[mikethetyke]

Chatting to a group of fellow allotment holders the subject of how it was done years ago arose, things like miners wives planting potato peelings hoping they would grow, etc. this set me thinking ( a dangerous thing to do ) just how did they manage before seed catalogues, pesticides, and all the other stuff we take for granted.I am turning a little corner into a "victorian" garden using the old ways and any suggestions and tips would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

[Yorkie]

Welcome to the site Mike 

I'm going to move your post from the Welcome forum to Grow Your Own, where more people are likely to see it.

Do feel free to pop back into the Welcome forum and introduce yourself a bit 

[gillie]

They did have seed catalogues, pretty much like the ones you see today, except there was no colour printing.

There are an increasing number of 'heirloom' seeds in the modern catalogues so buying the correct varieties should not be too much of a problem if you  hunt around.

And they did use pesticides - nasty things that have been banned years ago, which I don't think I had better mention.

[Yorkie]

You mean arsenic, DDT & nicotine for starters? 

[mumofstig]

beg steal or borrow the dvd/video (or book even) for the Victorian Kitchen Garden programme.

That'd be a good reference point 

[gillie]

"You mean arsenic, DDT & nicotine for starters? "

Well, since you started using rude words, I could add mercury compounds, and...

(Actually I think DDT  did not come into use until a bit later).

[Yorkie]

  You may be right, I was interpreting "old" liberally !!

[solway cropper]

I'm an old liberal and I remember all those nasty things. Gardening fifty years ago was basically the same as it is today. In the 1960s I worked in the kitchen garden of a large country house and it was basically the same as when it was planned a hundred years before that. They had more modern plant varieties but the tools and techniques used were the same. I used to think at the time that most of the staff were the same as well 

[lancashiregardeninggal]

I have been doing a little bit of research on bee-keeping and apparently some Victorians used to poison the bees as a means to getting the honey .  There are obviously some good and bad 'old ways' .

[JayG]

Even 10 years ago, and certainly 20 years ago, the home gardener had a veritable arsenal of sprays and puff-packs to kill just about anything that dared to move (some of them, like gamma-BHC sounded like by-products of the nuclear power industry!)  

It can't be a bad thing that so many products have been found to be injurious either to us or the environment and have been withdrawn, although sometimes I can't help but rue the lack of a safe "cure" for some pests which you can no longer do much, if anything, about (red spider mite springs to mind.)

[mumofstig]

  red spider mite  drives me crackers ( well, even more so then  )

[Rampant_Weasel]

on the victorian kitchen garden dvd harry tells u how to make a red spider mite pesticide which he brushes on.
i got the whole 3 dvd set for around £20 from amazon, worth every penny.
also its probably on youtube somewhere if u just require that part.

[Paul Plots]

I'm not sure what the seed catalogues of yesteryear looked like but I discovered one of my ancestors was a plant and seedsman living in the wilds of Watford (Hertfordshire) in the late 1700s. So there were certainly seed producers and merchants around then. 

[elrohana]

I do things the 'old old old' way most of the time - by hand and with no chemicals, just manure - but I do cheat and buy some compost for potting, can't make enough quickly enough for what I need.

[Beklet]

Funny you should say that about the potato peelings.....

We were weeding the area I was about to plant beans and there was a spud plant growing...when we pulled it up it had sprouted from the end of a spud my mate had cut off and put into the compost heap.....thing is, it was growing far better than the spuds that are supposed to be growing!!