Kitchen Garden Forum

Has anyone seen this type of gardening before. The glass domes were hot bedded with a single plant inside, then covered with a woven willow roll to further protect the growing food. The seige of Paris was organised in such a manner with food almost the entire year.

I haven't seen this done, but i do think the bell cloche was more of a French thing, whilst here in England, barn cloches were widely used.

Not sure if the woven willow covers were used.

A very interesting topic, may i add.

Some barn cloches in Chwilog way back in the 1940s. All long since disappeared.

More pictures of Miss Priddle here http://cat.llgc.org.uk/cgi-bin/gw/chame ... stselect=1

Isn't fleece the modern equivalent ? Lots of early salads grown that way.

oldherbaceous wrote:I haven't seen this done, but i do think the bell cloche was more of a French thing, whilst here in England, barn cloches were widely used.

Not sure if the woven willow covers were used.

A very interesting topic, may i add.

The willow was used to gather top heat, the dark colour, like a solar water heater is painted black. Of course the willow replacements could begrown again by simply pushing cuttings into a suitable patch of ground.

We traced our family tree back to the early 1500's and this was a picture we found amongst an entire document. Farming was our forte, lifes alternative engineers with baler twine and intuition.

Many of the older ways still hold true including natural materials, if we remembered and passed on the older skills, walking away from the current paradigm would be so much easier.

Keep the faith.

Glass cloches are brutal to use. I cut myself very badly on one once, a barn cloche. The glass tends to slip out of them easily. Not only that, they have sharp edges and corners, they're heavy and brittle. Thank goodness for polytunnels.

The Chwilog photo is fascinating in showing a "modern" Dutch-light glasshouse in the background. Marvellous bit of gardening history. Thank you for posting.

I agree, Felix. We used glass cloches (just in our own vegetable garden, nothing like on the scale of Chwilog) but we found that strong winds would cause havoc with the cloches and we found bits of glass in the soil for many years afterwards! Not nice at all.