Prairie Yard & Garden: Growing Vegetables in the 1800s

Prairie yard and garden is a production of the University of Minnesota Morris in cooperation with pioneer Public Television funding for Prairie yard and garden is provided in part by the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund additional support provided by mark and margaret yackel-juleen in honor of shalom hill farm a non-profit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near windom in southwestern minnesota shalomhillfarm.org ii imagine living in the 1850s minnesota was about to become a state and growing your own vegetables was a necessity because there were few stores join me on Prairie yard and garden as we learn about growing enough food to survive our long winters well today I have with me Andrea Crist who's the site interpreter here at the Oliver Kelley farm in Elk River Minnesota and boy did you have to wear that back in the 1850s yes this is typical dress for a lady of the time period all of the girls in the family would be fully covered actually men and women were covered from head to toe you didn't have you know any legs showing you were covered up to your wrists you had everything up to your neck covered for women one of the things about the clothing is that it protected the outer garment you know you only owned two maybe three dresses one of those being a nice Sunday dress so you wanted to protect that outer garment as much as possible because there is yards and yards and yards of fabric which you would have to purchase and you sometimes didn't have that extra money to just make a new dress so you protect it as much as possible in the way you did that was to wear undergarments what about that heavy eight run that's looks like it gets lots of use it does it does the aprons kind of the the tool for women whether you're cooking and you need it to open up a hot stove or to wipe off your hands I know especially when I'm working in the garden you know I use it a lot of times to just kind of gather in produce so I can carry things very easily so and again wipe my hands off too but well we're here in the 1850s through 1870 period of farming and life on a farm and it looks like we have a huge garden it is almost an acre and this would be about the size like the Kelly family would need for six people in order to sustain them for a full year and that's what they were kind of going for is trying to have enough produce that would get them through an entire year and you only have a really short growing season especially in Minnesota here it's a lot shorter than in other places so you have to plant a whole lot and hope that it's enough and so a lot of that was you know planning ahead forethought thinking about what was going to store what could you use now what were you going to use later and then preserving it and what's the other thing they'd have to take into consideration what about seed collection did people just keep their seeds absolutely they kept seeds anything that you could very easily do beans or extremely easy corns easy Peas are easy those are very easy to collect seeds from so they would definitely be collecting the seeds from those other things that you could collect seed from you know any other biennials your cabbages your carrots anything that you had to replant a second year sometimes they would do that they up actually uproot the whole plant and and Transplant them indoors and the root cellar with some dirt and stored them there for during the wintertime and then bring them back out and replant them the next year so that they would actually flower but it seems more available so you didn't necessarily have to do that especially on the riverfront here you know you had seed our shipping availability very easily and Kelly was getting seeds a lot of times from like through the patent office he worked with them and he would get seeds available that way they'd send him things to try out and so you know he had access to seeds and he even worked for a seed company at one point in time so he had the availability to try a lot of different things so that would be more easily accessible than maybe taking the time to do it yourself so I think they did sometimes and they didn't do it another day sure sure and one of the challenges being here in Minnesota and being a new territory would be just what's going to grow because it was a lot of experience prior to this right and so it was a lot of trial and error to see what was actually going to grow certain varieties grow better at one location and not know the location due to the season itself and also due to the soil you know this is very sandy soil here and so there are certain things that don't do as well for Kelly it ended up being wheat we actually didn't grow very well here and that was the big crop for Minnesota market farmers in the 60s was growing wheat and so he had to he had to make a switch and try to find other things that he could sell what would be the staple crops in the 1850s 60s um the biggest things for farmers especially in Minnesota again thinking about not only now but also later would have been root crops that was their biggest thing they grew tons and tons of root crops so that's all of your your potatoes your your rutabagas your turnips your beets you know radishes your carrots parsnips salsa fie those are all root crops and and the reason they would grow a whole bunch of those is because they're very filling you can get them some of those varieties get extremely large which would mean they would store longer in the season the larger it is not necessarily having the best flavor the larger it is