Explore the Kitchen Garden at Jerusalem Mill Village!
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Our Garden
In 2000, the living history volunteers of The Friends of Jerusalem Mill added a kitchen garden behind the Cooper/Gun Shop. The garden displays plants and gardening techniques used by families 250 years ago to provide food and medicine. The produce from our garden is used and consumed on site during our hearth cooking demonstrations.
Kitchen Gardens
Kitchen Gardens provide vegetables for immediate use throughout the spring, summer, and fall,
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Raised beds are preferred for kitchen gardens to better shield the plants from animals and enable a denser planting. Raised beds are also easier to prepare, plant, and maintain. Raised beds are usually made with wood, although the walls of the beds were often made in earlier periods with well packed earth. Grass growing on the sides would help hold the beds together.
After the beds are prepared in the spring, cabbage stumps, asparagus (sparrow grass), and turnips are planted first, then squash, potatoes, and onions. Onions are planted deep for harvesting during the summer, or shallow for drying and storing for use in winter. Leafing vegetables are usually planted last, after corn and beans. Gourds can be planted, as well, to provide water vessels and dippers. In fall, a winter garden is planted for a second crop of certain vegetables, primarily root vegetables and leafy greens.
Vegetables commonly grown or mentioned in recipes (receipts) of the colonial period include vine and bush beans, beets, cabbage, carrots, corn, cucumbers, leeks, lettuce, parsnips, radishes, spinach, squash, turnips, and horseradish. Native American Indians taught the first colonists to plant the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash planted together in large, circular mounds of earth. The squash covers the ground around the corn stalks, and the beans use the corn stalks for support. You can see an example of this compact method of planting in the Jerusalem Mill’s field garden adjacent to McCourtney’s Store.
Medicinal herbs include Foxglove (digitalis), Coneflower (Echinacea, an immunostimulant), Chamomile (tea/indigestion), Coriander and Dill (flatulence), Feverfew (for fever and headaches), Bachelor’s Buttons, Lavender (sedative/flatulence), Marigold (deer repellant), Mint (tea/colic/cramps/ deer repellant), Catnip (tea/fever), Parsley (Astringent/breath cleanser), Rosemary (mood lifter/blood pressure stimulant), Sage (reduces milk production/antiseptic), Thyme (antiseptic/worms/athletes' foot), and Yarrow (anti-inflammatory).
Flowers sometimes grown in a kitchen garden include Sweet William, Sunflower, Coneflower and Black Eyed Susan.
The Great Tomato Debate
Possibly, anyone who has ever visited an historic site’s kitchen garden and noticed an absence of tomato plants has been told that every American colonist believed that the fruit of the tomato vine was poisonous.
Until the late 18th and early19th centuries, many people did consider tomatoes to be poisonous because the plant is related to the nightshade (Belladonna) family. They were only partly wrong. The roots and leaves of the tomato plant contain the nerve toxin solanine, which interferes with the body's ability to use acetylcholinesterase (a chemical that facilitates the transmission of impulses between body cells). Tomatoes likely also met with limited popularity among the English as food because they were difficult to grow in England’s short, cool, damp summers.
Tomatoes originated in South America. Spanish priests probably brought them to Europe from Mexico in the 1500s. Tomatoes became a popular food item in Spain and Italy, where they were often prepared with spices, vinegar, and oil.
In 1756, Martha Bradley explained in her book The British Housewife that the tomato “...is the fruit of a Plant of the Nightshade Kind, but is perfectly Wholesome. Soups are made very agreeable by this...”
At least by 1781, Thomas Jefferson was growing tomatoes in his own garden, and in 1782 he commented that tomatoes could be purchased in Virginia markets. By about 1790 they were available in Philadelphia markets, as well.
Based on a variety of 17th, 18th, and 19th century sources, we know that the tomato was neither universally avoided nor was it universally consumed and enjoyed.
