Although today is Earth Day, you might have noticed that much of what you see at the historic homes and buildings at Greenfield Village is already quite planet friendly – because so many of today’s “green” practices connect back to our ancestors’ way of life!

Water conservation can be seen in various places throughout Greenfield Village with rain barrels and cisterns, like the one outside of the Guild Beer Hall (near the Glass Shop).

Inside our historic homes, all cleaning solutions used are essentially natural materials, including vinegar, baking soda and natural soaps. You’ll also find our historic presenters composting animal waste and household scraps, as well as saving all cooking fat for later use to make soap and tallow candles.

At the Daggett Farmhouse, textiles are all homegrown and homemade from natural materials like linen and wool. Clothing and household textiles are re-worked and recycled.

The Mattox family would have recycled and reused everything in the period represented here (the early 1930s) – even using newspaper for wallpaper and insulation! The family was cash-poor and also had to make do with what they produced themselves.

And of course, the working farms in Greenfield Village are animal powered!

What kind of similarities do you see between these time-honored practices and today’s efforts to be more “green”? What other environmentally-friendly practices have you noticed at Greenfield Village?

It’s finally time – Greenfield Village re-opens this Friday, April 15! All this week, we’ll focus on some of the special springtime activities that you’ll see around Greenfield Village as you take that first stroll of the season; today, Cathy Cwiek – manager of historic foodways and domestic life at Greenfield Village – takes us on a tour of the gardens throughout the Village. See you soon!

Spring has finally arrived at Greenfield Village!

While this gives us many causes for celebration – including the Village’s re-opening – one of my favorite elements of the season is watching the gardens in our historic homes grow.

We have a wide variety of crops that grow in many different styles of gardens throughout Greenfield Village – and of course, all are cultivated according to that particular home’s geographic location and time period.

Let’s take a walk through the gardens!

Daggett Garden (built in 1754 in Andover, Connecticut)

At Daggett, we show a very traditional way to garden. The word garden means “to guard in”; just as you guard something in with a fence, you guarded in your crops. In crowded Europeans cities, where the American colonists came from, you’d see them growing their crops in tiers and boxed beds because the cities were crowded and you had to maximize the amount of crops you got from each square foot of gardening.

This is another location with raised beds, which were just rebuilt last year; we grow a variety of vegetables, herbs, flowers and even concord grapes – and just look at how big the cabbages we grow can get!

Susquehanna Plantation (built circa 1835 in St. Mary’s County, Maryland)

At this home’s original location, tobacco was the crop that the enslaved African Americans would have tended and grown. Growing tobacco was back-breaking work. Henry and Elizabeth Carroll enjoyed a very prosperous life from selling this tobacco; in 1860 alone, Carroll sold over 10,000 tons of the crop. Today, you can still see the same variety of tobacco grown in the fields surrounding the plantation, although it doesn’t grow quite as well here in the North.

We start the plants early in what’s called a cold frame because the growing season for tobacco  is quite long – more than 140 days. In the 19^th century, tobacco plants were started in protected seed beds, and then transplanted into hills in the fields. It was not uncommon to plant lettuce along with the tobacco seeds in the seed beds to act as a buffer, and to draw leaf-mulching insects away. Notice how the tobacco is being grown here, in a mound almost three feet high; to do this, you stick your foot in the mound, hoe up the soil up to your knee, pull out your foot, and then put the plant into the ground with your whole fist. From there, you have to keep mounding up and up.

When the time is right, the entire top of the plant is pinched off to prevent it from going to seed and ending its growing cycle too soon.  This will cause the plant to try and replace its top with a lot of small shoots called suckers, so this is when the process of “suckering” begins: taking off the smaller leaves so that only a few leaves (about 12-14) will get really big instead.

With open pollinated heirloom varieties, such as we use, you always save the seed and grow your crops again next year – this way, you maintain an original variety of the plant, and as a bonus, you don’t have to buy new seeds each year!

Mattox Garden (built about 1880 in Bryan County, Georgia)

Here, we grow okra – specifically, Georgia Jade okra, an heirloom variety that actually grows very well here in Michigan. You’d be surprised by the abundance of okra you can get, even in such a contrasting growing location.

To do this, we work a good mulch right into the beds, which helps the water stays within the bed itself; it doesn’t run off and evaporate as much as it does when you have row crops.

We also grow everything from yellow bantam corn, radishes, Muscadine and Scuppernong grapes, tomatoes and collard, mustard and turnip greens. With corn, tomatoes and okra, you can mix that with a rice dish, throw in a ham hock – and you have yourself all different kinds of gumbos and jambalayas. That was very typical Southern cuisine.

(For another example of a classic Southern dish, watch our video here on how to make Hoppin’ John, from our cooking demonstrations during Celebrate Black History! in Henry Ford Museum.)

Firestone Farm (built in 1828 in Columbiana, Ohio)

Although the Firestone home was built in 1828, we show life as it was lived at this farm in the 1880s – and that means vegetables planted in neat rows in the kitchen garden.

Most of our crops are directly sown and include a number of different pole and bush bean varieties. Dry beans were an important part of the winter stores as they would keep and could be used in a number of ways.

We also have quite an assortment of fruit trees at Firestone Farm, with the most important being the apples that grow both in our small orchard and in the back yard of the farmhouse.  Some types of apples kept all the way into the spring months, and others were dried, made into apple sauce, and apple butter.  Cider is also really important, but not the sweet kind we all drink in the fall.

