Kitchen Garden (Memorial Garden)

The kitchen garden at Waters Farm is located outside of the main hearth at the back of the farmhouse and the summer kitchen (a.k.a.  Peddler’s Shop) at the North end of the building.   With thankful guidance from Christie Higginbottom, a Garden Research Historian at Old Sturbridge Village, the garden has been planted with herbs and vegetables that would typically be found in a kitchen garden in the mid-1800’s.  The kitchen garden is currently maintained by Mary Garrett with help from other Waters Farm volunteers.

Kitchen gardens in England during the Tudor period (1485 to 1603) were often small, located close to the house and primarily used for growing medicinal herbs, fruit trees, and vegetables. The Tudors believed in the power of herbs to treat all manner of ailments and thus the kitchen garden was treated as a medicine cabinet.¹ This tradition was passed down through generations to the colonial settlers including the Waters family. The kitchen garden was typically smaller than the vegetable garden that was primarily used for canning fruits and vegetables for the cold New England winters.  Examples of the useful plants in the Waters Farm kitchen garden include dill, thyme, sage, basil, chives, parsley, rhubarb, carrots, radishes, and last but not least – tomatoes.

In the early 1700s, European colonists brought tomatoes to the Americas, where they were primarily grown as ornamental plants in the northern colonies. In 1820, Robert Gibbon Johnson, a prominent citizen of Salem, New Jersey, reportedly became famous for publicly eating tomatoes that he grew in his garden from seeds from South America. At the time, tomatoes were widely considered poisonous, so hundreds of onlookers traveled far and wide to witness the event. By the 1840s, tomatoes became widely recognized for their nutritional value and were even attributed with medicinal qualities. ²

 ¹“Plot-to-plate dining: a history of the kitchen garden”, Savills, May 12, 2023
² “The History of Tomatoes in America”, Grit – Rural American Know-How, April 6, 2015