[Sca-cooks] Re: SC - Creating a period garden/raised beds

[Jenne Heise]

>  the question of beds.
> These pictures often are a weirdness of English horticulture.

On what do you base this statement? Frank Crisp's _Mediaeval Gardens_ give illustrations
of period gardens with raised beds from French and German sources as well as other
European sources. Walahfrid Strabo talks about raised beds in his Hortulus:
"That it should not be washed away
We faced it with planks and raised it in oblong beds
A little above the level ground." (Trans. by Raef Payne, 1966)

> Beds would be hot beds as well.
> By digging in a thick (2foot ) layer of FRESH horse muck underneath the soil
> of the bed you can raise the temprature by 4-5 C
> please don't ask me what that is f  I have no idea.
> but this methad extended your growing season by 4-5 weeks as the heat
> protected the seedlings. Allowing you to supply
> food to the kitchens a month early.
> If you the had a cold bed as well (in the shelter of the north wall) It
> delays the season by about the same amount
> overall giving you fresh food before and after its normal cropping seasons.
> A good book is
> The Victorian Kitchen Garden

A book with more about this in period is:
Campbell, Susan. Charleston Kedding : a history of kitchen gardening. (London : Ebury
Press, 1996)

Period or near period gardening books would include:
Hill, Thomas. The Gardener's Labyrinth: The First English Book on Gardening. ed. with an
introduction by
      Richard Mabey. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.) Originally published
1577, this edition
      based on the 1652 ed.
Markham, Gervase. The English Husbandman. (NY: Garland Publishing, 1982). Originally
published1613.
Le Menagier de Paris.A medieval home companion: Housekeeping in the fourteenth century.
Translated and
      edited by Tania Bayard. (NY: HarperCollins, 1991)*
Palladius, Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus. Palladius On husbondrie. From the unique ms. of
about 1420 A.D. in
      Colchester Castle. Ed. by the Rev. Barton Lodge. (London, Pub. for the Early
English Text Society, by
      N. Trübner & Co., 1873 and 1879.) Early English Text Society series parts 52 and
72.
Parkinson, John. A Garden of Pleasant Flowers:Paradisi in Sole, Paradisus Terrestris.
(NY: Dover, 1991).
      From the 1629 edition.
Strabo, Walafrid. Hortulus. Translated by Raef Payne. Commentary by Wilfrid Blunt.
(Pittsburgh: Hunt Botanical
      Library, 1966)
Tusser, Thomas. His Good Points of Husbandry, 1557. Edited by Dorothy Hartley. (London:
Country Life
      Limited, 1931)


Other sources I've heard of but not seen the text of are:
Charlemagne's List
Albertus Magnus, De Vegetabilis et Plantis [On Vegetables and Plants], circa 1260.
Roman de La Rose, 1237-1277
The Feate of Gardening Poem by Jon the Gardener, in English, in the 15th? century.
Pietro de' Crescenzi, Liber ruralium commodorum, 1305
Alexander Neckham, De Naturis Rerum (between 1170 and 1200?)
Bartholomaeus Anglicius, De Proprietatibus Rerum, 1240.

--
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at mail.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"It's no use trying to be clever-- we are all clever here; just try
to be kind -- a little kind." F.J. Foakes-Jackson