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All That Was Learned in a Season of Herb Gardening

Published on December 4, 2025December 5, 2025 by In The Vintage KitchenLeave a comment

Adelma did not let us down. In her 1964 book, Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, she assured readers that certain types of herbs would grow in sun-dappled shade gardens. And she was not wrong. Herbs did grow. Flowers did form. And I did clip and cook my way through the summer. Just not quite in the way that I had anticipated.

If you are joining us for the first time, this post is part of a series started back in January 2025, about building an herb garden from scratch inspired by the horticultural wisdom of New England herbalist, Adelma Grenier Simmons (1903-1997). Catch up here for a proper introduction to Adelma and the inspiring gardens that she built at her Connecticut home, Caprilands over the course of the 20th century.

In January, when planning and preparations were underway for the start of our first-ever herb garden at 1750 House, I had visions. As I sketched out the location map of what herbs would go where and which companion plants would best be suited side-by-side, in my mind, the herb garden of summer 2025 would be eye-high. Right in step with the 5-foot tall foxglove success story of past gardening endeavors.

Emboldened by those towering giants of the woodlands that had been grown in the greenhouse from the smallest of seeds, I had visions that the herbs would grow equally tall. I had visions of their delicate petals swaying in the breeze. Of their foliage tinted in all the greens. I had visions that they’d make a home in and around the foxglove and create an undulating palette of soft colors. A cottage collection. A fully filled out bed.

The snow-covered greenhouse in January 2025

While the ground was still frozen and snow-covered, I could see a full garden, busy with birds and bees and butterflies floating here and there. I could see the feathery chervil, the wave of parsley, the white petaled chamomile, the flax, the forget-me-nots, the dill, the lavender, the calendula. When the garden was covered under an ice-slick snow sheet, and I was starting seeds indoors, I had visions of deep summer in the herb garden. Hazy light, hot temperatures, the greenhouse surrounded by a vibrant and verdant utopia racing skyward to meet its peaks. I could see the bee balm on the right, the nasturtiums climbing a trellis on the left, and the foxgloves trying to out-stretch them both. I could see the savory, the sage, the oregano, the thyme creeping and heaping their way around the garden floor. As I collected seed packets in my garden tote in the weak light of winter, I imagined, months later, collecting herbs in a kitchen basket slated for summer meals made possible by the summer garden.

Back in January, bundled up in sweaters and scarves, I could anticipate the warm-weather blog posts. The recording of each new herb as it is unfurled week by week, month by month, all summer long. The sharing of what things looked like, smelled like, tasted like. The chamomile, the dill, the calendula. The mint, the basil, the cumin, the thyme. The unfolding of each new flower, each new leaf, day by day. They’d be blog posts that would practically write themselves, not because of AI (something I never use here on the blog) but because the herbs made it easy under Adelma’s experienced guidance and thoughtful instruction. I had visions.

Wrapping up eight months of gardening experience in one blog post is a lot to ask of a reader’s attention. So, in order not to make this post eighty miles long, I’m going to truncate a lot of what happened during the growing season. This is not an attempt to skirt over the challenges, of which there were many, and only to shine light on the successes. But building an herb garden, as I have learned this summer, is a bit like watching a tree grow minute by minute. Not a lot happens. And to be completely honest, not a lot happened for months.

When the seedlings grew strong and hearty indoors all through cold, snowy, rainy February and March and April, I knew they were off to a good start. The calendula was spilling over the sides of the seed tray on one end, while chamomile was mounding so full and lush on the other end, it was difficult to see the individual cell blocks from which they sprouted.

In May, everything headed out for planting. Optimism was high as all the seedlings were tucked into their pre-planned beds alongside their pre-planned companions. The summer garden visions were swirling with each dip of the spade into the soil. The cilantro next to the parsley, the flax next to the nasturtiums, the bergamot behind the feverfew, the oregano in front of the coleus, the echinacea before the fence. On and on, the digging and planting went all the way around the greenhouse. Three full sides layered in seedlings that would reach graduated heights of up to 5′ feet to match the foxglove. The shortest in front and the tallest in back.

Parsley seedlings adjusting to their new bed.

Once planted, every seedling got its own individually made wire cage for protection from rabbits, deer, squirrels, and other wild creatures that might find a newly planted herb garden especially enticing. For about a week, things were good. The herbs settled in and seemed to be happy in their new spots. The branches of the trees overhead were leafing out, and the sun was doing its dappled dance. The visions were coming to life.

Then the cold snap came. The weather turned wet and winter-like for weeks. Memorial Day weekend was rained out with a nor’easter, not bringing snow, but rain and high winds and 40 degree days. By Mid-June, I was still doing gardening chores wearing a wool turtleneck sweater and jeans.

Despite the unusually cool start to spring, the 22-foot tall Japanese maple unfolded in its normal fashion, but instead of last year’s canopy, it reached an extra 24″ inches in length this year. This sent branches half-way across the greenhouse on one side and further into the front yard on the other side.

This spring… the growth-spurt of the red japanese maple in the top left corner.

By July, a deep shade took over the whole left side of the greenhouse. The seedlings in that bed were the first to disappear. The nasturtiums, long and leggy already at just a month old, were eaten down to the ground in an afternoon’s timeframe. The cilantro, parsley, chives, and flax were next. All consumed by some mysterious creature, neither rabbit nor deer, but something smaller that could fit through the wire cages and snack away. My guess was that it was most likely the work of slugs, cut worms, and caterpillars who had made their presence known in other beds in years past, and who like to eat in the off hours when no one is watching. By the end of July, what was once a tender patch of steadily growing seedlings was now a framework of protective cages and bare dirt, with not an herb in sight.

Luckily though, as an experimental year, I planted herbs in several places around the garden, not just the greenhouse, so that we could see in which areas they grew best with varying lights of shade vs. sun. The reliable foxgloves in the front bed of the greenhouse grew to 5 feet and bloomed in shades of pink, purple, and white.

The foxglove seedlings in the back behind the greenhouse were squashed and trampled over by squirrels enroute to the birdfeeder and eventually were crushed to a papery pulp. The herbs on the right-hand side of the greenhouse (with lighter shade and much more sun-dappled conditions) fared far better but remained short and seedling size for months.

Although this photo above was taken in late June, the plants never really got much bigger than this over the next 60 days. Each formed their own little clump, but never branched out enough for one to meet the other, which was my initial idea in order to create a full garden. The mystery pest got the best of the herbs on the far edges of this bed too… the echinacea, the bergamot, the chives, and the chervil, but left the lemon balm, the oregano, and the feverfew alone. As an herb that symbolizes protection and new beginnings, I immediately loved the fortitude of the feverfew. Planted all around our pup Indie’s headstone, as a way to safeguard her spirit and to mark a new chapter, it was encouraging to see that it was now protecting the neighboring herbs too.

Every week, I kept waiting for something spectacular to happen: for something to catch a growth spurt and shoot up tall. But throughout the entire summer, all the seedlings that had been planted in early spring remained short and compact. Despite the organic compost laid in a thick blanket, despite the weekly waterings, and despite the regular fertilizer feedings, the herbs kept to a mercifully slow schedule. Meanwhile, the rest of the vegetable and flower gardens all around 1750 House flourished.

A small portion of the backyard vegetable garden in late July. This photo includes tomatoes, peppers, basil, corn, nasturtiums, winter squash, melons, beans, kale, artichokes, and collard greens.

In Adelma’s summer chapter of Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, she recommended two options in regard to feeding herbs: a commercially available (mid-20th century) fertilizer containing a 23-21-17 ratio and a homemade version of manure tea. While there are several horse and cow farms in our surrounding area, I have yet to see if any of these farms offer organic manure for sale, so I opted for the latter. The exact makeup of the commercial fertilizer that Adelma had recommended, is no longer available in that specific configuration anymore. I wound up making my own fertilizer combination comprised of organic seaweed, bone meal and banana peel water which was the closest I could get to mirroring her nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium ratio.

Finally, when the end of August approached, a growth spurt occurred. The herbs in the greenhouse bed started spreading out wide, but not high. The tallest herb was the lemon balm, measuring in at 5 1/2 inches in height, about 19″ inches shorter than what it should typically be. So you can see that things were not exactly ideal in this area of the garden, but they were at least improving slightly.

At the end of summer, the feverfew filled out and a perennial foam flower plant was added to replace the forget-me-nots.

Just as the lemon balm and feverfew started fluffing out, the tiniest of forget-me-nots bloomed. It was one single flower of dainty proportions and the the prettiest shade of blue, a color not that common in the garden beds here. As a spreading perennial, it was a hopeful sign that they were establishing themselves. That the herb garden might be turning a corner towards long-lasting success. The photo is not so great, but the flowers really were lovely.

Later in the week, bunnies ate the anemone. The mystery pest came back too and ate the forget-me-nots, flower and all, and then ate the bergamot for dessert.

As a true experimental garden, I didn’t interfere with any of the plants, but just observed their progress, keeping notes, and taking photos on what survived and what didn’t and in what location with what amount of sun. When I sketched out the garden in January, I paired all the seedlings with their most ideal companion plantings based on compatibility, size, structural composition, and color so that everything harmonized and flowed together. When companion planting, there’s the added benefit that these specific pairings “help” one another, whether it’s underground adding additional nutrition via their roots or above ground adding protection or distraction from various pests. This step of the planning process is pretty intensive because many things can’t be planted next to each for lots of varied reasons. Add in additional factors like water, soil, and sun requirements, and this placement-of-the-herbs exercise turns into a puzzle on paper best executed with a pencil and a sizable eraser. It took many days to get the garden plan correctly mapped out over winter. What I didn’t plan for though was Santiago.

Santiago, the twenty-one-year-old wonder cat this summer.

In early September, on a beautiful sunny Sunday, Santiago, our 21-year-old cat, said a peaceful goodbye to life at 1750 House. Maybe nature worked in our favor over the summer leading up to the moment when we laid Santi to rest in the spot in the greenhouse garden where the anemone once stood. It was an ideal new home for Santi. Near his favorite rock with the hollowed out middle that became his outdoor water bowl, it was also close to his pal, Indie, with full view of the bird feeder and the woodlands and all the wild creatures that sparked his curiosity each and every day since he arrived a southern cat in a northern land.

Back in January, penciled in around the anemone were pink and white echinacea, foxglove, lemon balm, parsley, mint, chives, and oregano. Now in reality, in September, Santiago’s inclusion in the garden inspired something different. A new vision. One that transformed this side of the greenhouse into a brand-new kind of garden altogether. Instead of an entire bed filled with herbs with a foxglove end cap, a new celebration garden was coming into light. One that represented joyful memories in the form of plants. One that captured the engaging spirits of our long friendships with a ten pound cat and the most enthusiastic pup on the planet. The foxglove, feverfew, and lemon balm will stay, but in place of adding other herbs, next spring, I’ll be adding flowers and shrubs suited to shade that carry reminders of Indie and Santiago. Instead of a bed for scented herbs, it will become a bed of sentiment, which is not unlike how colonial gardens were built in America in the first place.

Faced with not much time left in the growing season to start something new, the winter offers the opportunity to think about the perfect plant to represent Santiago, this marvelous little friend we’ve known for two decades. I don’t know quite yet what companion will join him, but I do know that it will be a dramatic standout flower amongst the herbs, just like Santiago was a dramatic standout kitty amongst cats.

Two ideas I’m considering at the moment… black peppermint and the black aeonium called Zwartkop, pictured above.

In the other experimental herb garden beds, challenges and triumphs ebbed and flowed with the swell of the season. The second location was a full-sun bed in the front yard that surrounds a 100-year-old maple tree.

The bed was vacant when we moved in, except for three clumps of rusty-red daylilies planted years ago by a previous owner.

The daylilies – a gardener’s joy at 1750 House from year’s past.

To celebrate the full sun location and to compliment the color palette of the daylilies, I planted the whole bed in shades of yellow and orange with a touch of pale pink. Calendula, yarrow, and blackberry lily seedlings were planted between coral bells, sweet potato vines, cosmos, and zinnias.