but it would store and that's really what they were looking for was produce that was going to last and so your root crops really were one of the most important things that they would have been planting a whole bunch of are there any unique varieties that we wouldn't see today um we do have a few um now rutabagas aren't a very unique variety we have what's called American purple top rutabaga all around today I believe they are so around these are our rutabagas right here most people that come into the garden aren't familiar with rutabagas you can still find them in the grocery stores they just look very different a lot of times the tops and bottoms are cut off and they're all waxed over which is why nobody recognizes them but they were extremely important at the time because again they were a very bulky root crop that stored a very long time actually one of the very unique root crops that we have in here is what is called salsa feed it was also known as oyster plant because it sorta had that taste of oyster to it and Kelley and his wife his second wife Temperance they were both from the Boston area so that would have been they would have been used to that flavor of oyster and way out here in Minnesota you're not going to get that but salsa fee was a root crop that sort of had that flavor to it and so that would have definitely been something they would have been growing and we have some here it looks like grass what is growing it's very hard to distinguish from weeds sometimes but it gets very very long and it doesn't get very thick it's not much thicker than my thumb but it's kind of like a carrot in resemblance except it's white that's it Christine and how would that be cooked like all root crops can boil it you can then mash it you can stew it you can bake it you can fry it pretty much root crops there's no end to what you can do with them and there were several different recipes that they would have been using with all of their root crops but any of your potatoes your rutabagas your parsnips you you can pretty much cook them however you want pretty much how we would cook potatoes nowadays you can do with all of the root crops I'm always interested in parsnips my mother was a great personal cook we always had them fried in butter love that nutty flavor apparently it must have been a real staple back in those days parsnips were very important again because it was another root crop but the really neat thing about parsnips is is you can actually keep them in the ground you didn't have to harvest them all when frost came with everything in the garden you really had to pull it in before Frost some of your root crops even your cabbage you could leave out after the first or second frost if it wasn't too hard of a frost they'd still be fine but everything else had to be completely removed and you did want to get everything out before it snowed parsnips you didn't have to do that with you could actually leave them in the ground they could winter and then come spring you would have a fresh set of root crops to harvest from and to start using so they were pretty exciting and they did use them fresh in the in the in the fall but then a lot of them would also stay in the ground in winter until the spring and I always heard old timers say that they got sweeter by leaving them in the ground that is what I have heard I have never compared the two so I can't personally speak to that but I have heard that it gets sweeter over the winter besides root crops I see a number of other plants here what would be the next most popular type of thing that was not a root crop definitely they grew a lot of squash we have several different varieties we have a couple winter squash we have a Boston marrow which is a big orange winter squash and then we've got a green Hubbard and both of those being winter squash they bulk up in size and then you could store them through the winter at least as several months of the of the winter we also have summer squash varieties and those would be only during the summer the fresh use only you're not planning on storing those you could possibly pickle them if you wanted to but they're mostly a fresh use but the squash is another big thing we've got here we also have a lot of different varieties of peppers we've got these wonderful green they look like bell peppers they're called bull nose and they get very large theirs are good for fresh use they're also good for pickling one of the things that they would do with some other peppers as they would actually stuff them they would cut them open and they would stuff them with what we would think of as relish it's like chopped cabbage and onions and peppers and tomatoes a lot of spices would go into it but they got out all of the seeds from the center of the pepper and stuff it and then they'd actually sew it shut and then the whole thing would go into vinegar and become a pickle so it would it would pickle that process is known as mang going and that came from a plant called a mango that we actually grow here on the farm it kind of resembles a little cucumber it's only gets to be about fist size and it's dark green usually and it tastes like a very bland cucumber it really has no flavour to it which is why it's not seen anymore nowadays because you really do have to do something to it and what they did is they would pickle it and they would do the process that I just described with the pepper where they got it and they'd stuff it and sew it shut and because that was the only thing you did with the mangos that's the process of doing that became known as mango and you can even do it with things like