near Mortlake, Battersea, and Deptford. During the last four or five years, these fields, and many private gardens near London, have been infested with a most beautiful little beetle, striped with red, black, and blue, which eats through the shoots close to the ground almost as soon as they appear. Asparagus is generally forced by covering the beds with manure, and by deepening the alleys between the beds, and filling them with manure also.

Sea-Kale.—About seventy years ago, Dr. Lettsom, a celebrated physician and botanist of that day, happened to be travelling near Southampton, when he observed some plants pushing their way up through the sea-sand. Finding the shoots of these plants quite succulent, he enquired of some person in the neighbourhood if they were ever eaten, and was answered, that the country people had been in the habit of boiling these shoots and eating them as a vegetable from time immemorial. The doctor tasted them, and found them so good, that he took some seed to his friend Mr. Curtis, the originator of the “Botanical Magazine,” who had then a nursery in Lambeth Marsh. Mr. Curtis wrote a book about the plant which brought it into notice, and he sold the seed in small packets at a high price: and thus, this long neglected British plant, which for so many years was only eaten by the poorest fishermen, became our highly prized and much esteemed sea-kale, which is now so great a favourite at the tables of the rich.