The calendula were the winners in this bed since they made it to full flower and kept flowering along with the cosmos and zinnia from June to November. The calendula formed little bushes of sticky leaves and multiple flower shoots. Had I planted about twice as many, they would have filled out all the bare spots in the bed completely. The yarrow and blackberry lily took the whole summer to establish themselves, but by September they both sported long leaves, so I’m hoping they’ll over winter with healthy vigor and really take off next year.

The third bed was also planted in full sun, but because of this year’s extending tree canopy, it turned out to be covered by partial shade once all the leaves unfurled in early summer. Since this bed, tends to dry out more quickly, it was the ideal spot for the Mediterranean herbs (lavender, rosemary, thyme, oregano, cumin, and sage) along with winter savory, dill, garlic, chamomile and one brussels sprout added for encouragement and nitrogen sharing. Most everything did well in this bed, except for the garlic which grew lovely, long green leaves but never formed actual bulbs, and the cumin which flopped over in the cold weather of spring and never really rallied after that. Like the greenhouse beds, everything planted here remained small and compact but looked healthy and happy. In August, the chamomile flowered for the first time, sending up two fragile little blossoms. Days later, in the early morning when I came out to water, all eight of the chamomile mounds and the dill were eaten down to nubs.

The last of the herb beds, located on the other end of the backyard from the greenhouse, contained basil and and another batch of nasturtiums. These beds were in partial shade last year, but turned out to be in full sun this year, due to a large tree that fell far back in the woods last autumn. That opened up a bit of a sun spot in the tree canopy overhead that was fortuitously in the direct path of our vegetable beds. Planting seedlings in spring when the trees were still bare, I had no idea this sun spot was going to be available, but it made it a banner year for everything growing in that section of the yard, basil included. Racing right alongside the pepper plants, the basil grew over two feet tall and produced leaves as big as my hand.

The nasturtiums, a reliable favorite for the past four years, thrived in the same way. Grown from seeds I collected from last year’s nasturtium harvest, this was the first time I had tried growing new flowers from the previous year’s stock, a recommendation from my fellow New England Instagram gardening friend, Karen. The vigor of the nasturtiums in this sunny bed, which bloomed and crawled for a full seven months, more than made up for the nasturtiums that were eaten by the mystery pest on the left side of the greenhouse in early spring.

This photo was taken early on in the season, but by October the nasturtiums were climbing all over the squash trellis, our lemon tree, the floxglove, the bush beans and the pea trellis

Their enthusiasm inspired more seed saving adventures. Not only from the nasturtiums again, but also from vegetables we grew this summer and from two native herbs, Joe Pye and Queen Anne’s Lace, collected from a neighborhood park. It’s going to be fun to see how (and if) these will grow here at 1750 House next spring.

Queen Anne’s Lace at our neighborhood park

A field of dreams… hundreds of Joe Pye not far from the Q.A. Lace

The final gardening trial in my experimental year involved starting four different types of herbs again in early September. This time, seeds were started in individual pots and in a raised bed, both placed in full sun locations in the back yard. I chose chervil, parsley, dill, and cilantro to experiment with since these are all cool weather lovers and since all four never made it to maturity in other in-ground areas of the garden. The chervil and parsley were planted separately in small pots, one plastic and one terracotta. The cilantro, dill, and a second batch of chervil were planted side by side in a raised bed that had previously been home to lettuce and mini melons, both of which thrived over the course of the summer.

I was interested to see if these containers and bins made a difference in the overall vigor of the plants and also interested to see what challenges might affect the herbs in this new arrangement. Within a week, all the herbs had sprouted from seed. The chervil in the garden pot made it to flowering stage, but still remained much shorter than its traditionally intended size. The parsley filled out its pot. The trio in the raised bed grew quickly too. All three spread out and up but the chervil and dill remained short and low. The cilantro grew taller and fanned out beautifully, like a bouquet. None of the herbs in the pots or the raised bed were affected by pests.

Raised bed with dill (left), chervil (center), and cilantro (right).

As of this first week in December… there are still green herbs in the garden: in every bed from the greenhouse to the front yard to the backyard. Already tucked in to their winter blankets (aka mounds of leaf mulch surrounding them but not covering them) they made it through their first snow/sleet/ice storm on Tuesday and look just as happy as they did on the days when the temperatures were 50 degrees and sunny. This makes me so hopeful that in starting an herb garden in 2025 with Adelma’s guidance, enough healthy groundwork has been laid for many of these herbs to overwinter and start anew again in 2026.

This experimental year proved to be so valuable in so many ways. Not only did I learn first-hand about the growing conditions for herbs at 1750 House, but I learned about how our landscape changes year by year. I learned that shade is good but sun is better. That parts of the garden need more protection from wildlife. That a sizable list of herbs will have a permanent home in the gardens here going forward. And I was reminded that gardening is a journey. That it takes not just one year, but many years and lots of patience and practice to establish a full, lush and vibrant herb garden.

This project also extended itself way beyond the landscape at 1750 House too. Throughout the course of the year, I connected with several new blog readers from around the globe who are also interested in herb gardening. I visited a very inspiring large-scale herb garden that’s about to celebrate its 30th birthday, and I received a lovely invitation to visit the Coventry Historical Society in Coventry, Connecticut, which houses a small collection of herbs from Adelma’s gardens along with some of her personal artifacts.

So while my winter time visions of early 2025 did not come to life in the exact way I thought they might, the herb garden bloomed in many other ways. Because this was just the starting point of what I hope will become a long-standing garden feature here at 1750 House, stories about Adelma and the herb garden adventures will be continuing on the blog throughout 2026 too. There’s so much more to discuss, including notes on caring for a batch of herbs that were brought indoors to overwinter, recipes from Adelma’s kitchen, a recipe for a homemade salve made from the calendula flowers that grew in the front bed, the neighborhood seed saving experiments, and features on both a trip to the Coventry Historical Society and the 30 year old herb garden. All these stories and more will be coming to the blog over the course of 2026.

In the meantime, our herbal education continues.

Cheers to Adelma for making this garden experience feel like a real experiment. Cheers to all the herbs for teaching us everything we needed to know when it comes to growing new life at 1750 House. And most importantly, cheers to Santiago, who gave us far more than just a mere 21 years together. Long live the garden you’ve inspired.

Mid-June in the Vegetable Garden

Published on June 15, 2025 by In The Vintage KitchenLeave a comment

If I walk out of the back door very quietly on these early, almost-summer mornings, I can usually spot Lily eating grass at the edge of a way too overgrown decades-old daylily bed. Lily, as we came to call her due to her preference for this area of the yard, is a baby rabbit about the size of a teacup. She was born to Lefty, a wild cottontail that lives in our woods.

Lefty came by her name because she holds her left paw in the air whenever she is at rest. Whether that is some sort of injury or just her natural proclivity, we don’t really know, but she gets around great regardless, seemingly unfazed by what, if anything, troubles that part of her leg. Originally, we thought Lefty was a boy bunny because of her big size, but once we realized that Lefty made Lily, we started calling her Lefty Lucy after that sing-song mechanical phrase, righty tighty lefty loosey about tightening screws and bolts. Obviously, Lefty Lucy is not running around the yard with carpentry tools, but she is an important component and a key contributor to the natural health, vitality, and inner workings of the woodlands that back up to our property, so Lefty Lucy seemed fitting in more than one way.

Every year, spring seems to bring on a new set of circumstances and situations to be considered when it comes to how, what, where, and why we are growing food here at 1750 House. Year one, it was learning the capabilities of the greenhouse. Year two, it was tackling the slugs. Year three, it was increasing perennials. Year four, we are learning the wilds.

This is our first spring without Indie chasing all the squirrels, corraling all the chipmunks, and defending us from turkeys and deer, coyotes and foxes, and that one time glimpse of a bear. Indie was not a classically trained working dog, but she had the super smart instincts of her collie/shepherd breeding and was pretty skilled at keeping everything wild at the far perimeter of the property and away from all the garden beds.

When we first moved to 1750 House, in an effort to co-exist in happy harmony with the surrounding wildlife, we taught Indie some loose boundaries. We established an imaginary border for her that separated the yard from the woods and it took her no time at all to understand that the yard was her territory and the woods belonged to the wild animals. This worked pretty well, on both the wild creatures’ side and Indie’s. During the day, the wildlife mostly kept to the woods and the treetops and Indie mostly kept to the yard. At night though, our garden camera showed a different story. While Indie was asleep in the house, the yard was full of critter traffic. This proved both Indie’s effectiveness at day patrol and also nature’s clever way of working around our silly ideas about confined borders. Now, without Indie this spring, I wondered how our property would change when there was no presence of a pup. What would happen to the imaginary boundary? Would the wild creatures reclaim the yard as their own?

As it turns out, wholeheartedly yes. To say that the backyard bloomed with critters and creatures is an understatement. Our woodland deer sightings have tripled in size from two to seven. A pheasant, which in the past was just a one-day-a-year passer-through, spent days in early spring wandering the woods. Last month, a female turkey took up residence in the long grass near the bird feeder for a week. A pair of hawks has chosen a nest spot midway through the woods. Lefty and Lily set up home. And a veritable city of chipmunks and squirrels now keep the yard in a continuous state of rustle and bustle from treetop to underbrush, morning to night.

Turkey sighting to the left of the tree trunk

Not realizing how impactful something is until after it’s no longer there, Indie’s absence raised a question. How exactly will her not being here affect the garden this spring? Will the deer feel free to eat every last tomato? Every last flower? Will the squirrels and the chippies destroy the plantings? Will all of our hard work and time spent seed-starting and sowing, building, and bed designing be in vain?

The vegetable garden, almost fully planted out by the first of May, stopped and started, struggled and rallied, round and round again as temperatures jumped between the low 40s and the high 50s in seesaw fashion all the way into early June. Almost everything that we planted was cool-weather hardy and tolerated the damp, sunless days. But my optimism in planting out the tomato, cantaloupe, and squash seedlings proved to be a bit too ambitious. Not fans of cold, wet weather, all three vegetables succumbed to early blight, root rot and/or a general overall malaise that caused yellowing leaves and drooping stems.

The wildlife didn’t seem to mind the wet weather at all, nor the absence of Indie. Whipping up their own kind of fun, a particularly rambunctious set of squirrel siblings made joyful use of the yard unencumbered by a patrol pup. They chased each other through the canna beds, knocking off fragile tips of newly emerging sprouts. They dug holes all over the garden looking for nuts. They upset roots in the pea patch, the corn plot, the bean bed. With their acrobatic leaps and bounds, dangles and dives, they beheaded sunflower starts, dropped tree limbs onto fragile seedlings from overhead, romped through the wildflower bed, and knocked over many a wire cage protecting nerbs and flowers, fruits and vegetables.

The chipmunks celebrated spring in the garden in their own way. Keen on building subterranean housing, they endeavored to make entry and exit tunnels all over the yard and the garden beds. So far they’ve dug golf-ball-sized holes by the Mediterranean herbs, by the witch hazel tree, by the evergreen saplings, by the Hosta plants.

All this energetic play and home building aside though, surprisingly, so far at least, the deer, the squirrels, the chippies, and the bunnies have been very respectful of the actual garden plantings themselves. The deer win the award for best behaviour and for keeping within their boundaries. But the squirrels and the chippies can’t be scolded simply for playing andf home building. Apart from the antics that uprooted the corn and topped off some of the cannas, I’m happy to say that none of our wildlife neighbors have nibbled or rearranged or broken any of the plants or emerging fruits and vegetables in the garden. As it turns out, Indie might have trained them just enough. Either that or it’s the daily birdseed buffet that keeps everyone full and satisfied enough to leave the vegetables alone.

Despite all the cold, rainy weather and the spirited playground, the late spring garden, although not quite as grown up as last year, is starting to finally make some headway. Here are some photos taken in the last few days…

Windsor fava beans in front and Scarlet Emperor pole beans climbing the wire panel in back.

Buttercrunch lettuce in front and dandelion greens in back.

Silver Queen corn – 2nd sewing. This time in pots to sidestep the squirrels.

Dinosaur kale. Currently at 18″ inches in height, this is the tallest kale plant we have ever been able to grow so far.

Overhead view of the tall kale. Also, the first kale plant that has ever escaped caterpillar and slug damage.

Green Globe Artichokes – currently 23″ inches tall.

