The Colonial Kitchen Garden: Food, Medicine, and Survival in Rebecca Nurse’s World

Before pharmacies and grocery stores, a colonial kitchen garden served as a household’s medicine cabinet, pantry, and safeguard against hunger. This lecture examines the herbs, vegetables, and flowers Rebecca Nurse may have cultivated, with attention to their culinary and medicinal uses. Drawing on the site’s modern reproduction of a 17th-century kitchen garden, it also explores colonial growing methods, as well as the preservation and storage practices that sustained families across the seasons.
Presented by Dr. M. Franny Zawadzki