The Victorian Kitchen Garden — Season 1, Episode 8: July
Documentary • 30 min • 1 season, 13 episodes • ★ 10.0/10
Episode synopsis
The soft fruit is ready for picking - morello cherries and black, red and white currants, red and yellow raspberries. Gooseberries, too, are ripening fast. Peter visits Goostrey in Cheshire where the extraordinary Victorian tradition survives of pitting one gooseberry against another to find the heaviest. Harry feeds his plants with homemade liquid manure, and sprays the trees with 'Bordeaux Mixture' - a fungicide discovered by accident in the vineyards of France. Peter tells the story of the Victorian craze for bedding plants, which one writer described as 'those hideous miles of scarlet geraniums'.
About The Victorian Kitchen Garden
This wonderful series goes behind the high redbrick walls of Chilton Foliat in Berkshire, where Harry Dodson carefully recreates a traditional Victorian kitchen garden. Using traditional tools Harry painstakingly transformed the weed-choked ground into a gardener's and cook's delight solving many horticultural mysteries along the way and showing how gardeners dealt with pests and how they grew exotic fruits and vegetables for the household all year round.