there's recipes to do it with peaches where you've got out peaches and you do the same thing but there's different ingredients that go into it so tends to be a sweeter pickle there pickles at the time were a lot more than just what we think of as dill or bread-and-butter or sweet they really had a whole range and it depended on what you were pickling not just cucumbers it depended on what additives what spices you were putting into it what other ingredients you were putting into it as well as what kind of vinegar you were using and they were making all of their own vinegar so you had a lot more than just cider or white vinegar like we have nowadays I didn't realize that lots of different vinegars other different vinegars depending on what you threw into the barrel so in that barrel and processing process we didn't have jars in those days um they didn't what we think of as canning nowadays they didn't do Mason's canning jar did come out in 1858 now that's you know ten years after or eight years after Kelly's were here on the property and that's new technology at the time so it's like all new technology you know I did sometimes works right away and sometimes doesn't sometimes there's kinks the whole process of canning that we know nowadays that we understand with doing a second boiling and creating a vacuum they didn't understand that whole process at the time so you know they put put things in jars and they would put a lid on it and they'd put a wax seal on it and that would be what we would think is the closest thing to our modern candy but what really worked for them was pickling and it was just really taking a big crock putting vinegar in it and submerging whatever it is you're trying to pickle beneath the vinegar level and then just leaving it and that's what worked the best and that was a process they had been doing for years they understood and so even when the new modern canning jars came out a lot of times the things that you were pickling in your crocks turned out better and didn't go bad as quickly as the things that you put in the jar cuz it you just didn't quite understand that process yet and how it completely worked you think a lot of people got sick in those days I don't know botulism would have been a major concern but that's what comes to my mind you know and people got sick and people still get sick nowadays from different things that go bad you know getting sick is just a reality of life and it was a reality for them the biggest thing that we have nowadays is we have antibiotics we have access to doctors and and more medical understanding than they had at the time so for sure people did die of things like food poisoning but they died just as easily from the common cold that we don't die of nowadays you know so there's a whole range as what contributed to death rates and that's for people like I said part of it some of it would have been from food some of it just was just the reality of life well I see a number of different kinds of beans here what story behind beans we have several different kinds of beans that we grow here on the property beans were something that Kelly grew and there are big distinctions as far as what kind of bean it is there are there are varieties that are a green bean that we are familiar with where you eat them in the pod and we have a red valentine bean and we have an early yellow six week bean those are both green bean varieties but we also grow driving varieties here too and that's what some of these rows are here are dry bean varieties where you actually plant them with the intention of letting the plant die you want it to completely grow and produce the biggest seeds possible so that you can later shell them out and then use this as a baking bean and those were extremely important in the mid 1800s because once they're dried out completely they will store for years as long as they don't get wet you could store them for years they obviously didn't store them for years because they were eating them or they were selling them off but that was an important crop and so you would actually leave them in the ground and we actually have a bunch up on our porch right now that we're drying out and just completely Leddy them all of the moisture that was in the roots completely dry out and then we're going to bag them up and that would be something they would typically do that sitting and shelling there during the wintertime when all of the other garden activities are completely done you have nothing else to do in the garden you would sit there in shell and that was actually a job a lot of kids ended up doing during the wintertime is to shell out a lot of the beans but they were because they're a baking being a dry bean they did have a long storage life and beans were very very common especially for Yankee farmers they ate beans a lot a lot more than we in being a good source of protein it is it so it probably supplemented the eggs in the meat that was being used also mm-hmm well Andrea I see a number of different varieties tomatoes were they popular in that time period tomatoes were grown a lot of people think that tomatoes weren't grown and that's because previous in years about fifty years earlier they were still thought as being poisonous but tomatoes were grown a lot on farms a lot of times you would use them fresh so you could cut them up and add them into soups and stews you can even bake them but what a lot of times they would do as far as preserving them would be to turn them into a sauce a very very thick sauce they called ketchup it's very different from our modern ketchup it is more like a salsa it's very very