The Victorian Kitchen Garden

Episode Synopsis

The soft fruit is ready for picking - morello cherries and black, red and white currants, red and yellow raspberries. Gooseberries, too, are ripening fast. Peter visits Goostrey in Cheshire where the extraordinary Victorian tradition survives of pitting one gooseberry against another to find the heaviest. Harry feeds his plants with homemade liquid manure, and sprays the trees with 'Bordeaux Mixture' - a fungicide discovered by accident in the vineyards of France. Peter tells the story of the Victorian craze for bedding plants, which one writer described as 'those hideous miles of scarlet geraniums'.