The Walled Kitchen Garden
In the melon house, which is heated by a boiler in the potting shed, we grow temperature sensitive plants. The whole wall is hollow and acts as a flue, along which heat and smoke escapes, eventually escaping through a chimney after heating the melon house. The glasshouses are used to grow oranges, lemons and grapes, while less sensitive fruit such as peaches are grown in the shelter of one of the walls.
Work on the garden is stepping up a gear as the soil warms up. Despite the snow earlier this week the potato crop is now safely in the ground and all of the plots are dug. The gardeners are busy potting on and sowing seeds, ready to start planting in the rest of the garden once the danger of late frosts is past. Hopefully the weather will follow a more normal pattern this year and the garden will recover from last year's weather related problems. As part of this year's events we are having a couple of Meet the Head Gardener sessions, one on the Spring Bank Holiday Shearing weekend at the end of May and the other on the the third weekend in October as part of a harvest event. Our Head gardener, Roy Simkins, will be on hand to answer questions and at the Harvest event there will also be cookery demonstrations, using seasonal vegetables to make chutney and preserves.
The brick structures sticking out of the ground in the tea garden are actually the ventilators for the root cellar beneath the dairy, where carrots and parsnips were stored in dry sand. Runner beans were salted in stone jars to last the winter, whilst potatoes were covered in earth and straw in clamps in the garden itself.
On large estates such as Sandwell, some fresh fruit would have been grown throughout the winter in the orangery. The third Earl of Dartmouth was the first president of the Royal Horticultural Society and his son the first president of Birmingham Botanical and Horticultural Society.
Produce from the garden is sold from the shop next to the garden in season.
Email: john.stokes@sandwell.gov.uk