Nasturtiums grown from seed harvested from last year’s flowers

Experimental porch pots – mint, sweet potato slips, collard greens and artichokes. The collard green leaves on the right are turning pink from too much rain.

Foxglove – these four self-seeded from last year’s blooms.

The tallest foxglove this year reached 4′ feet 5″inches, about a foot shorter than last year. Maybe the lack of sun and heat made them a little smaller.

Other veggies not yet quite photo-ready include eggplant, pepper plants and the second sowings of tomatoes, honeynut squash, cucumbers, and cantalope. There is lots of information to share about the herb garden growing up too, but in order not to make this post a million miles long, details on that project will come in a separate post later this month.

Even though it is a bittersweet spring due to the absence of Indie, it is lovely to be surrounded by our new menagerie of wild animals. They each bring such personality and interest to the day and to the garden. Nature is a remarkable healer.

From all of us at 1750 House, cheers to the growing season and all the surprises it brings.

Advice from Adelma: How to Create an Herb Garden in Partial Shade

Published on April 27, 2025April 29, 2025 by In The Vintage Kitchen4 Comments

In the words of New England herbalist Adelma Grenier Simmons (1903-1997), “the most difficult garden to maintain is an unplanned one.” If you are joining us on this year’s Greenhouse Diaries adventures, you’ll recall that Adelma is our horticultural teacher, creative muse, and gardening inspiration for 2025 as we embrace her expertise in building and establishing an herb garden here at 1750 House.

Although I’ve never met Adelma, she passed away in 1997, and I’ve never had a chance to visit her beloved Caprilands Herb Farm, I do have several things in common with her that makes me feel like we are kindred spirits. We both purchased 18th-century houses in Connecticut that needed an extra bit of care and attention. We both embraced a desire to create heirloom gardens made from scratch. And we have both indulged our passions for history, cooking, and hands-on gardening.

Adelma’s 18th-century Connecticut home – Caprilands.

Ever since my husband and I moved into 1750 House, I’ve had my mind set on building a proper kitchen garden that includes plentiful bouquets of vegetables, fruit, herbs, and edible flowers. I laid out our initial plans in a 2022 post about colonial kitchen gardens, but as we keep digging and discovering, growing and gathering, year by year, we keep refining and expanding plans to fit our abilities, interests, lifestyle, and landscape. Every year, the garden design plans seem to get better and better.

Adelma Grenier Simmons circa 1935. Photo courtesy of the Hartford Courant, Aug 01, 1935

Always interested in tips and techniques that will make my endeavors more successful, when I first discovered Adelma’s book at a local library book sale last year, I had a feeling I was going to be in the good hands of an expert gardener. This is the 1964 book that inspired the project…

Read more about Adelma and her contributions to horticulture in our first post here.

In Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, Adelma lays out how to build, cultivate, create, design, grow, and care for an herb garden utilizing decades of practical, hands-on knowledge learned over her long, enthusiastic career as a gardener, herbalist, lecturer, and horticultural scholar.

Throughout the entirety of 2025, season by season, I’m taking her words to task and building an herb garden from scratch that I hope will continue to remain a stalwart and sustainable feature of the landscape at 1750 House for years to come. Since this is new gardening territory for me, both literally and figuratively, I thought it would be fun to share, along with my experiences, Adelma’s advice, in case you, too, might be interested in building an herb garden of your own. This way we can all experiment together.

In our first Greenhouse Diaries post of 2025, I introduced Adelma and her gardens at Caprilands, which attracted botanical enthusiasts from all over the world. The info I’ll be sharing here in the series this year, although based on my own Connecticut garden, will hopefully prove useful to all of our ITVK readers around the globe, too, who might face similar challenges when it comes to limited sunlight and space constraints. I’m excited to see how successful we can be using gardening knowledge from a 62-year-old book, and I’m also very interested to see just how bountiful a partial-shade herb garden can be.

There’s no way to find out unless we start, so here it goes. Advice from Adelma back then put into practice by me today.

Step One: Choose A Design and Figure Out What You’d Like to Grow…

Thoughts from Adelma: Whether the herb garden is small or large, it needs to be exquisitely neat and weedless, with wide paths and compact borders, the same plant often repeated to make a good showing. (Page 3)

In keeping with Adelma’s advice, I spent most nights in February and March studying stacks upon stacks of gardening books, in addition to hers, to gather ideas and inspiration from real-life examples – all so that our garden here at 1750 House would not fall into that aforementioned “difficult,” “unplanned” territory. Through the winter, I learned about prairie gardens, dry gardens, meditation gardens, bog gardens, dooryard gardens, shade gardens, kitchen gardens, formal gardens, cottage gardens, cutting gardens, woodland gardens, and native gardens in pursuit of coming up with some interesting layouts. What I kept admiring over and over again in book after book was a traditional square garden with pathways, some sort of architectural feature in the middle, and herbs arranged in a balanced fashion around the edges. A timeless design, I liked its simple and tidy scale, which is very much in keeping with our simple 18th-century colonial farmhouse.

In Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, Adelma also offered a variety of her own designs specifically tailored to herb gardens. There were eight in total, each ranging in theme and aesthetic. Had I the space and the sunlight, I would have replicated this one exactly…

Culinary and Knot Garden Design Layout – Adelma Grenier Simmons, 1964

The one challenge that presents itself at 1750 House is a limited amount of full sun spaces. Basically, we have two areas that receive about eight hours of sun a day and the rest is made up of dappled shade or towards the very back, deep shade of the woodland variety. Not every part of the full-sun area is appropriate for garden beds, so our limited sunshine spots are reserved strictly for growing vegetables and flowers in those areas.

One of our full sun spots is a raised bed that we built from rocks collected from around the property. Pictured growing here are peas, tomatoes, pole beans, zucchini, basil, and spinach from the summer 2023 garden.

While a shady garden is a challenge for growing many types of plants, the thing that first drew me to Adelma’s book last year was that she included a long list of herbs (29 of them) that grow well in sun-filtered shade. This was inspiration enough to start thinking about a new gardening experiment in 2025 to see what was possible in the way of a partial-shade garden using her expert advice.

The only compromise to a somewhat shady garden, Adelma noted in her book, is that some of the herbs might grow taller than they would normally in a sunny location, and that they might not be 100% as flavorful as their sun-bathed counterparts. Tall plants are my favorite kind, and while I am growing these herbs for cooking and, of course, would want them to be as flavorful as possible, I figure it’s best to understand their growing conditions and flavor intensity first in order to see what we can improve later.

Step Two: Determine The Location

Thoughts from Adelma: I think of the “perfect” herb garden as about 12 x 18 feet. Well organized, it will not require back-breaking labor once the soil has been prepared, walks laid, a center motif clearly stated, and borders planted with favorite but often miscellaneous plants set out in orderly beauty. (page 4)

The location of the 2025 perennial herb garden

Eight hours of full sun is ideal for herb gardens, but if that amount of sunlight is not possible when it comes to choosing a site, Adelma at least recommends situating your garden in a well-drained location with a slight slope so that plant roots are not swimming in puddles long after it rains or the garden is watered.

Our greenhouse sits in a southwesterly quadrant in the side yard on a natural slope. It’s bathed in sunlight from October through the end of May, but then, due to tree cover becomes partly shady in the summer. This is not ideal for sun-loving Mediterranean herbs like thyme, oregano, and basil, so they’ll have a designated bed near the veggies up front in full sunlight. But this area around the greenhouse gets all sorts of dappled light throughout the day, and I’ve always envisioned the garden beds in this spot to be full of flowers and native plants.

The 2023/2024 foxgloves on the opposite side of the yard measured between 3′ – 5.5′ feet tall.

There are already a few permanent residents in-ground at the greenhouse – last year’s foxglove starts, two Windflower anemones, a newly established hydrangea, and a burning bush. The burning bush was here when we moved in, and the hydrangea was propagated last summer via a clipping from a friend’s garden. Given how well the foxglove seeds grew on the opposite side of the yard throughout 2023-2024, they’ll be a mainstay in the herb garden too to help attract pollinators and add some overall height to this rather flat patch of ground. Otherwise, it’s a blank canvas to cultivate.

Step Three: Decide What To Plant and Gather Your Seeds…

Thoughts From Adelma: For you, herbs will be green medicines, fragrances, seasoning magic, soft tones and muted colors, textures pleasant to the touch, and names that are good to hear and bear much repeating. (page vi)

Location and personal preference will determine your selection of seeds, of course, and climate will determine your timing of when to plant what where. Since we are focusing on a larger shady herb garden with a much smaller full-sun patch and generally would like to grow herbs for cooking and drying, I followed Adelma’s list for shade-tolerant varieties.

This year our herb garden will include forget-me-nots, feverfew, wild bergamot, lemon balm, flax, dill, basil, nasturtiums, chervil, cilantro, parsley, oregano, echinacea, winter savory, English thyme, German chamomile, sweet peas, chives, sage, rosemary, yarrow, lavender, phlox and two different varieties of calendula. Everything highlighted in bold will go in the shade garden, the rest will be tucked into the full sun spots in the garden bed up front. Half of this list is a new, first-time growing experience for me, which makes this gardening project an exciting one on all fronts.

Step Four: Create a Planting Map

Thoughts from Adelma: Let the herb garden throughout look old, peaceful and nostalgic with quiet colors and soft textures. (page 17)

When it comes to the planting decisions of what goes where, I recommend sketching all this out on paper with a pencil. At this stage, there is a lot of penciling in and erasing out, second-guessing and revising, dreaming and deciding. Color, size, height, light, and soil requirements are all things to be considered as well as companion plant pairings and general overall garden aesthetic, plus any decorative items or accessories you may want to include. After months of fiddling on paper, my garden layout finally came together. Adelma can rest assured now. I have a plan.

Ideally, I’m striving for a cottage-style herb garden that is full, colorful, and graduated in size. The greenhouse will act as the central focal point, the pea gravel between the fence and the greenhouse will act as a pathway and giant field stones will become stepping stones in the garden beds. To make it visually interesting beyond texture and flower shape, I’ve selected varieties in the pink, purple, blue, white and yellow families to create a unifying color palette that ties in shades from the front gardens as well as a bit of symbolism.

In addition to practical how-to instruction, one of the most interesting aspects of Herb Gardening in Five Seasons is that it is also peppered with stories about folklore and symbolism surrounding herbs throughout history. If you communicated in the language of flowers, it is entirely possible to grow a garden full of patience (chamomile), virtue (mint), everlasting love (baby’s breath), good wishes (basil), humility (bluebell), courage (edelweiss), and ambition (hollyhock). For a complete list of flower symbolism, visit here.

This year, I’m incorporating a specific symbol in the garden – several patches of perennial forget-me-nots for one special reason. They are the flowers that symbolize memories of enduring love, lasting love, tender love. They will be planted all around our pup, Indie, who was buried in one of the beds next to the greenhouse last September. Her unexpected death left a big hole in our lives and in our hearts for sure. I still find myself looking down one of the long paths towards the woods, thinking that she’ll come around the corner any minute like she did a thousand times before after a good chase with a squirrel or two. She was such a big presence here at 1750 House, especially in the yard, we wanted to make sure she was forever a part of the property’s history.

Covered in seed pods after a romp in the woods.

It’s so strange to think that exactly one year ago, on a warm spring evening, not unlike the ones we have been experiencing lately, long before we added the wooden fence around the greenhouse, we were experimenting with building a wattle fence. Indie kept us company all evening that night, watching over our endeavors, sitting pretty much in the same spot where she would come to be buried four months later. I like to think that she is still sitting there just like in the photo, watching over us and the greenhouse and the garden. If I learned anything about colonial gardening in America in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was that American garden design is rooted in nostalgia and a longing for what once was. Like Indie, the forget-me-nots will forever be woven into the fabric of the garden from here on out, self-seeding our little secret language of love and friendship year after year.

Step Five: Start Your Seeds

Thoughts from Adelma: The business of planting seeds should be a simple process, as natural as nature. (page 58)

Adelma recommends seed starting outdoors when the weather is appropriately suited, but she also understands the rush and excitement of trying to get a head start indoors or in a greenhouse. Either way, she’s a fan of keeping the germination stage on the slightly cooler side with nighttime temps between 50-60 degrees. She also recommends as much time outdoors in the fresh air as possible to encourage strong, healthy growth.

