Chapter 5 - THE MIDDEN

Summary

‘The midden is the mither o’ the meal-kist‘(old Scots proverb)

The midden was essential to every garden. The story of the cottage midden in this period is the story of the gradual separation of household waste from the dwelling and its inhabitants. Everyone had a midden in the eighteenth century (and before), except in the most crowded cities where, in theory, muck was cleared from the streets every night. All refuse – animal, household and human – was piled or poured onto the midden. After Archibald Grant of Monymusk, a celebrated improver, had evicted his cottars, he instructed his factor to dump the houses on farm dung hills. Eventually, it was concern not only for health but also for appearance that drove the clean-up. But the continuing need of both farmers and cottagers for spreadable muck slowed it down. There were middens, though fewer, throughout the countryside on the eve of the First World War, and much of the same kind of household waste was being used as fertiliser on many fields and gardens in the twentieth as in the eighteenth century.

The size of the midden and the amount of manure the cottager could collect also determined how much land it was practicable to cultivate as a garden or potato ground. A garden without a source of manure was worthless and, as we have seen, payment in kind for farm servants always included manure for the garden; many farmers also provided the manure for the potato grounds. Potatoes were an especially demanding crop – up to forty tons of manure per acre was recommended in one THASS article. Archibald Gorrie, in his master plan for the cottage gardener, stipulated four barrow-loads of pig manure for two falls (seventy-two square yards) of early ashleaf potatoes. Different crops had different requirements: pig manure mixed with green weeds would produce nice floury maincrop potatoes; onions and leeks did best with a mixture of soot and poultry dung; early cabbage and other greens with liquid manure composed of soap-suds, ‘chamber lie’ and any dish-washings not wanted for the pig.

Rules about manure make it clear how important a sufficient supply was.