thick and ketchup just kind of was a term for any thick sauce so you can actually make cucumber ketchup we're just for Mary familiar with tomato ketchup and it was something that they would add into a lot of meals you know it wasn't just a little bit here on the side you mixed it in with things you put it with your meats you put it with your vegetables so they did grow a lot of tomatoes we have the large red ones here that are very familiar to a lot of people they just get very very large and those are early large Reds the other ones we have are these small ones that are right next to us and these are the small fruited Tomatoes we have a yellow plum variety we we have a yellow pear variety and we have a red pear variety and it's just really the shape of it we're we're familiar with like cherry tomatoes they're nice and round these actually look like little players or little plums but those you would use them just like you would use large Tomatoes yeah looks like a excellent crop for you this year it's very very productive so far there are a lot of green ones but we have made some ketchup already from a lot of our small ones the yellow ones turned very very yellow everything's just very yellow ketchup but it's it's very good and how would that be preserved it sort of is a pickling process you use vinegar in it just so like other your other vinegars you would submerge things in this one you actually put the vinegar into it and you do a lot of stewing over top of the stove so it is kind of like what we would think of is making like a salsa well I see a couple melons here in the garden also what's the background on those I mean I have a tough time growing melons nowadays I don't know how they did it back then melons are very hard to grow in Minnesota just because of our short growing season it's just the reality that you you're going to get someone you're not going to get some we have two different varieties of muskmelons in the garden right now very similar to our modern cantaloupe one is a nutmeg melon and then the other one is called a Jenny Lind melon and the Jenny Lind has more of like a turban shape to it and then the nutmegs really do look like cantaloupe and those will get a little bit of orange on the inside there's a lot of green to them though so when you cut open these varieties we would look at them from the inside and say oh that's a honeydew but it's actually it's a musk melon variety so we have those as far as musk melons we also grow some watermelon we've got an ice cream watermelon it's way hidden in the back it's hard to see it looks like a honeydew on the outside because the lines are so faint it gets a very light pink color on the inside and it's very very good we can actually get them to grow but again the short growing season so sometimes it happens sometimes it doesn't the other melon that we do get a lot of on a regular basis and this was why they actually grew this melon was a citron and it really does look like watermelon and that's what most people think when they walk in the garden they say oh there's watermelon it's actually a citron we don't hear of citron very much anymore because there's really no flavor to it such ones really don't have a flavor so what they would have done in Kelly's time was either pickle them or they would candy them and those are really the options that they would do it was it really wasn't a melon that you ate fresh and that's why you don't see it so much anymore although if you're curious about citron our modern fruitcakes they have those really gummy weird things in the center that is still citron it's still made of stitch on this the only place to see citron anymore nowadays and I would suspect that that particular melon might keep well for a fair amount of time it does midwinter on one of the advantage back in those days I suspect is if the produce was going bad or whatever it got fed to animals that was another use for yep your if you didn't use them fast enough and one of the things that they would periodically do especially women who were in charge of the houses they would go into the root cellar during the wintertime and check drops and you know go through all of the bins go through all of the the pickles and your vinegars and check to make sure things weren't going bad and if it was you pulled it out and if you could still use it you would use it if not it was fed to the animals well can we go take a look at that storage facility it must be interesting in the way that they found room for all of that I have a question what do you recommend for a tropical plant for a hot location in my yard a great plant for tropical sites hot locations is this penny sedum fireworks this is a purple form of penny sedum that's a new kind this year it actually has a stripe on the foliage and the foliage is pink as well as purple but it has lots of flowers it likes hot weather conditions so dry sites are okay but really full Sun it will take quite a bit of heat this plants native to Africa so it's used a lot really hot conditions it doesn't like cold so as soon as the frost comes it's going to die but it's a great plant for hot sites and containers south-facing porch you can put it in a large pot and it will become hundreds of flowers in the summer ask the Arboretum experts has been brought to you by the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chanhassen dedicated to enriching lives through the appreciation and knowledge of plants well we're in the root cellar now and this is what the families would have used kind of like our modern refrigeration so this is it's down below the ground it's nice and