Since our experiments of trying to grow cool weather crops in an unheated greenhouse this past winter flopped, instead of pulling out the greenhouse’s winter coat of plastic and outfitting it with a heater rather late in the season, I opted to start everything indoors in a closet that has a lot of natural light and a fair amount of sun thanks to a big window in a small space. I kept the room temperature between 55-65 degrees during the whole germination process, and all the seeds sprouted like the magical little champions that they are. For the past month, almost daily (depending on the outdoor temperature), I transported all the seedlings out to the greenhouse where they could capture the light and a little extra balmy warmth generated by the sun before bringing them back in when the temp dropped below 55.

Now that our last frost date has just passed on Wednesday, most of these seedlings will be heading out to the garden within the next week or two. They are a bit smaller in size than if I had started them in the greenhouse over winter with the heater, but like Adelma suggested, this cooler germination method might make them a bit more resilient to fluctuating temperatures as the season gradually warms up and we round the corner into May.

Step Six: Prepare the Garden Beds

Thoughts from Adelma: Work up the soil to a depth of 12 inches using a rototiller or a spade. I recommend three rotillings or diggings: the first to remove the sticks and stones; the second to incorporate well-rotted compost or well-decayed cow manure in soil lacking humus; the third to mix in the garden lime spread on top until the ground is nearly white. (page 55-56)

Home soil acidity test using the baking soda/ vinegar method

It’s important to know the acidity level of the soil you are working with since that will determine if you are going to blend in any additives. Adelma recommends turning over the dirt no less than three times and removing all the sticks and rocks that might be present. If your garden beds need some amending, lime and compost are two great additives that will improve the growth of your herbs and strengthen the soil. Compost can be added anytime of year, but Adelma recommends adding lime in the fall otherwise, it could stunt the growth of the plants if added in spring.

Back in mid-March, I did a home soil acidity test recommended by The Spruce, utilizing the baking soda/vinegar method. I’m not sure how accurate this test is, but apparently, if you have acidic soil, the combination of baking soda, vinegar, distilled water, and dirt will cause the samples to really bubble up. Not much happened during my test…

From what I’ve gathered so far, our soil at 1750 House is fairly neutral and, if anything, leans toward a slight acidity, which most plants love. So I’m not adding lime this year. But we did order four yards of organic compost from a local nursery.

Each garden bed received four inches of fresh compost. I’m hoping that will be enough nutrients to start the seedlings off on a good footing. Later in the season, depending on how well everything grows up, I might also add in a seaweed fertilizer and some bone meal. But for now, we’ll see how everything grows in this next month or two before anything else is added.

Step Seven: Enlist Your Helpers

Thoughts from Adelma: “A pleasant summer sound is the hum of bees above a flowering bank of thyme. It is truly the bee’s plant…” (page 67)

Other than a few mentions here and there, Adelma doesn’t discuss the benefits of wildlife much in Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, but as I learned from reading all those gardening books over winter, pollinators depend on all sorts of herbs to help get them through their seasonal travels. Likewise, the herbs depend on them to grow and thrive.

The same goes for the birds. I read recently that the best pest control you can have for your garden is an ample assortment of wild birds. A pair of nesting sparrows alone can eat up to 30,000 insects a week. Just the kind of appetites you want to encourage to help eradicate an overabundance of aphids, scale, beetles, grubs, and a whole host of other winged things that would normally munch on your plants.

We’ve been feeding the birds ever since 2022 here at 1750 House, but last fall we added two new bird feeders and built three new nest boxes this spring to keep encouraging our wild flock. Within a week of putting the nest boxes up, all three houses were occupied by sparrows. It’s so fun to watch them claim their new homes and poke their heads out of the entry holes each morning.

Besides the sparrows, our yard has quite an active bunch of cardinals, mourning doves, chickadees, blue jays, woodpeckers, titmice, nuthatches, bluebirds, juncos, robins, hawks, crows, and occasionally a wild turkey or two. In a future post, later this summer I’ll introduce you to Red, our most sociable cardinal who waits every morning at the feeder for me along with Audi, the one-eared squirrel.

A new batch of hand-painted garden signs to welcome the 2025 season

As of today… the sweet peas are up, the nasturtiums have been transplanted, and the cilantro and echinecea seeds are just starting to sprout under their protective wire covers. My husband built an array of these wire covers in all different sizes and shapes to keep the birds and squirrels from eating the seeds that are directly sown. So far so good.

The preface of Herb Gardening in Five Seasons is titled Herbs are Forever – And For All. I love that turn of phrase. It is such a fitting way to describe the appeal, universality and allure of these tried and true garden reliables. No matter where you go in the world, you can find an herb garden and someone who tends it. Perhaps that is why they are such enduring components to the garden landscape. In the same way, Adelma’s mark on herb gardening has endured too. Long after her death, memories of the beautiful gardens she created at Caprilands still find a place in contemporary conversation. I hope our little herb garden at 1750 House has such a lasting effect. A 275-year-old house deserves the pretty partnership of a timeless garden to travel the years with.

Adelma Grenier Simmons in her later years, as happy as can be amongst her garden paradise.

“Fortunately, the study of herbs touches all aspects of our lives, at all ages, under all conditions. What was rigorous physical experience in youth and middle age may become an absorbing study for the armchair gardener, who halted in activities by age or physical handicap, can still enjoy a fascinating world of legend and history.” Adelma Grenier Simmons, 1964

In the next installment of the Greenhouse Diaries, we will make a spring recipe straight from Adelma’s own kitchen and check in on the seedlings to see how they are growing. In the meantime, cheers to Adelma, to her helpful guidance, and to the act and art of growing a garden.

The Greenhouse Diaries 2025 : Meet Herbalist Adelma Grenier Simmons – Our Inspiration for the Year

Published on January 31, 2025 by In The Vintage Kitchen2 Comments

Snow is on the ground, freezing rain is in the forecast, and our first seedlings have just sprouted. It is officially time. The Greenhouse Diaries are back for a whole new year of growing adventures, experimental gardening, and wit and wisdom from some of the most interesting gardeners of the past three centuries.

If you are new to the blog, this series started in December 2022 as a way to chronicle our horticultural endeavors as we build up the heirloom gardens surrounding 1750 House with the help of our 4’x6′ polycarb greenhouse.

With two full growing years behind us and lots of trial and error, we are now at the stage where we pretty much understand the general garden design and layout we want to achieve, the capabilities we are working within, the location of beds, the soil, the sun, the shadows cast by the tree canopies, and the wildlife that both helps and hinders some of our ultimate goals.

Each year, we establish a theme in January based on inspiration from a vintage garden book that helps set the direction for the next twelve months and organizes the project list. While the overall garden plan has changed quite dramatically since we first moved in in the spring of 2022, the Diaries have helped define and redefine expectations, capabilities and desires.

First bouquet from the greenhouse – winter 2023.

In Year One, hot off the trail of sixteen years of city and country gardening in the hot and humid South, we were keen on testing the greenhouse’s ability to grow an array of vegetables, herbs, and flowers during our first New England winter, all inspired by the writings of Katharine Sergeant Angell White and her 1977 book Onward and Upward in the Garden.

In Year Two, we embraced perennials native to the East Coast that would provide a pleasant aromatic scent to the garden across all four seasons, thanks to the 1977 book The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell.

While we gleaned valuable information in both years and grew the garden successfully in many exciting directions, last year’s theme presented so many challenges that it made us rethink the perfumed garden altogether. In place of twelve new additions to the garden, we only added five… three bare-root witch hazel trees, a patch of perennial viola flowers, and a pot of Nemessia on the porch that slugs eventually enjoyed all the way down to tiny little nubs. The idea of planting an aromatic garden, while fun in theory taught us a lot about the realities of working within the confines of a Northeastern landscape. As we have come to learn, gardening successfully in New England means recognizing and embracing the seasonality of the landscape. And that means in winter, the natural world rests.

While it is not a problem to acquire twelve aromatic plants in a year, it was difficult to acquire them on a month-by-month basis in keeping with the Diaries’ month-by-month writing/gardening schedule. We discovered last year that most growers with aromatic inventory won’t ship to our neck of the woods until late spring or after early fall to ensure a successful growing experience. Our own favorite local nursery closes down completely from the end of December to mid-March and larger garden retailers in our area start to remove outdoor plant inventory by the end of July.

This left a limited window of opportunity to plant a dozen new varieties which didn’t match up well with a month-by-month writing schedule. That being said, The Fragrant Year was set aside a third of the way through 2024 and the greenhouse became a holder for a hodge podge of succulents, herbs and experimental seedlings for the rest of the year. Too fun of an idea to let it go, we haven’t seen the last of the Fragrant Year project though. It will come back with a more appropriate planting schedule at some point in the next few years. In the meantime, the now-established witch hazels and violas planted last spring will represent the scented garden for now as we turn our attention to our new, much more accessible garden project for 2025.

January 2025 flower buds on the witch hazel

This year, our gardening endeavors involve building a perennial herb garden with the help of Adelma Grenier Simmons (1903-1997) and her book Herb Gardening in Five Seasons published in 1964.

Adelma was considered a definitive authority on herb gardening in the United States during the mid-to-late 20th century. A Vermonter by birth, in 1929 at the age of 26, Adelma purchased a rundown 18th-century farmhouse on fifty acres in Coventry, Connecticut with the idea that she and her parents would start a dairy farm selling cheese and butter made from their own herds of cowsa and goats. She called the farm Caprilands, which literally means goatlands in Latin.

Adelma Grenier Simmons in 1935. Photo courtesy of the Hartford Courant August 01, 1935. Photo by John Haley

Soon discovering that running a dairy while also maintaining a full-time job as an international buyer for a Massachusetts department store left little time to do both jobs well. Adelma began to rethink her farming dreams. Inspired one day by a walk up to a rocky hill on her land, feeling the sun’s warmth on her face and watching it move across a patch of scrubby terrain, Adelma’s thoughts turned to recollections of earlier travels to Europe and the beautiful herb gardens that decorated a similar landscape. An idea struck.

By the early 1950s, the Caprilands Herb Farm was well established and Adelma was on her way to becoming the foremost authority on herb gardening in America. Welcoming visitors from around the world, Adelma gave tours of the grounds and the gardens. She also taught classes, organized workshops, and hosted teas and luncheons at Caprilands for anyone interested in learning more about growing, cultivating, cooking, and collecting these multi-faceted plants.

1970s postcard of Adelma’s 18th century Connecticut home – Caprilands

Eventually, Adelma became known as America’s “First Lady of Herbs” and was credited with igniting the country’s interest in herb gardens. In addition to educating the public at home, Adelma also lectured extensively around the country, into her late 80s, inspiring generations of gardeners with her knowledge of herbal horticulture, history, and symbolism. The gardens at Caprilands contained between 200-300 different varieties of herbs at any given time and from them, Adelma preserved stems and stalks in dried bouquets and living wreaths, saved seeds, seasoned food, and wrote extensively on their presence in horticulture, history, cooking and decorating. Her farm became both a learning center and a bustling business spreading the joy of herb gardening around the world.

Adelma Grenier Simmons photographed in October 1984 by Don Heiny. Photo courtesy of Find A Grave.

When she passed away in 1997 at the age of 93, Adelma’s estate went into probate and got tangled up in legal matters preventing her ultimate wishes of turning the property into an educational resource center permanently open to the public. The legal battles, which lasted over two decades, eventually resulted in Adelma’s house being sold, dismantled, and relocated to upstate New York where it was rebuilt for a private buyer.

1970s postcard of one of the 30 different herb gardens at Caprilands

While Caprilands and the incredible herb gardens that surrounded it are now a thing of the past, thankfully Adelma was a prolific writer who shared much of her knowledge and enthusiasm for herbs in over four dozen books and innumerable pamphlets. In the 1960s, Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, kicked off her writing career. Covering spring, summer, fall, winter, and Christmas (the fifth season), Adelma’s book tackles just about every bit of information you would need to start, maintain, and build upon an herb garden of your own.

