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IMAGE 2 if you want to use this in the section, up to you Kitchen Garden Spring 2023 pic b

Colonial Garden

Welcome to the Wing Fort House kitchen garden, planted, tended and harvested by WFA members and volunteers Amy and Dan McGuiggan. The Wing garden reflects a typical 18th century kitchen garden, often referred to as a Colonial garden. Kitchen gardens were not ornamental but were practical, the plants serving many household purposes including medicinal and culinary, as well as being used as repellents and clothing dyes.

Dan McGuiggan describes the hops process.

A look at the garden during the summer months.

Questions with the McGuiggans:

Q: Why is it called a kitchen garden?
A: Kitchen gardens were also known as dooryard gardens and were conveniently located to provide for a family’s immediate household needs and to supplement larger vegetable gardens and fields of crops set away from the house.

Q: What did a typical kitchen garden look like?
A: The garden was located on the south side of the house to take advantage of the sun and warmth. Fenced in to deter animals, the garden used rectangular, raised beds built of stones, logs or planks whose height helped with drainage and with warming the soil.

Q: How were the plants used medicinally?
A: Without modern medicines, plants, seeds and bark became the early version of the medicine chest, also known as an apothecary. Healing with medicinal plants is as old as mankind. Treating illness was based on an ancient Greek belief that the human body is made up of four unique fluids called humors – blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile – and that good health required these humors to be kept in balance. Different plants helped maintain that balance. Once many diseases were shown to be caused by germs, the four humors fell out of favor.

Q: How were medicinal plants rendered for home use?
A: Plants were rendered as tinctures, infusions and poultices. A plant like Lamb’s Ear, with its soft leaves, would have been used as a bandage.

Q: Will modern day gardeners recognize the plants that our Wing ancestors
enjoyed?
A: Yes, in many cases the same flowers and herbs that we enjoy today such as rosemary, parsley and basil, were staples of the kitchen garden generations ago. Families who immigrated to North America brought plants with them from the Old World,
including lavender, chives, thyme and sage, but also adapted native plants including bee balm, to their gardens.

Q: What can visitors expect to see in the garden this summer?
A: If the weather cooperates, visitors will see potatoes, leeks, onions, cabbage, beans and hops, as well as others like calendula, nasturtium, bee balm and fennel.
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