Description

Watch the Oldest House Garden come to life! Properties Maintenance Assistant for the Nantucket Historical Association, Kathrina Pearl, shares all her secrets for creating the perfect garden.

Transcript

Gardening at the Oldest House Garden in Nantucket I really think the garden process starts in the fall. Here at the oldest house, we start cleaning out the beds from the previous year and then we apply our manure which is horse manure from local stables here. And when spring rolls around, we really just get out there, dig the beds over, rake them and they’re ready to be seeded. This is our seedling propagation unit, and it’s here in that back of the wood working shop at the Gosnell Center. They start off in little row flat like this and here you see, we’ve got some teasel taking a little while to show up with some sweet marjoram and some chamomile. Then as they grow, they become, they are gradually transplanted out into larger flats. Here we have something that has just been removed from a seedling flat. Its summer savory, the beautiful sweet pot herb and it’s in a little, what we called six packs. Little six packs where it has more room to grow and mature. It’s a fairly low tech set-up, anybody can do it. We just have ordinary shop fluorescent light, a homemade frame and a place for plants are happy. At that point, we have a lot of the seedlings for the beds here growing and they move onward into a green house which is like a halfway house for seedlings. This is an unheated green house so it’s essentially a large, cold frame and they are at the point now where they’re growing, but they’re also getting used to lower night time temperatures and yet they’re protected from the winds. So it’s a halfway area between that really nice condition indoors and the conditions that they’ll have to face outdoors. We have our onion seedlings, which will be ready to go in the ground and probably two weeks where we try to get them in before the end of April or at the late as the first week of May. We have some cabbage, some Savoy cabbage seedlings, some spinach and some chamomile. In the late April then we take the seedlings that we’ve grown. We’ve plant them into to be vegetable beds and the salad beds out here. And we’ll also at that point, sow some seeds directly on the ground. So, we’ve been working hard the past week or so, all the beds are prep. We’ve got one bed left to turn over. This is really what they look like to right after the winter which is pile horse manure on in the late fall and the winter. Now we leave the bed just lie like this all winter long but then in the spring, we dig them over, rake them out and they turn out like that, they’re ready to plant. Being a housewife kitchen garden of around 1700, what we have is a mixture of plants. We have all the perennial herbs and the upper layer of beds here. These beds nearest the house and these are the familiar lavenders, thymes, sages, rosemary. These beds down here are the ones where the annual plants go, the annual herbs, and the annual vegetables when we just keep cycling through this all summer long. As one crop comes out, another crop will go in. High tech way of making rose is too mark out where we’re going. Now, I think we’ll shed five rose in here. This bed is nicely prepared and so it’s going to be the onion bed. We have a sort of an intensive horticulture type thing going back and this time space is small. So we get the most we can from the beds. So after we planted the onions, we’ll plant lettuces in between them and then the lettuce which will be harvested before the onions grow to full size. So you’re like getting two crops in one bed. This will be a bed of mixed salad greens and some people are surprised to learn that people grow salad greens back in the 70’s onwards or earlier. They grew many kinds of lettuces, they grew spinach, they grew Swiss chard, they grew kale and they ate what they called salad with oil and vinegar. Lettuce was, yes, eaten as a salad but it was also thrown in the pot, the suede pot or the pottage, so it was also known as a pot herb. In studying garden history, it’s been fascinating and interesting. As you go back with history and you’d still all these gardens and why they remade and who they were made for. It’s just wonderful inspiration for them to design work we do today. And what's amazing too is how elaborate some gardens were, even hundreds of years ago. Everything has filled out just as we hoped it would. Some things are doing better than others, of course, as always in the garden. But we have the herbs that are behind me in bloom. They’re so beautiful and decorative as well as useful and down in the lower beds behind to my left. We have the annual herb and vegetable plot. And they filled out very nicely, we’ve harvested already. We’ll be harvesting some more this week and we continue to refill the beds every few weeks, anyway with new seedlings. So it's hard to call it a garden at its peak because the garden has many peaks through the season. Well I'm not sure I have any great tips that will change the way anybody gardens. But, over the years, I’ve develop sort of garden philosophy of keep it simple. Or check that that the plant is happy, that’s in the right condition, sun or shade and that it’s getting enough water. Often times, gardening problems go away or gardening in all its many aspects it can be really rewarding. It’s great fun but if asked, what is my favorite thing about gardening. But I really have to say, it’s the down time. When you’re in a garden, whether it's a modern, brightly colored, wonderful lay out garden, or whether it’s just simple kitchen garden. I think as I weed, I think a lot of gardeners can relate to this that, yes you’re working but it’s your own time in your own space and to me, that’s the most wonderful thing about gardening.