Garden layouts, botanical drawings, black and white photographs, recipes, and poetry fill the pages of Herb Gardening in Five Seasons while also providing detailed information on seventy-seven different plants, an herbal dictionary, and a pronunciation guide. One of the things I love most about Adelma’s book are the lists in the back that organize groupings of herbs by name according to specific situations… Herbs for Bees, Herbs for Dry Soil, Herbs for a Meditation Garden, Herbs to Grow as Hedges, Herbs for Tall Accent, Herbs for Sun-Filtered Shade, etc. It’s that latter list that interests me most since the majority of the garden spaces at 1750 House are bathed in partial shade throughout most of the peak growing months.

When I first discovered Herb Gardening in Five Seasons at a local book sale, a woman next to me asked if I had heard of Adelma. When I said that I had not, she proceeded to tell me a story about the time she went to a luncheon at Caprilands and about how Adelma had served the biggest salad bowl she had ever seen stuffed to overflowing with nasturtium flowers freshly picked just hours earlier. The woman said it was the prettiest salad she had ever seen, let alone eaten. Right then, I knew the book was bound for life and library at 1750 House. Thinking about how well the nasturtiums have grown each summer in the gardens here and the fact that her book includes not only gardening advice but also recipes too, it seemed like Adelma was the perfect teacher to assist us this year in our efforts to create a permanent herb garden.

It wasn’t until after I was home that I noticed that Adelma had inscribed the book to a previous owner. To Carol, it reads… May herbs enrich your life and bring you joy for all seasons. Adelma Grenier Simmons.

Here it was. The final nudge from Adelma to get the garden growing. Over the next twelve months, I cannot wait to share her insight, wisdom, and instruction through our herb gardening adventure. In the next Greenhouse Diaries post, I’ll share the layout and location of the herb garden and the list of herbs that will get us started, courtesy of Adelma’s helpful garden guide and companion planting lists.

In addition to Adelma’s final wishes to turn Caprilands into a teaching facility and an educational resource, she also fancied the idea of creating a network of other herb farms around the country that shared a like-minded enthusiasm for herbal outreach and education. Since Adelma’s wishes for her beloved gardens at Caprilands never came to fruition, it is nice to be able to honor her here in our herb garden adventure at 1750 House. Perhaps in our own small way, it’s part of the start of the cross-country garden network that she envisioned so long ago.

Cheers to a whole new year of gardening, to Adelma for sharing her knowledge of herbs, and to the greenhouse who is proving to be a wonderful teacher herself.

The Flavor of Catching Up and a Vintage Homemade Ketchup Recipe

Published on July 12, 2024 by In The Vintage Kitchen2 Comments

One minute it was mid-April. The witch hazel had just arrived in the mail. A newly planted pot of Nemesia was fluffing out on the front porch, ready for its photo shoot and its spotlight feature in the Fragrant Year series. The collard greens, beets, peas, and kale were growing up in the garden. The second-year foxglove was throwing out layer after layer of leaves, mounding up like bushes. The shop was a flurry of activity – filling and emptying, filling and emptying with stories, heirlooms, and recipes, from kitchens, cooks, and history past.

The next minute it’s the 4th of July. I’m making a vintage summer recipe for the blog. The humidity has set in and the slugs have returned. The witch hazel has grown 6″ inches. Tomatoes and corn have replaced the kale and collards in the garden. The Nemesia has outgrown its pot twice. The summer vegetable garden has been planted. The autumn pumpkin seedlings have started to flower. And the shop is filling and emptying, filling and emptying again with a season’s worth of new old stories.

How did three months pass so quickly? How did we go so fast from collards at the end of one season to corn at the beginning of another? How did all the trees leaf out, and the wildflowers bloom on the side of the road, and the strawberries appear and then disappear? How did Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, and Fourth of July fireworks pass without a single reflective moment to stop and share here on the blog?

So many interesting stories, gardening adventures, and heirloom gatherings have filled up those past three months. So many things I wanted to share, slated to share, photographed to share. But somehow, the days whizzed by. One by one, ten by twenty, thirty by sixty. All to wind up here at ninety days with nothing new but last April’s post.

Long stretches of absence like this are rare here on the blog and it can be challenging to start back up again after such an extended time away. Fortunately, after much stewing about how to return and what to say, Eleanor Roosevelt breezed into the Vintage Kitchen last week and offered up a bit of wisdom.

“If life were predictable, it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

This quote is attributed to Eleanor’s 1937 autobiography, This is My Story, which is now included on my list of books to read. Somehow Eleanor’s wise words wound up describing the very circumstance that defined the last three months. It was unpredictable. It was full of flavor.

The greenhouse got a fence. The hollyhocks bloomed. The 1750 House cupola was rebuilt. The vegetable garden was harvested for spring. And then it was re-planted for summer. The holidays were celebrated. The tomatoes climbed. Tulip bulbs were ordered for fall. Vegetable seeds were exchanged. A wild pheasant stopped by to say hello. Friends and family came to visit. Recipes were cooked. Heirlooms were collected. And after a two year wait, the foxgloves flowered for the first time.

The activities were plentiful, and each day different in routine and rhythm. Just like Eleanor said… they were full. In that spirit of busy activity, I thought it would be fun to do a quick recap via photos of what’s been going on in the kitchen, the garden, and the shop over the past three months so that we could wind our way back towards the present to share a new vintage recipe so perfectly suited for the mood and the moment. This is a catch-up post of the past three months with a 1960s recipe for homemade ketchup attached at the end. Catching up with ketchup, if you will.

A Look Back…

Two of the most exciting 1750 House renovation projects were the rebuilding of the 1930s cupola which had been chewed to pieces by squirrels long before we moved in, and the addition of a long-awaited fence around the greenhouse. The cupola was rebuilt using old tools and old techniques and squirrel-proofed so that the weathervane horse could freely run with the wind once again…

The greenhouse fence adds some dimension to the side yard and forms the backdrop for a cottage garden that will eventually include shrubs, perennials, climbing flowers, and a permanent herb garden.

In early May, a wild pheasant came to visit…

In early June, a prehistoric-looking Dobson fly appeared one morning in the greenhouse…

And at the end of June, we saw our first butterfly of the season, a Red-Spotted Purple dipping and diving around the garden path and raised beds.

The witch hazel, from February’s Fragrant Year post, arrived in the mail in mid-April with not one bare root specimen but three, even though I just ordered one. All three trees were planted and named (Hazel, Harriet and Hilda – a nod to the original H-hinges inside 1750 House) so that I can track and record each one’s progress. All was well for a couple of months with each leafing out and growing taller, but sadly, Hazel got some sort of blight and lost all her leaves. I’ve left her in the ground in hopes that she recovers, so we’ll wait and see what happens over the next few months. In the meantime, Hilda and Harriet are doing great. In three months, they’ve each grown 6″ inches and have sprouted numerous sets of leaves. If they keep that growth rate up through the fall, by the end of 2024 they should be reaching about four feet in height.

Scenes From The Garden…

Cherry Tomatoes (Variety: Sun Gold Pole)

Stories From The Shop…

Every bit of kitchen history is always interesting, but every season there are a few stand-out stories that capture quite a bit of attention. These are some of the latest encountered over the past three months. Clicking on the photos will take you directly to the shop item that inspired further storytelling…

The lives and adventures of early 20th-century husband and wife explorer team – Zetta and Carveth Wells

Long Island’s Roosevelt Raceway, a horse racing mecca from the 1940s-1980

.

The prize-winning pattern of a 1943 amateur design contest held by the Vogue Mercantile Institute in collaboration with Homer Laughlin.

The story of Perdita and the Charleston restaurant she inspired.

The 1930s baking invention of Cale Schneider.

Just last week, we debuted our own custom-designed ITVK gift wrap. The floral pattern was inspired by a vintage print that I found in a South Carolina antique shop in 2003. That print, along with an antique platter also found that day, launched a passion for collecting vintage and antique heirlooms and laid the groundwork for what would eventually become In The Vintage Kitchen.

This was a packaging project I first started dreaming about during the 2020 COVID lockdown. I picked the colors in the bouquet to represent the brand colors of the Vintage Kitchen long before I ever knew that a red house built in 1750 and surrounded by garden beds of orange lilies awaited in my future. The floral bouquet was resized, recolored, and brightened up to give it a more modern feel by a wonderfully talented graphic designer based in Austria. I think it’s the perfect blend of history, sentiment and fate. All purchases from the shop are wrapped, and complimentary, so if you find an heirloom you love, it will arrive packaged up in this…

That Was Then, This Is Now…

Now that we are all caught up, let’s ketchup. This recipe comes from the 1961 New York Times Cookbook, edited by one of our favorite Vintage Kitchen cooks, Craig Claiborne. Since it’s condiment season I thought this would be a fun one to feature for a couple of reasons.

Just like mayonnaise, I have always heard that a homemade version is much tastier than any store-bought variety. And since there aren’t really that many different types of ketchup available at the market, this recipe will add a little something unique and unexpected to your summer cookouts. Also, at some point in the summer when harvests are abundant and overwhelming, I always find it helpful to have a collection of recipes at the ready that require big batches of tomatoes so that nothing goes to waste. This recipe definitely calls for that.

This week we are making Spicy Tomato Ketchup from scratch using garden ingredients and a handful of pantry staples. The spice in the title comes from a small amount of cayenne pepper which can be omitted completely if you don’t like a little extra zip. But just to clarify this is a true ketchup, not a hot sauce, so if you are not a lover of hot and spicy foods, don’t worry, it won’t set your mouth on fire. Milder than Tabasco sauce, I’d rate the spice factor of this ketchup at about a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the hot, hot, hot side.

The recipe calls for 12 pounds of tomatoes which yields about 6-8 pints of ketchup. When writing the cookbook, Craig Claiborne assumed that you would make a big batch, seal everything in sterile jars, and add it to your pantry collection for later consumption. Clearly, 8 pints is a lot of ketchup and not everyone is a home canner, myself included. I cut the recipe in half and then in half again and wound up with about 1 cup of ketchup after starting with 3 lbs of tomatoes. That size batch is shelf-stable in the fridge and is just the right amount for a few servings, and a few slatherings. Having said that, I’m posting the original recipe in case you are a ketchup lover and a canner too. This way, the measurements and portion sizes can be customized to your own needs. As for timing and difficulty, it takes a few hours to make this recipe, but it’s a very easy process. The bulk of the cooking time is hands-off while you wait for the tomato puree to reduce to a ketchup-like consistency.

Spicy Tomato Ketchup

Recipe from 1961 edition of The New York Times Cook Book. Makes 6-8 pints

12 pounds ripe tomatoes

1 cup chopped onion ( I used Vidalia onions)

1 tablespoon salt

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon black pepper

1/2 teaspoon celery seed

1 teaspoon mustard seed

1 tablespoon whole cloves

1 stick cinnamon, broken

1 1/2 cups vinegar

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Remove the seeds before you cook the tomatoes.

Core and chop the tomatoes. Cook the tomatoes and onions together until soft (about 20-30 minutes) and then press the mixture through a fine sieve.

The cooked tomato and onion mixture before it is pressed through the sieve.

The tomato and onion mixture after it has been pressed through the sieve (large bowl).

Return puree to heat and cook until reduced by one-half, stirring occasionally. Combine spices in cheesecloth or a tea strainer and set in the puree. Add the rest of the ingredients and stir.

Continue cooking uncovered to desired consistency (about 2-4 hours depending on the amount of tomatoes used). Remove the spice bag. Seal ketchup in hot sterilized jars or refrigerate in an air-tight container if making a smaller batch.

With a thick consistency, a sweet taste and a peppery bite this homemade ketchup was full of delicious, tangy flavor. A little bit darker in color than our usual brand of store-bought ketchup, the best way to describe the difference between these versions is to compare them side by side.

The store-bought ketchup was not as sweet and it tasted tinny like canned tomatoes with a mineral undertone. The homemade ketchup was sweeter, brighter, and more evenly balanced in flavor. The store-bought version was candy-apple red in color and smoother in consistency. The homemade version, although not thin, was more sauce-like in texture, similar to a steak sauce or a barbeque sauce, and slightly more opaque. The last defining difference between the two was the spice factor, which of course was the unique ingredient in the homemade version.

Interestingly, the store-bought ketchup contained very similar ingredients to the homemade version… organic tomato concentrate, organic sugar, organic vinegar, salt, organic spices, and organic onion powder – not too different from the ingredients we used. But like anything made from scratch in small batches, as opposed to something made en masse in a factory, you can’t beat fresh, homemade, whole-food flavor.