cool you keep all the doors the windows everything's boarded up so it's nice and dark so everything can be preserved better and we're right now in the section where we've actually got some pickles going on right here because this is the way to preserve things was to pickle things pretty much means just submerging it in vinegar so we've got right here on the corner this is the cucumber ketchup I was mentioning about you can make different kinds of ketchup uh-huh and so this one it looks more like a our modern relish so it's just a lot of cucumbers and onions and there's mustard seed a bunch of other spices that are added into it the big thing is vinegar vinegars the preservative in this case would have been easy to get the various spices I mean what is the boat's bryggen that was as Cargill when they come up and down the river yes yes you could get different spices in off of the river you know the steam packets were going up and down the river about two times a week so you had access to put in orders and things that you could get spices any herbs that you wanted you could grow in your own garden but spices you really had to order in uh-huh Alton this one here this one here this one's this one's our exciting one this is the mangoes that's those little green fist size melons and this one these are and everybody used to plate to keep things submerged yes because anything that comes up above the vinegar level and has access to the air is then going to start going bad it's going to start collecting that bacteria in so really putting a plate on top of it and sometimes even a rock like was on the the ketchup helps to keep everything beneath the vinegar level and that's another thing ladies we're checking for regularly was not just is there bacteria on there but did any of the vinegar start to evaporate do I need to add more in so having that plate on there you can see how far it has evaporated I'm so I'll show you one of these mangoes so this is a the mango melon and this one was gutted and then it was stuffed and then the lids back on and then the whole thing is sewn shut and that's really just to keep all this stuffing in there and so then as it's in the vinegar the whole thing is just pickled everything including the stuffing it's all pickled and then when you wanted to stick this on a plate all you have to do is just grab this string and just pull it right out because it's been soaking for you know a couple of weeks and you could just serve it as a hole where you could chop it up and mix it with other things depending on what your plans for the meal were well it looks like a lot of work so in the back they probably would be good surgeons yes ladies would have been sewing girls traditionally started sewing as early as four years old they would start learning how to do sewing so in the fact of sewing food it was just a different material that you were using huh but it was kind of a fancy pickle so if you were you know when you're at the end of the year and you're harvesting all your grain and you wanted to put something fancy on the table for the gentlemen the hired men that are doing all the threshing work for you it was something really nice to put on the table what the family had done a fair amount of entertaining and this would have been their specialties um entertaining wasn't extremely common you got together you kind of saw people on Sundays but that really was the only time that you kind of interacted with other people farmers were kind of solo they had neighbors but they were you know a couple miles apart and you didn't really see your neighbors house you saw the edge of his property you saw the edge of yours but you didn't really see his house but you know you did have times when you would get together like I said Sundays you'd see people on special occasions like the fourth of July was a big occasion to get together you know like I mentioned about threshing when you're going through and separating the brain you know if you had a machine like Oliver Kelly would have had a threshing machine and other farmers who'd intense resolution would come over to use the Thresher you know that would be a time when there would be more people and you'd have some more interaction so so yeah we've got our pickles in here and then in the other room we've got lots of very big bins and it's just for those root crops that you pull right out of the ground and you just stick them in a bin a lot of times it would cover them up with dry sand to help block out all of that light kind of keep them in the environment they were already in and then that just really was the way to preserve your root crops everything above the ground had to be pickled everything below the ground you could just store in bins there wasn't a lot of extra work to them well Andrea I want to thank you this has been most educational learning about 1850 60s farming and hard work and involved funding for Prairie yard and garden is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund additional support provided by mark and margaret-yackel juleen in honor of shalom hill farm a non-profit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near windom in southwestern minnesota shalomhillfarm.org you you you

Channel: pioneerpbs

Views: 137,221

Rating: 4.9050593 out of 5

Keywords: oliver, family, gardening, 1800s, 1800, mississippi, river, elk river, historical, history, garden, prairie, yard, landscape, farmstead, pioneer, women, children, vegetables, pbs, KWCM, KSMN, K49FA, Public, TV, Appleton

Id: 0UhB4iOl-PA

Length: 28min 46sec (1726 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 03 2014