History Restoration Machinery Gardens Visitor Centre Home

The Heritage Gardens Gardening styles, like fashions, change with the times. Victorian tastes favoured diversity and novelty, and seed companies tempted gardeners with hundreds of varieties. Today only a few are commonly available. Heritage plants are living artifacts, so the site gardens are for both preservation and display. Seed Saving is an important heritage activity! Modern hybrids do not reproduce themselves; but the historic open-pollinated varieties reproduce true to seed. Successive generations are identical. Each year seeds are collected for future plantings -- the only way to ensure their survival. Organic management techniques used at The Grist Mill in many ways parallel farm practices of the last century. Crop rotations, compost and manures are used to build soil fertility. Explore the heritage gardens and see the Victorian era favourite varieties that are planted here. Special sections demonstrate the species that were popular with Julia Bullock-Webster and other neighbours of Barrington Price. You're sure to discover some great ideas if you're a gardener! From the Mill you can take a path up to the Upper Gardens on an open terrace with "K" Mountain as a wonderful backdrop. Near the heirloom apple orchard are several plots where you'll see our "living museum of wheat" remarkably different varieties including some that were known many centuries ago. In mid-summer we hand harvest the wheat and gather it up in traditional sheaves. More circle gardens and our kitchen gardens are here as well. Copyright © 2000/2010 The Grist Mill at Keremeos/DBS/ All Rights Reserved & by Sheba