You might suspect that ketchup would have an origin story that begins in Italy, given the country’s love of homegrown tomatoes and homemade sauce. But actually, ketchup is steeped in centuries of Chinese food culture and dates all the way back to the 1700s when it was first used as a way to ferment and preserve fish. At that point in time, there were no tomatoes involved and it was not red in color. It was thin and watery and looked more like soy sauce. It wasn’t until the early 1800s in America that tomatoes in ketchup made their debut.

Henry John Heinz (1844-1919) made ketchup a famous American condiment in the 1870s after years spent first experimenting with horseradish. By the 1960s, when this Spicy Tomato Ketchup recipe was published in The New York Times Cook Book, Heinz Ketchup was a worldwide favorite bringing in over $300 million dollars a year in global sales.

It’s interesting to think that in the dawn of convenience foods (aka the mid-20th century), when saving time in the kitchen was important to busy families, and the exciting novelty of pre-packaged foods was all the rage, that Craig Claiborne was still interested in adding a homemade ketchup recipe to his cookbook. When 1960s home cooks could have easily run out and purchased an already prepared bottle of trusted, reliable Heinz Ketchup and called the day done for a lot less time and expense, it’s interesting that the New York Times treated this ordinary, taken-for-granted, always-around condiment with a little more reverence.

In preparing this recipe, I now understand that ketchup is an elevated culinary sauce, perfected over centuries. It’s not just something you slather on your burger or your hot dog or dip your french fries into without thinking. It shouldn’t be something you buy in bulk at the grocery store with the same level of enthusiasm as buying a roll of paper towels. Homemade ketchup requires time and a unique blend of ingredients to bring out all the flavors. It’s a condiment worthy of attention and of appreciation. When it is homemade, it offers a gourmet flourish to your summer grill menu and adds a bit of zesty flavor to your palate and your plate. There is also something freeing about knowing that, should we ever run across The Great Tomato Ketchup Shortage of 2021 again, we could easily whip up a batch ourselves if we needed to. I guess this means that I need to learn how to can. So that I can go ahead and make those eight pints and have a reserve in my pantry. This homemade recipe will spoil you in that way. It will turn your attention away from all those other commercial ketchups. There is truth in the saying. Yes, homemade ketchup tastes better than a store-bought version.

I hope you love this ketchup recipe just as much. As always, if you make it please share your thoughts in the comment section below. And if you’d like to experiment with another homemade condiment, try this wonderful Danish mustard recipe here.

Cheers to Craig, Eleanor and tomato growers all over the globe for adding so much flavor to our summer days.

Growing A Fragrant Year: Violas For March and Part of April

Published on April 13, 2024April 13, 2024 by In The Vintage Kitchen4 Comments

{A Fragrant Year is an ongoing series shared throughout 2024 highlighting twelve fragrant plants, trees, flowers, shrubs and herbs added to the New England garden landscape, month by month, surrounding a house built in 1750. This series was inspired by the 1967 garden book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell. If you are new to the blog, catch up with our first introductory post here.}

March blew into the kitchen in a flurry of raindrops, wind chills and the occasional threat of one more snowstorm. My favorite local nursery didn’t open for the season until mid-month, and as we are quickly learning, not much happens in New England on any sort of instant gardening level until the beginning of April. So this month, there will be two fragrant garden posts – one for March and then the other for April so that we can keep on track for a full year of fragrant gardening month by month.

When our local garden nursery did open its doors for the season, a much-anticipated event in my world, a sea of pastel colors unfolded rack by rack, tray by tray, row by row. Aside from all that lovely Easter egg-shaded splendor, the thing that immediately greeted everyone at the door was the unexpected scent of warm honeycomb. This was not a fragrance brought on by bees zipping in and out of the flower pallets nor by close-by hives where they like to linger. This was the scent of violas, our featured fragrant flower for the month of March and part of April.

Dainty and delicate, a smaller but more robust version of their bigger blossomed offspring, the pansies, violas have always been a flower I passed by in previous years because of their size and what I thought was a sort of a hum-drum, everyday ordinariness. But when seeing them altogether, in masses of bright purples, oranges, lavender blues, crimson reds, lemon yellows and perfect whites they were a bright sight for winter-weary eyes. I also never realized what an incredible fragrance they carry, but after reading all about them in Helen and Leonie’s book, The Fragrant Year they were definitely worth a second look. “The fragrance reaches out to snare you into stopping, marveling, ” wrote Helen and Leonie back in 1967. Indeed.

Technically considered an herb, violas are the parent plant of pansies, and though while smaller in size, will put out more buds and blooms in the late winter/early spring months than pansies. They are also a heartier plant that is able to withstand freezing temperatures and snowy landscapes, an ideal match for our New England climate, but also for other areas around the country that experience cool weather temperatures during springtime too. Ideal temperatures for growing these ladies are 40 degrees at night and 60-70 degrees during the day.

“The end of the growing season is the beginning for violas since short cool days are needed to trigger bud formation,” write Helen and Leonie. That means that when you plant violas, you actually encourage two growing seasons from them each year – one in fall and one in spring. And since they come in an array of colors beyond the most traditional (lavender), they can complement most garden palettes. Here are just a few color choices within the viola family…

First discovered in the Pyrenees, violas have been part of kitchen gardens for centuries. Used in making tea, wine, and liqueurs, they are also members of the edible flowers club. Not only do they add an interesting slightly sweet flavor to salads, cheese, butter and desserts but they also add beauty and color to the plate as well. And their contributions to everyday life just don’t stop at the kitchen either. Throughout history, violas have also been used in making perfume and medicinal salves since they contain both anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial properties. These flowers might be mini in size but they certainly are mighty when it comes to usefulness.

I came home with a variety called Penny Lane (a hybrid of the Viola cornuta family) which comes in a mix of shades ranging from deep red to white and yellow. The more you plant, the greater the scent of course, but it’s amazing to think that even one small plant can carry what seems like an entire perfume factory in just a few petals.

We have French botanist, Rene Louiche Desfontaines (1750-1833) to thank for describing and naming this variety of viola. He did this in the late 1700s, which makes them a very age-appropriate choice for 1750 House. That was an unexpected surprise learned after I brought the Penny Lanes home, but now that they are firmly nestled under a crab apple tree, tucked in between woodland border beds of daylilies and foxglove starts from last year (see more of those below) they seem quite fitting.

My eight plants might not be much of an exuberant site at the moment, but one of the fun things about violas is their ability to self-seed on their own. In theory, fingers crossed, in the next couple of years, we’ll see violas popping up all over the woodland areas surrounding this small bed that will add color, interest and most importantly, fragrance to the early spring and late autumn landscape. We’ll catch up with them again in fall to see how this set is doing and to see how much they’ve grown over the course of the next seven months.

Meanwhile, here are some other sights and updates from the greenhouse diaries of March and part of April 2024…

New pathways around the greenhouse and the yard are underway. We’ve lined each one with a wattle border using invasive vines cut down from the woodlands that were taking over some of the tree canopies. Landscaping bushes, a short fence around the greenhouse, and more planting beds are coming soon to that area.

Do you remember the first planting of the foxglove seedlings from last year? This is them now after being planted in the garden last May. The one thing that is difficult to find online these days is a visual example of what foxglove, started from seed, should look like year one just as a green plant before it flowers in year two. There are plenty of photographs that show foxglove fully flowered out in year two but none taht I could find at least of how the plants should look in their first year. I’m so happy to share these photos because hopefully it will become a helpful reference for other gardeners too. As I discovered, year one foxglove plants (leaves only) are beautiful.

In the first year, they grow to about the size of a large head of lettuce and stay green year-round including during the winter – even in below-freezing temperatures and snow. We planted ours on the edge of the woods in an area that we will continue adding to year after year, so that eventually the woodlands bordering the edge of the yard will be lush and green and full of foxglove. Much prettier than looking at bare patches of dirt.

The collard greens and the peas have been planted in their springtime beds…

The pea patch also increased in size to three 8 foot rows. The more peas the better.

And the brocolli is now 12″ inches tall. The beets greens are growing.The kale is just right at 6″ inches now and Liz has a lemon with triplets on the way.

An industrious pair of black-capped chickadees pecked their way through a post on the back porch of 1750 House. What’s particularly fascinating is that this post is not made of wood but of a plastic composite that holds up one corner of the 1990s addition. The post will eventually get replaced with real wood, but for now, the chickadees seem more than happy to call it home. And we are more than happy to have these cute little songbirds as neighbors. Not only do they sing their way through the day but they also feast on a host of insects that can be problematic in the garden including the dreaded scale bug, which we had troubles with last year.

And just in time for publication of this post, something arrived in the mail…

Could it be the witch hazel from February’s Fragrant Garden post?! Stay tuned for the second half of April’s Fragrant Garden series coming soon. In the meantime, cheers to the cheerful viola. Happy Spring!

Growing a Fragrant Year: February’s Helpful Hazel and the Greenhouse Diaries

Published on February 29, 2024February 29, 2024 by In The Vintage Kitchen8 Comments

Witch hazel illustration by Leonie Bell circa 1960s

With a scent ranging from sweet yeasted bread to bubblegum, the centuries-old Hamamelis virginiana (aka the common witch hazel) kicks off Month #1 in this year’s Greenhouse Diaries series. In case you missed our introductory post last month, our theme for 2024 is a Fragrant Year, where we’ll be sharing twelve months of perfumed plants, flowers, and trees that have the power to add a calming, aromatic atmosphere to gardens big and small.

Inspired by the 1967 book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell and their idea that planting a scented garden benefits not only one garden but many surrounding it, it’s an exciting project that I hope will bring some discussions and awareness about the power of plants and the perfume they provide.

Acting as guinea pigs and testing fields, the greenhouse and gardens of 1750 House are the experiment stations to see how Helen and Leonie’s suggestions work in our northern landscape. Although we are gardening in New England (Zone 6) and striving for a natural and historical outdoor environment appropriate to the history of the house, it’s my goal with this series to feature fragrant specimens that will grow in other parts of the country too, in case you are looking to augment your own green space with some pretty aromatics.

As I write this, the last of our 11″ inches of snow has just melted and signs of spring are stirring in the daffodils poking through in the front corner bed. Planted long before we ever moved in, I’ve come to rely on those flowers as little time clocks signaling that a new season is close at hand even though nighttime temps are still in the 20s and 30s. Spring, indeed, is happening. Soon.

In the beginning chapters of The Fragrant Year, Helen and Leonie write about the “optimistically planned” winter garden, which if done correctly should “offer us flowers with various shrubs to brighten the dull months.” One of their suggestions for wintertime color and scent is one of the oldest medicinal plants in the New World and a resident of the entire eastern half of the country from Canada to Florida.

Although technically considered a shrub or a small tree, when left to its own devices, common witch hazel can grow up to 30 feet tall, and is one of just a few plants that blooms in the dormant stages of winter. Brightening up the landscape with fringe-like ribbons of golden flowers, it adds bright color to the garden, shelter for birds, and a food source for winter pollinators like the dagger moth that shivers and shudders its way through the cold season.

The common witch hazel in winter. Photo courtesy of TN Nursery

Requiring moist soil, sun to partial shade, and an acidic to neutral PH level, witch hazel is an easy-going, practically carefree planting that grows one to two feet in height each year. Ideal for sunny spots, woodland edges or sloping hills where soil erosion is a concern, the helpful hazel compliments a variety of different landscapes in a variety of different states.

Last year, we had to make the tough decision to bring a tree service in to cut down two trees that were precariously leaning in the backyard. The salve for having to cut down two old trees was knowing that we would plant at least two new ones in their place.

Surrounded by woodlands on two sides and facing a community garden in front, 1750 House is tucked in between acres of beautiful naturally-kept trees, including five elms and two cedars that are over 100 years old. While we have no shortage of very tall trees, we do have a bit of haphazard mid-range tree coverage that reflects over 270 years of garden endeavors executed by previous 1750 House residents. Privet, fruit trees, ornamental shrubs, wild natives, ornamental grasses and a few invasive species all compete for attention to the eye. We are on a mission to corral all these growers into a more cohesive vista so that they can work together to provide interesting layers at different heights to create a unique blend of shapes and colors throughout the year.

