The wooden yoke around my neck doesn’t hurt at first. I winch up two brimming wooden buckets from the well and attach them to the yoke. Now carrying 40 extra pounds of water weight, my shoulders visit my knees as I lurch away from the well and stagger across the garden to pour the water into the cistern, where it must warm to air temperature before it is scooped out again to water the vegetables.
I’m in the Colonial Garden and Nursery at Colonial Williamsburg, the 84-year-old living history museum in Virginia. It’s sunny and quite warm; T-shirt weather. Because rain’s been scarce, I have volunteered to water the vegetable garden, in the way a housewife of the “middling class” would.
Never has a drop in the bucket seemed so futile: If it were 1750, it would take 49 more trips just to keep this garden alive another day. With men off doing the hard labor, this Sisyphean task fell to women or children. Or, for those who could afford them, slaves. In truth, most people gardened at the mercy of the weather.
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“It’s a lot easier to raise a hog than a cauliflower,” he says. Turns out these forefathers weren’t getting their five-servings-a-day any more than we are now. Less than 10 percent of a Williamsburg resident’s diet was vegetables. Meat and corn, as grain, were the foundation of their food pyramid. Growing your own was too hard; success too uncertain to rely on for sustenance.
The garden is a smaller three-bed variation of the type a gentleman might have owned: a foursquare garden—four vegetable beds with paths crisscrossing between them. Next to it is a mini orchard of closely spaced fruit trees. Both are surrounded by a low wooden fence. With houses on lots of less than half an acre, Williamsburg residents didn’t waste space on sweet potatoes or turnips. Leeks, onions, kale, broad (fava) beans, and cabbages were popular. Most of what the colonists ate grew on plantations outside of town and was bought at market. Perishable salad greens were harder to come by, so luxuries such as lettuce—a favorite among the colonists—were worth the gardening effort.
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This garden is tended organically—the only option in Colonial times. But the settlers had one up on us: Many of the most troublesome insects we battle in our vegetable gardens today are not native, and in the 18th century they hadn’t yet arrived in America. Although striped cucumber beetles, squash-vine borers, and cabbage loopers were here, and plum curculio besieged fruit trees, many crops grew pest-free. Insects such as imported cabbage worms, flea beetles, slugs, and snails hadn’t yet crossed the pond. It would be years before the Colorado potato beetle and the Mexican bean beetle hitchhiked their way to Virginia.
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Article source: Rodale’s Organic Life
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