We also grow citron melons at Firestone Farm; these look like little watermelons but are white inside – when you candy these (by cooking the rinds in a sugar syrup), you can put these into stone breads and a lot of holiday baked goods.

Dr. Howard’s Medicinal Garden (built about 1840 in Tekonsha, Michigan)

When we re-opened this building to visitors, we did a lot of research – which was easy to do, as there were a lot of original papers from Dr. Howard himself and even barrels and medicines that he used. He would pay young people to go out into the woods, pick herbs and bring them back to him to use in his medicines.

The plants we grow there are the plants that we have documented that Dr. Howard grew and picked from the woods out in what is now known as Tekonsha, Michigan (in the extreme southwest corner of Michigan, about 10 miles south of Marshall, Michigan).

Ford Home (built in 1861 in Springwells Township, Michigan)

As with several of our gardens, we have wonderful concord grapes that we grow at Henry Ford’s birthplace, alongside parsnips, brandywine and yellow pear tomatoes and  different varieties of squash.

Several of these older and almost forgotten varieties of crops are starting to become popular again, and it always makes me feel good when I go to my local grocery store and see something that we grow at the Ford Home, like Hubbard Squash. I have a feeling someday those pear tomatoes will be in your Kroger store because they are just so good.

Clara Ford’s Garden of the Leavened Heart (built in 1929 in Greenfield Village)

While the gardens at our historic homes are tended by our trained historic presenters, we also have several other gardens that are tended by our Village Herbal Associates, a very strong group of volunteers that cultivate the Dr. Howard Garden, Clara Ford’s Garden of the Leavened Heart and the Burbank Production Garden; they then sell their products at the Farmer’s Market that we have each fall in Greenfield Village.

Henry Ford’s wife, Clara, was instrumental in putting this particular garden together. She didn’t have much to do with all of Greenfield Village, but Clara had that garden. It has Victorian pathways and very pretty shapes – in fact, if you look closely, you can see four arrows and four hearts; when you put them together, they make a complete circle that you can walk around.

So the next time you visit, make sure to take a few moments to look at the many varied gardens growing throughout Greenfield Village – what other elements have you noticed about each home’s garden? What similarities do you see with today’s gardening practices? What kinds of differences do you see?

Turns out my grandparents’ meal routine in many ways resembled that of colonial farm families: a small, cold breakfast, followed by a big midday spread with lots of protein, and then a small evening meal. But colonial meals, such as those prepared in the Daggett Farmhouse in Greenfield Village, were much more dependent on the calendar.

At Daggett, the 1760s Connecticut home that became part of Greenfield Village in 1978, “Everything is done according to cookbooks of the period and foods of the season,” says Cathy Cwiek, The Henry Ford’s manager of historic foodways and domestic life programs.

Each day, presenters at the Daggett Farmhouse prepare one midday meal: a main dish, one or more side dishes, a bread and sometimes a sweet. Presenters choose from seasonal menus that may include about a dozen main dishes, a dozen sides, a half-dozen breads and a dozen sweets.

This time of year was a time to plant the year’s crop and finish using up the foods preserved from the last harvest. One recent dinnertime at the Daggett Farmhouse, presenters Suzanne Geliske and Patience Hotton prepared and served a meal that — judging from its appearance and aroma — indicated that the Daggetts ate well, at least at midday.

On the menu:
– Chicken in the Dutch Way, “basically boiled chicken served over rice,” Suzanne says. Rice wasn’t grown in Connecticut, so the rice in the farmhouse would have been purchased from a merchant in a market town. Both the chicken and the rice were boiled in pots over the great room hearth.
– A garden salad made from greens (white cos lettuce, chive blossoms, rose petals and lovage leaves) harvested that morning from the garden just outside the kitchen. The salad was served with a hot dressing of oil, vinegar and herbs.
– Fresh asparagus heated over the hearth and pickled items (beets and cauliflower for this meal) preserved from last fall’s harvest.
– Pea soup made from dried peas and smoked sausage and heated over the hearth.
– Molasses-wheat bread with butter. Although main and side dishes varied depending on what foods were available, the constant at every meal was bread served either with butter or cheese.
– Rice pudding, heated over the hearth, for dessert.
– Cool well water to drink.

The Daggett family’s dinner looked and smelled delicious — freshly washed greens, steam rising from the platter of succulent chicken pieces on a bed of fluffy rice, colorful pickled vegetables, an inviting loaf of bread with butter — and had me glancing at my watch to see how long until my own lunchtime.

During dinner, Suzanne, Patience and fellow presenter Russ Eichold told visitors about some utensils that seem unusual today. Patience pointed out that many colonial spoons were crafted from animal horn. Russ held up his knife and fork. The fork had just two tines, and they were extremely sharp. And the knife was very wide. Demonstrating with a piece of chicken on his plate, Russ explained that colonists used the fork to hold food for cutting, then to slide pieces of food onto the wide knife blade. Once the food was on the knife, it was simply a matter of lifting the knife to the mouth.

Cathy says meat was a mainstay of 18th-century dinners because farm work was difficult and workers needed a lot of energy. In 1760s New England, she says, seafood was available and an occasional main dish — sometimes served at the Daggett Farmhouse — was eel. “You mention eel, and a lot of the workers say ‘Eeeeeewwwww!’” Cathy says. “But it tastes good.”