The appeal of planting a witch hazel shrub in the backyard is the pretty array of color it will add at eye level in the winter when most of the woodlands boast shades of grey, snowy whites, evergreen, berry reds and blacks. I also love the medicinal factor that witch hazel offers and the future opportunities it will bring later down the road to explore some homeopathic recipes.

Humphrey’s Witch Hazel Oil was made in New Hampshire in the 1870s. Image courtesy of the Boston Public Library.

Befitting a proper and useful kitchen garden of a house built in the 18th century, witch hazel in all its forms, from leaf to stem to flower, has been cultivated for hundreds of years for use in poultices, anti-inflammatory salves, and skincare maintenance. In New England, we have the area’s indigenous tribes to thank for teaching early settlers how to boil the bark for medicinal tinctures to heal coughs, colds, and inflammatory ailments. The leaves were used in wound care. The wood for making bows for hunting. By the 19th century, witch hazel became a key ingredient in the first mass-marketed skincare product – Pond’s Cold Cream – which debuted in 1846 under the name Golden Treasure.

Helen and Leonie offered another use too… clipping a few branches of witch hazel in winter and adding them to a vase along with some balsam sprigs for some invigorating indoor aromatherapy. Even though it can take up to six years for the first blooms of witch hazel to appear, I can already imagine such a bouquet.

Young fruit of the witch hazel shrub. Photo: Katja Schulz

While I have ordered plenty of garden seeds online before, ordering a shrub off the internet was an entirely new experience. As I learned, live agricultural specimens like this one are shipped in timing with the appropriate planting season. So the witch-hazel shrub I selected from Tenesssee won’t arrive until spring even though it was ordered in late winter. That’s a handy system that sets you up for success from the beginning.

So the first month of our Fragrant Year series starts off with a to-be continued. We’ll check back in on our witch hazel planting adventures in spring when the shrubling arrives. In the meantime, if anyone else has any experience working with witch hazel, your thoughts are greatly appreciated. Please share them in the comments section.

Cheers to Helen and Leonie for their advice on adding winter color to the landscape and for the aromatic start to showcasing historic plants in the gardens at 1750 House. Until next month, happy gardening.

Other sights from the February greenhouse…

Not to be upstaged by the witch hazel, and just in time for our first Fragrant Year post, Liz Lemon is blooming and filling the greenhouse with her lovely citrus scents.

Welcome To A Fragrant Year: The Greenhouse Diaries Return for New Growing Adventures

Published on January 27, 2024January 30, 2025 by In The Vintage Kitchen10 Comments

The Greenhouse Diaries are back with new inspirations and a whole new year of growing adventures to explore and discover. Like last year, these new diary entries center around what can be grown in a petite 4×6 greenhouse in our four-season New England climate, but starting this month there is a brand new theme, different from last year, that is guiding our gardening goals in 2024.

Last year, our first year as greenhouse owners and New England residents, we focused on winter gardening from December through May and all the possibilities that a warm greenhouse could offer in a cold landscape. We drew inspiration from Katharine Sergeant Angell White, a lifelong lover of the natural world who also happened to be a marvelous writer, a founding editor of the New Yorker magazine, and the beloved wife of E.B White.

Katharine Sergeant Angell White (1892-1977)

Her 1977 book Onward & Upward in the Garden, featured a collection of horticultural essays that highlighted her ability to embrace challenges by finding joy and solace in the certain uncertainties. Something that all gardeners must face when it comes to designing a pleasing landscape, in Katharine’s case, it was the long Maine winters that were a struggle for her spirit which yearned to be out in the garden digging and clipping, pruning, and propagating. She also had much to say about the confusing advice of garden experts and her own thoughtful attempts of trying to create the garden of her dreams. Her writing was full of spirit, humor and opinion when it came to detailing plans, recommending books and seed catalogs, and offering advice on growing plants and flowers both indoors and out. She was inspiration enough for us to start experimenting with our first winter growing season. Cold weather aside, we had Katharine on our side, lending a unique empathy and encouragement that fueled our desire to get out and grow things regardless of the weather, our experience level or the unseasonability of what we most wanted to achieve.

Our plan last year was to get a head start on establishing garden beds for 1750 House, so we focused mainly on forcing seeds and plants to sprout, bud and bloom early. Using 33 different plants, flowers and herbs as trial-run guinea pigs, we accomplished our goals with a fair amount of success and a few setbacks as we tested the physical capabilities of the greenhouse and grew our garden knowledge.

A greenhouse success – the joy of growing collard greens in 2023

This time, a year wiser, we are reducing the number of overall plants in the greenhouse to just focus on the proven winners that grew well both in the greenhouse and in the garden beds last spring, summer and fall. And to keep things interesting, we are launching a new experiment. This year, we are leaving extra room in the greenhouse to try our hand at growing a new type of perennial garden for year-round enjoyment… a landscape full of plants, flowers and trees that carry a scent.

Marvelously scented magnolia blossoms dotted our landscape down South.

When we lived in the South, we were surrounded by a wide variety of aromatic flowers that made our time there all the more memorable because of the beautiful perfume that continuously lingered in the air. The scent of night-blooming gardenias and fragrant magnolias swirled around our dinner parties. The heat of summer brought heavy humidity but also the delicate, sweet aromas of climbing Carolina jessamine. Roses in every scent and shade toppled and tumbled over hedgerows and brick walls. It was a lovely layer of landscape design that I had never really thought about until we had experienced it firsthand. Of course, we won’t be able to recreate an exact aromatic Southern garden here in New England since it’s a very different climate from there to here, but there are plenty of other options in the Northeast to explore for similar effect thanks to our new inspiration.

Here to guide the 2024 Greenhouse Diaries in our aromatic endeavors is the 1967 book, The Fragrant Year by Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Leonie Bell. Month by month, in words and drawings this book details how to grow specific types of plants and flowers that will continuously unfold new scents in the garden season by season, even in the winter months.

Praised for being the first of its modern kind, The Fragrant Year was lauded both for its scope and its practical application, as well as its healthful benefits. In the opening chapter Helen writes… “if our gardens today were more often planned as fragrant retreats and our rooms were frequently perfumed with bowls of spicy pinks, bunches of aromatic herbs, vases of fragrant roses, and jars of potpourri, perhaps we would not have to depend so much on tranquilizers to hold us together in this frantic, fast-paced world.”

Helen wrote that in 1967 but it is still so applicable today. The world is still frantic and fast-paced. People still look to medicine to calm their nerves. But we think Helen’s theory is pretty wise – there is something much more natural, more gentle, more joyful in tackling frantic nerves and fast paces with this sort of approach instead. It is lovely to think that by selecting a few handfuls of scented botanicals and thoughtfully adding them to the landscape we might not only help create a more calm environment for ourselves but also for the community around us. Who knows what sort of impact that small gesture could have on a greater world.

A prolific writer of gardening books throughout the 20th century, Helen was no stranger to the power of plants. Along with penning a newspaper column titled Our Gardens Within and Without during the 1920s and 1930s, she also wrote for all the well-known women’s magazines including House & Garden, Cosmopolitan, Better Homes & Gardens, and House Beautiful. In between all that she wrote/edited over fifty books on various gardening topics throughout her long and lengthy career.

Born in New Jersey, Helen spent the majority of her life in Philadelphia, PA and Westport, CT where she experimented with gardening projects of all sorts both indoors and out. Her most well-known book was one on caring for African violets published in the 1940s but she was a beloved and trusted authority on a variety of horticultural topics throughout her life. Working with Leonie on several different projects, it was in the 1950s that they learned they shared a mutual love of aromatic botanicals. Upon discovering this, the idea for The Fragrant Year was quick to spark but it took Helen and Leonie ten years of dedicated research and trial-and-error gardening experiments before their book was finally published.

Leonie Bell in the garden. Photograph courtesy of monticello.org by way of Rev. Douglas T. Seidel

Like Helen, Leonie Bell (1924-1996) lived and gardened in suburban Philadelphia. In addition to being a well-respected botanical illustrator, she was also known as a rose expert. Contributing her expertise to several rose garden books published during the 20th century, Leonie was often referred to as a rose genealogist since she had a knack for discovering/uncovering heirloom roses from the past that had been misnamed or believed to be no longer in existence. At one point, her own personal garden contained over 200 different types of roses, most of them old-fashioned heirloom varieties.

If you are ever in Virginia, you can see the impact Leonie made at the Leonie Bell Rose Garden at Thomas Jeffferson’s Tufton Farm, which features a tribute to both Leonie’s legacy and the history of North American rose breeding.

Much sought after in the world of botanical illustration, what’s interesting about Leonie’s art is that she was self-taught. Her intrinsic knowledge of the anatomy of plants combined with her studies at the School of Horticulture in Ambler, PA led her to closely look at botanical subjects from all angles. That well-rounded vantage point carried through to her drawings which shine with scientific detail but also personality.

Excited to share a year full of fragrance here on the blog, each month we’ll feature a new scented flower or plant recommended by Helen and Leonie and detail our gardening experiences as we incorporate twelve new aromatic additions into the landscape at 1750 House. Hopefully, you’ll find this information equally inspiring and insightful too. It would be lovely if we could all experience the calming nature of a scented garden together.

Our next Greenhouse Diaries post will introduce our first fragrant botanical, but in the meantime, here’s a quick update on improvements we made to the greenhouse over the summer and a current list of what’s growing in the greenhouse now…

Current Occupants

As of mid-January, the greenhouse is halfway full with overwintering geraniums, vinca vine, and dracaena spikes from the summer garden. Six different types of succulents, a coffee plant, a pineapple sage cutting from our summer plantings, and Liz Lemon (our six-year-old lemon tree) fill out the rest of the space alongside a batch of newly started seeds… collards, broccoli, beets and four different types of salad greens.

Winter Plastic Wrap

This isn’t a new improvement, but we are on Year No. 2 of dressing the greenhouse in a winter coat – aka wrapping it entirely in a layer of thick plastic – to keep the heat in and protect the plants from drafts during rain, sleet, and snowstorms. The plastic, a temporary solution for the coldest months gets removed in early spring, folded up, and stored in the basement. Once the temperatures drop below 45 in the fall, we put the plastic back on for the season. Aesthetically, it’s not the prettiest site but it gets the job done and keeps our overwintering plants and new seedlings happy and warm. We weren’t sure how the plastic was going to hold up from year to year, but so far it’s nice to see that it is still working just as well. To learn more about this winterization system, see last year’s post here.

Thanks to the plastic wrap, everything stayed warm and dry inside during our most recent January 2024 snowstorm.

New Electrical

Over the summer we added an electrical outlet inside the greenhouse and buried the wiring underground. This was a big (and much safer) improvement from running an extension cord across the yard between the greenhouse and the workshop, which is how we handled things last winter. This new addition is an outdoor-rated 110V 15 amp circuit box which is just what we need to power the heater and lights.

A New Heater

A new mini space heater replaced the tall radiator-style heater used last winter. This smaller size opens up more room to move around the greenhouse and fits nicely on a bottom shelf tucked out of the way when not in use. It has a safety feature that turns the heater off automatically if it tipples over or if any excess moisture drips inside. When the greenhouse reaches a certain temperature, it also automatically turns off to save energy and to keep the plants from overheating.

Normally the heater sits on the pea gravel floor of the greenhouse so that it efficiently heats all areas from bottom to top, but to photo it for this post I put it on one of the higher shelves for a better view. Please note: your greenhouse heater should never be this close to any plants as the proximity to the heat will cause the leaves to shrivel and could become a fire hazard. Any greenhouse heater should have a wide radius that is completely free and clear of other objects.

By using this smaller unit, we don’t have to run out and adjust the heat as the temperature changes over the course of the day, like we had to do last year. Also, we readjusted our required heat temperature in the greenhouse. Instead of keeping it in the mid-70s like last year, we lowered it to 55 degrees, in hopes that the cooler temp will keep spider mites at bay. We learned first-hand last winter how much they just adore a hot greenhouse. The new heater also blows warm air around the space instead of radiating it, so we have continual air movement swirling around inside this year, which I also hope will help with any pests. The final great benefit of this small little worker is that it has an additional fan option too, so in summer we’ll be able to grow our herbs inside the greenhouse without the temperature getting too hot or the air too stagnant.

