By Jacquie Foote The children of early Geauga were very…
By Jacquie Foote The children of early Geauga were very busy in the gardens, especially in the early summer when the garden plants and the…
By Jacquie Foote
The children of early Geauga were very busy in the gardens, especially in the early summer when the garden plants and the weeds are running their annual fight over garden space. These youngsters (and their folks) had an interesting arsenal of tools to use in the battle with the weeds. Early garden tool catalogs listed hundreds of task-specific tools, including both familiar things such as mattocks, weeders, weed whackers and rakes, as well as such things as dibbers, potato hoes, onion hoes, daisy grubbers, claws, forcers, straigh-teners and garden reels. (We will spend a little time on these more old fashion tools later.)
It was not only the kitchen garden that received the attention of those young gardeners … the medicinal garden had to be carefully tended also. The plants in this garden were very important, as they were the source of Dr. Moms medicines, you know. Yet, nowadays, one would expect to find some of these medicine plants in the kitchen garden.
Take, for example, rhubarb. This plant was used as a medicine by the Chinese since before the birth of Christ. Thanks to a Dr. Fathergill, about the time of the American Revolution, rhubarb was introduced to England. From there, it traveled to America, but was a medicine, not a food, until the mid-1800s.
Then, there were the peppers. First grown in South America, peppers were brought to Europe by Columbus where they were grown in medicinal gardens and used to treat such ailments as colic, fevers, malaria and toothache. Early Geaugas Dr. Mom was more likely to make a salve of peppers mixed with honey than she was to cook them up for supper.
In early Geauga, few gardens, medicinal or kitchen, contained horseradish. This plant, native to both Europe and Asia and grown for about 2,000 years, was considered so powerful a medicine that, except for a few cases, it was only used by doctors.
Thinking of plants that we put in our kitchen gardens today that were not considered food back in early Geauga … there is the eggplant. If you found this plant … which was first grown in South America, then taken to England by explorers and, finally, brought back by English colonists … in a garden in early Geauga, it would be a flower garden. Eggplant was thought to be poisonous and was grown just for its beauty.
Another plant misunderstood in the same way was the tomato. Tomatoes are said to have been grown in ancient Egypt as well as in ancient South America. (The Aztecs are said to have given this plant its name.) Tomatoes were brought to Europe by early explorers and back to America by the English settlers. These plants were considered to be deadly poisonous, but it was fashionable to plant rows of alternating red and yellow tomatoes as decoration.
So, using their dibbers, daisy grubbers, claws and forcers, the children of early Geauga not only tended the kitchen and medicinal gardens, they also took good care of some deadly, but decorative plants we now happily eat.
For information on the events at the Geauga County Historical Society’s Burton Century Village Museum, call 440-834-1492 or visit www.geauga
historical.org.
