Late spring and summer is the perfect time to stroll through the Kitchen Garden at Kew Gardens. It explores sustainable production processes and has been created on the site of the original Georgian kitchen garden.
Sustainable production processes
Key words at Kew Gardens Kitchen Garden are both crop rotation and polyculture, companion planting, zero use of chemicals, and no dig method. These are all methods that aim to tackle biodiversity loss, food security, climate change and the cost-of-living crisis. All in all, they use permaculture ideas here. The entire garden is a living productive laboratory.
Crop rotation
The staff at the Kew’s Kitchen Garden operates an annual crop rotation. This means they plant families in different beds each year.
Rotating crops creates a moving target for pests and diseases that attack each crop and helps to prevent nutrient depletion in the soil.
Polyculture
Although crop rotation is the buzz word at Kew’s Kitchen Garden, staff combines this approach with polyculture, which is the practice of growing more than one crop species together. Just like in nature!
Polyculture serves multiple functions in the ecology of agriculture, including controlling insect pests, plant diseases, and weeds. Polyculture can contribute to sustainable agriculture as it does not rely on pesticides, requires less tillage, and increases local biodiversity.
Companion planting
To encourage the natural ecosystem, at Kew’s Kitchen Garden they plant ‘beneficial’ and ‘sacrificial’ flowers and herbs to support the crops. This helps gardeners avoid having to use chemicals.
Beneficial plants, like marigolds (Calendula) attract useful insects to the beds. Sacrificial plants, or ‘trap crops’, give the target pest an alternate feast.
No dig method
The horticulturists of the Kitchen Garden use a ‘no dig’ method. Using this approach, you feed the soil from above, as happens naturally with falling leaves, etc. You leave the work to the worms and other creatures to carry the nutrients down into the lower ground. This layer of organic matter also suppresses weeds, and protects beneficial bacteria and helpful creatures that live just below the surface.
Royal Family
The royal residences at Kew had kitchen gardens to feed the Georgian Royal Family. In the mid-1800s, Mr. John Aldridge supervised a foreman, nine men working in the glasshouses, and 15 allocated to other duties including working in the kitchen gardens.
Fruit trees covered the walls and glasshouses much of the ground. A large vinery grew black Hamburgh grapes. There were seven peach houses, two vineries, two cherry houses, three pine stoves and a range of pine pits, a mushroom house, and many frames for vegetables!
Transfer
With the end of royal residency at Kew Palace and a kitchen garden laid out at Frogmore, near Windsor Castle, the Royal Family found they no longer required the kitchen garden at Kew. It was transferred to Kew’s Director, William Hooker, in 1846. Demolishing one of its walls, Hooker filled it with a collection of hardy herbaceous plants.
Dig for Victory
During the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, in World War II, Kew provided training on cultivating food crops, made land available for residents, and created ‘model’ allotments tended to by women gardeners to instruct the public on the best way to produce their own vegetables.
Replanted
It was only as part of a 2015 TV series that the long-lost Georgian kitchen garden was replanted, with heritage varieties and biodiverse crop species. The garden was re-developed an re-opened in July 2022. Your podcaster visited the gardens just a couple of months later, in December 2022, and made her recordings for Discutafel. Note: there’s also a kitchen garden near Kew Palace, which Discutafel hasn’t visited. Yet 😉
Links
- Edible science: Kew’s Kitchen Garden
- What has Kew brought to the plate? (TV series info)
