Use Vintage Technique To Grow More Fruit in Less Space

Reader Contribution by Brian Kaller
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All across Ireland, sometimes crumbling and overgrown, lie the kitchen gardens that once served vast estates and armies of workmen. The phrase “kitchen gardens,” which sounds like it might describe a row of window-box herbs, doesn’t really do justice to the complex infrastructure of such places – a landscape of stone walls and chimneys, glass and tile, all engineered with precision and foresight. A Victorian-era kitchen garden is a masterpiece of sustainable technology, one that allowed people to multiply food production many times over, grow subtropical food in our wet and cold country, and fed legions from a limited patch of ground – all without electricity, fossil fuels or modern materials.

These Victorian gardens, however, depended on the constant care of master gardeners who kept alive techniques, patiently developed over centuries that have been mostly abandoned in our hurried age. Take, for example, a 200-year-old walled garden we visited last year, whose paths were bounded by what appeared to be wooden fences covered in leafy vines. One closer inspection, they were not fences or vines, but apple trees.They had stood for perhaps a century in unnaturally geometric form, now-gnarled branches curving outward from vertical trunks. From them smaller branches shot upward, creating immense candelabras several metres across. Even with some branches bent downwards with age and accident, they retained a striking symmetry – and they were laden with then-tiny apples. Near them, we could see saplings perhaps ten years old, stretched and trained along posts and wires, and already taking on their adult shapes.

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