New Lights

My most favorite new enhancement to the greenhouse came this fall when we added bulb lights to the interior roofline. The lights make it so much easier to work at night, especially in the winter when it can get dark as early as 3:30pm if we have an especially cloudy or rainy weather day.

These bulb lights are a tad too big for the space, so they’ll be swapped out for something a bit more petite this spring, but we had these already on hand and wanted to make sure we liked the light idea before we committed to several sets. At night it looks especially festive. Once all the landscaping is in place around the greenhouse, it will provide a nice light source for outdoor dining during the warm weather days. By then we’ll be at least five months into the fragrant year and the garden will hopefully be on its way to becoming a perfumed paradise. Just dreaming about it now, I can see and smell the summer already.

If you’d like to catch up on the trials and tribulations of our first year of greenhouse gardening start at entry #1 here. Otherwise, it’s on to 2024 and all the delightful aromas that await each new season.

Cheers to ever-evolving garden adventures, to a scent-sational year ahead and to Helen and Leonie for inspiring this new set of diary entries centered around the life and times of one mighty but mini New England greenhouse.

It’s Finally Here! Our Annual Shop Sale is Today

Published on November 2, 2023 by In The Vintage KitchenLeave a comment

Happy All Souls Day! Just wanted to pop in with a quick reminder for all our intrepid culinary adventurers and history-fueled home decorators… our annual one-day-only 40% off shop sale is today!

There are a bevy of new (old) heirlooms that have arrived in the shop recently, so if it’s been a bit of time since you last visited hop on over to the shop to see our latest collections. Some of our favorites include these charmers…

A collection of Poland’s authentic heritage recipes compiled by the Polanie Club of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Rare antique J.W. Pankhurst English ironstone dinner plates circa 1850.

A porcelain enamelware floral bowl set by Kobe circa 1980s

A 1930s-era packet of French postcards featuring the beautiful city of Marseilles

An antique crocheted tablecloth handmade at Ellis Island circa 1916. You might remember this one from our in-depth blog post about one woman’s Italian immigration story here.

A vintage Dutch cookie tin featuring maritime art.

A 1930s edition of a classic kitchen cookbook courtesy of Fannie Farmer, the woman responsible for creating our modern cooking measurement system.

A vintage botanical art book featuring gorgeous illustrations of fruits, vegetables, and flowers.

An antique handmade gathering basket from the early 1900s

A vintage pair of cheerful yellow dinner napkins with embroidered dots fit for every season.

Interested in meeting some of the makers and collectors behind our shop’s beautiful heirlooms? Poke around each section and you’ll encounter these faces and the stories they tell about history and their place in it.

Hope you find a treasure that calls to your heart and adds an extra bit of joy to your home.

As always, the sale runs through midnight tonight and discounts are automatically applied at checkout. Thank you so much for traveling with us down these adventurous pathways of culinary history. Cheers to new inspiration and a day of happy shopping!

Highlights from the Summer Garden & A Big-Time Surprise Visitor

Published on September 11, 2023September 11, 2023 by In The Vintage Kitchen2 Comments

A visit from the deer we call Juna in June.

Before summer ends officially on September 23rd, I didn’t want the season to go by without a garden update on how the seedlings fared once they left the greenhouse in spring. Given the late date, this is sort of like a summer wrap-up post told mostly in images – a view of our New England garden from June to mid-September. Don’t miss the real garden surprise (visitor) all the way at the end!

Heirloom Flower: The Watchman Hollyhock grown from seed started last year.

The Watchman Hollyhock starts out with a bloom as black as night but slowly turns a deep purple the longer it says on the stalk.

From black to eggplant to deep plums and bright purples – the hollyhock came to symbolize the enture garden as it grew and changed over the summer months.

Brussels Sprouts with a companion planting of dill and volunteer tomatoes – stowaways from last year’s crop.

OUR 2023 BEST GROWERS

This year, we were most successful in growing the following list from seed. Everything here but the pole beans, zucchini, and peas were started in the greenhouse in winter or early spring. The rest were started from seeds sown directly in the raised beds. Further down in the post, you’ll find the list of flowers and vegetables that we struggled with along with the various reasons. Hopefully, other New England gardeners will be able to share their insights as to why or what may have caused the challenges. But for now, here is our list of winners this year…

Tomatoes (Brandywine, Sungold Cherry, Sweetie Pole Cherry and Pineapple)
Cucumbers (Marketmore)
Collard Greens (Georgia Southern)
Hot Peppers: Lemon Jalapenos, Santaka Chile, and Padron Peppers
Rapini
Pole Beans (Blue Lake)
Flowers: Foxglove, Snapdragons, Hollyhocks, Mexican Sunflowers, French Marigolds, Zinnia, Geraniums
Mint
Lettuce (Rouge D’Hiver, Farmers Market Blend, Arugula, Salad Bowl Blend)
Cascadia Peas
Mexican Sunflowers
Jarrahdale Pumpkins
Black Beauty Zucchini (partially successful, more on that further on in the post).
Cucamelons

The cucamelons were one of our most enthusiastic growers this year. If you are unfamiliar with these little charmers, they are native to Mexico and look like miniature watermelons but taste like lemony cucumbers.

Our cucamelon plant literally vined its way to double in size in less than a month. At mid-September, it’s now over 9′ feet tall and still climbing. Its current destination is the upper echelons of the crab apple tree above it.

Cucamelon on the vine. They dangle like plump pearl earrings when they are ready to be picked.

Cucamelons are tiny (about 1 inch in length) but full of fresh summer flavor.

We loved the cucamelons so much that they inspired a new 1750 House summer cocktail – the Cucamelon Gin and Tonic.

So much new information has been learned about how to proceed this fall. What worked, what didn’t, what we can improve on and what we can forget, what we can nurture now and what we can save for another day or another year. A lot of surprises ensued. What worked great last year didn’t necessarily work as well this year. One thing that drastically improved though was the soil (thanks to a year of composting and leaf mold, and we didn’t overwater thanks to the miracle moisture meter reader. The garden was definitely much more lush and vibrant and full this year.

One of the surprises of the season were the Black-Eyed Susan vines. We almost gave up on these guys completely since they grew so slowly for so long. We figured they weren’t happy in the bed or the inground mound where we planted them. It took five months from seed to first flower (and our forgetting about them), but once they got to the bloom stage they really took off and haven’t stopped since. Now they are happily climbing all over the sides of the rock-walled raised beds and are producing lots of pretty little flowers. I learned from our local nursery, that they have the best luck propagating these flowers from clippings, so we are going to try that method this fall.

Tomatoes and pole beans climbing their way to the sky. This top rung of the trellis is 9″feet tall. We have to get on a ladder to pick the top tier!

The moonflower vines were a placeholder and an experiment to see if we liked a living wall on one part of the back of 1750 House. As it turns out we do! Next year, that wall will be covered in English ivy, which has already been planted at the base of the moonflowers. The moonflower seedlings were purchased from our local nursery, but we will definitely grow them again somewhere else in the garden next spring, this time from seed. They are fast growers and produce big beautiful white flowers, the size of your hand.

Our Biggest 2023 Garden Challenge: SLUGS

Oh the slugs. They slithered, they slimed, they feasted their way through the broccoli patch, the herb garden, the marigolds, the nasturtiums, the lettuce, the pepper plants (leaves only), the colleus and the cosmos. We tried all sorts of ways to deter them – sand barriers, chili powder sprinklings, tin foil, beer traps, nightly hand-picking.

We were most successful with the beer traps – sinking a small container in the garden soil filled with about 1/4 cup of beer. The beer attracts them to take a swim and then they depart this life in one big vat of boozy revelry. The other thing that worked well was handpicking (we relocated all the slugs to the woods each evening to carry on life there), but this was a never-ending task – every single one we picked was replaced with a new slug the next night. Plus, this hand-picking was a pretty unappealing and slimy exercise. Our buckets each night were filled with at least 30-40 slugs. Interestingly, they left all other plants in the garden alone, which is why we had such great success with everything else. Next year, we are going to try growing all of these feast-worthy plants in the greenhouse over the summer to hopefully keep them slug-proof.

Impromptu bouquet – snapdragons and phlox

First summer gathering basket: nasturtiums, zucchini, cucamelons, mint, Mandeville flowers, cherry tomatoes, pineapple tomatoes, Santaka chile peppers

Things That Didn’t Grow Well in the Garden This Year…

Zucchini (Black Beauty) – while they did grow big and lovely and flowered every day pretty much throughout the summer, two plants only produced three zucchini. Three was a definite improvement from last year’s crop which was zero, so we are moving in the right direction but this was also the second year they eventually became overcome by powdery mildew, even though we tried two different treatments: baking soda and neem oil
French Melons (powdery mildew victim #2)
All the herbs – parsley, basil, chives, sage, and thyme (The work of the mighty slugs! The only herb they left alone was the rosemary).
Cosmos – our second year in a row trying to grow these. (They produce a few flowers but then the plants dry up and die off)
Bush Beans – we rotated them to a different bed this year underneath the tomato plants and they did not like it. Maybe it was not enough sun for them once the tomatoes really started growing.
Broccoli (DiCiceo) – we harvested one broccoli head harvest before the slugs arrived for the season
Straw mulch – The intention was to use this as mulch to help with the slug situation but, as you can see from the list above, it had no effect and turned out to look really messy in the garden. Aesthetically it wasn’t our favorite.
Sunflowers – also our second year trying to grow these. Starting them in the greenhouse this year helped but they were weak and spindly and mostly fell over before July started.

Back to happier stories…

Our first big pineapple tomato weighing in at 1.7lbs

The big goal for 2023 was to create a pollinator-friendly garden. Success!

Pole beans and cucumbers joined the weekly gathering basket in August.

This year, the tomato’s best friend was the pole bean. Both still growing strong, they’ve become their own support system at the top tier keeping everything nice and tidy all on their own.

Impromptu bouquet: mint, Mandevilla, marigolds, Mexican sunflowers, snapdragons

The first time the gathering basket weighed over 4 lbs with all its produce was the first of September.

One nasturtium plant managed to outsmart the slugs. How? We aren’t exactly sure, but for some reason, they left this one alone.

All things considered, this year’s garden was definitely an improvement upon last year’s just as far as soil health, pollination count and bird and frog activity. Last year we had more voles and chipmunks but this year we had more slugs. Last year we had more heat but this year more humidity. Last year we had barely any flowers, and this year, we enjoyed ample bouquets all summer long. That’s the joy of gardening though I think. It’s always changing. Always engaging us.

Although the temperatures are still in the 80s, and there are still a couple weeks of summer left to go, Autumn is definitely beginning to cast her spell over the garden. Our first pumpkin just formed, the paradise apples are falling and our first sighting of a Spotted Orbweaver joined us overhead on the patio chandelier one night at dinner. Fall is coming.

The pumpkin vines are making “S” curves all over the sideyard.

Spiders, slugs, birds, bees, and Juna aren’t the only things that came to visit the garden this summer. Recently, we installed an outdoor trail camera to see what sort of wildlife came to visit in the night. Our most frequent sightings so far have been the wild rabbits (hop over to Instagram to see our favorite little bunnies zooming around the yard), along with the occasional raccoon, and opossum, two coyotes and a pine marten not to mention a bevy of early morning birds and squirrels. But our most dramatic guest so far is this guy…

A bobcat! He passed right through the yard with no incidents and thank goodness no bunnies. It’s pretty magical that such an extensive amount of wildlife lives while we sleep, carries on while we dream, travels about while we stay put for hours on end. We can’t wait to see what shows up this winter.

Last, but not least in this highlight of summer pos , we have two exciting sneak peeks of two very big 1750 House outdoor projects about to be unveiled soon…

We can’t wait to share them with you! Stay tuned!

In the meantime, cheers to summer 2023, to all we learned and all we reveled in, and to Lady Nature for continuing to be our biggest mentor and our guide. We’d love to hear how your gardening adventures fared this year. Please tell us all about it in the comments section. It’s so important to share the highs and lows, regardless of what part of the world we live in so that we can all learn together. The more gardening joy the better.