Tallahassee Museum 1880s Garden

The herb garden adjacent to the farm house and
vegetable garden in the Tallahassee Museum 1880s farmyard.  

The VegHeadz Demonstration Vegetable Garden is not the only vegetable garden in Tallahassee tended by Master Gardeners.  

Master Gardener Brenda Buchan has volunteered at the 1880s Garden at The Tallahassee Museum for a number of years. Brenda is our guest host today as she shares information about that garden.  Photos by Brenda Buchan.

“For vegetable gardeners, the Leon County Extension Office houses the Master Gardener’s VegHeads Garden behind Demonstration Bed 5. If you are a home gardener and have small plots or raised beds to plant in this is the perfect place to learn. 

“The Leon County Master Gardeners also host a vegetable garden inside the Tallahassee Museum at the farm house location. It is called the 1880s Garden because the homesites there were built in the 1880s and the herb and vegetable garden reflects what would have been growing at that time. This garden, usually less than an acre, would be considered the kitchen garden that the lady of the household would tend in order to feed her family. It involves planting row crops that could be eaten when ripe, as well as dried or canned, and stored for the winter. During the 1880s, the farm site would also have had a large crop garden, where the crops are sold for income such as peanuts and cotton. That crop would be worked by the men of the household.

“The Leon County Master Gardeners have been working the Tallahassee Museum’s 1880s garden for over two decades now. Twice a year, in the Spring and in the Fall we put in new crops. We use the same methods used during the 1880s including pushing a hand plow and cultivator. The garden is all organic, as it would have been in the 1880s, and any insect problems we have are hand removed or sprayed with soapy water. The crops we plant are also ones that would have been planted at that time and eaten by residents of north Florida. We use composted animal manure to fertilize the crops. I share an anecdotal story at the end of the article about this.

“This garden was started by Glenn Mayne, a long time Leon County Master Gardener, and the methods we use are the same ones his grandfather taught him as a boy while tending his farm in Escambia County, Florida in the 1950s. 

Master Gardeners Mary Jackson and Glenn Mayne
tending the grape arbor at the Tallahassee Museum 1880s farmyard.

“During Spring and Fall, Master Gardeners work the garden on Tuesday mornings. It is common for us to be approached by visitors to the museum asking about what we are planting or the methods we use to tend the garden. We use this opportunity to share our knowledge and to encourage them to try a vegetable garden at home. While we frequently are not there at the time, we know the Museum uses the vegetable garden to teach grade school students about farming when their class visits the museum. For some of the children, they have no idea that French Fries come from potatoes and that potatoes are vegetables and grow underground. We receive a lot of feedback from the Museum teaching staff on how much the children love the vegetable and adjacent herb garden.

“Besides being a community service for the county school children and Museum, the Master Gardeners who work the Garden learn a lot about what row crop farmers must deal with each year. That includes crop rotation, weather conditions, insect infestations, critter management (rabbits, squirrels, deer), and fertilization. 

“The story I wanted to share is yet another lesson we learned this past year. Normally, we do not apply fertilizer to our plants until they have grown approximately eight inches tall and then we only apply it to one side of the crop, the north side. This is called ‘side dressing’ and is done to allow the plant to choose whether it wants to grow towards the fertilizer or not. This past fall, when we went out to plow our small field and prepare it to plant seeds, the Museum had left for us a small pile of composted manure next to the field. Leaving manure out is not a good idea when dealing with children as those ‘Road Apples’ can look too much like a dirt clod that needs to be thrown. So instead of waiting we decided to spread the manure thinly over the entire field and cultivate into the soil before we plowed the rows and planted the seeds. That turned out to be a really bad idea. The seeds did eventually sprout but never thrived. Three months after planting, the crops were still only six to seven inches tall. Lesson learned, we will never spread manure again before planting and we will keep side dressing the rows instead.

“We welcome interested gardeners that want to work with us and learn.”

Master Gardeners David Marshall pushing the cultivator beside the field peas, and 

Marcie Pretorius tying up tomato plants at the Tallahassee Museum 1880s Garden.