Saturday, February 25, 2012

Hot Beds

It being almost Spring, it is time to start planting--or at least think about plantting--the garden.  In the days before electric germination mats, farmers used to get an early start on Spring plantting using hot beds.  There were essentially cold frames that had a layer of fresh manure under them, and another layer of soil on top of that.  The decomposition of the manure generated heat, warmed the soil, and thereby "forced" the seeds into early germination.  In some locations, farmers did not need to cover the hot beds at all, and in other instances they put hoops over them and covered them with canvass at night and during storms.

George Fisher, writing in 1794, described the late-Winter preparations for planting like this:
"Throw up some new dung in a heap to heat, that it may be ready to make hotbeds for early cucumbers and melons…Nurse the cauliflowers kept under glass carefully; shut out the frost but in the middle of the milder days let in a little air…Make a slight hotbed in the open ground for young sallading, and place hoops over it that it may be covered in very hard weather."
From: The American Young Man’s Best Companion (Walpole, NH: 1794)  p. 357.

This is a sketch of a 19th century hotbed, published in:  A. Watson, The American Home Garden (1856).
A 19th century diagram for a hotbed, with the manure below ground-level.

Another 19th century innovation: heating the ground in the hotbed by running flus from a wood-burning stove under it.

No comments:

Post a Comment