Heirloom Gardens
The world we live in today is much different than our ancestors a century ago. Our heirloom gardens are designed to look back at historic gardens, crops, and practices so we can appreciate where we are today and learn.
Heirloom gardens add another dimension to your museum and historic village experience. Eye-catching blossoms, fragrant herbs, luscious fruits, and rows upon rows of colorful vegetables all vie for your attention. They are also used regularly by our historic Pinecrest Village interpreters for preparing meals in historic kitchens, dyeing fibers, medicinal preparations, decorations, and craft projects.
Learn more about our Kitchen gardens, heirloom varieties and orchards below.
Meeme House Kitchen Garden
The heirloom garden at the Meeme House (c. 1855, Meeme Township) contains hardy crops commonly grown in the 19th-century kitchen garden. These vegetables are grown from seed “bred back” to original types. Among the vegetables often grown here are Danvers Half Long carrots, early Jersey Wakefield cabbage, and China rose radish. These varieties would have been grown and saved for their flavor and storage capacity.
This garden also features some herbs for practical and culinary uses: lovage, tarragon, dill, and mint. The garden is surrounded by fruit trees. What’s grown in the Meeme House kitchen garden is regularly utilized by the historic cook working inside!
Carsten Makerspace Garden
The Carsten Garden (c. 1860, Netwon Township) is an example of an early vegetable and practical garden. Everything grown in this garden is utilized! Vegetables grown here are appropriate for an early 20th-century time period, including pumpkins, squash, dryables like peas and beans, garlic, onions, or easily cooked-up options like cabbage or lettuce.
Herbs are planted around the base of Hetchler House such as mint, lemon balm, and horseradish. Much of the food stuffs consumed by a family in a dwelling like this would have been foraged from the countryside: berries, acorns, sumac, ramps, and mushrooms.
The Hop Yard
Grown vertically on poles, hops are a perennial vine that is grown as a flavoring and a preservative/stabilizing agent in the brewing process. When harvest time came, the whole community would have a picnic, perhaps bring in a band, and make a social event of the harvest.
Heavy gloves were worn to avoid the sticky, sharp nature of the bines. Harvest basket contents were evaluated by weight. The flowers were dried in heated buildings and pressed into bales.
Pollinator Spaces
Did you know that every third bite of food we eat is due to pollinators?
It's true! Honey bees, butterflies, birds and other pollinators help grow our food, keep our flowers blooming and make our lands healthy. However, for many reasons, including lack of habitat, pollinators are struggling. The plight of honeybees, native pollinators and the monarch butterfly have placed a renewed sense of urgency on the development and conservation of habitat for these crucial ecological workhorses.
The Manitowoc County Historical Society has 2 pollinator habitat spaces: 2 acres near the Collins Depot and an acre field behind the Cheese Factory.
This effort is made possible in partnership with the Manitowoc County Farm Service Agency, Millborn Seeds, and the Bayer Feed a Bee program. Feed A Bee is a major initiative of Bayer CropScience and dozens of partners around the country to increase forage for honey bees and other pollinators, including growing 50 million flowers and providing additional forage acreage in 2015. By collaborating with organizations and individuals throughout the United States, Feed a Bee helps provide pollinators with the food they need not only to survive, but to thrive.
The Orchards
A number of orchards can be found around the grounds at the Manitowoc County Historical Society. Apple trees were often seen as the cheapest crop a farmer could grow – you could plant once, and harvest for years.