History meets the garden at Adam’s Heirlooms on the Founding Fathers Farm set in the rolling farmland of eastern Manitowoc County.
Adam and Dianna Diehl grow historic heirloom vegetables, then pair them with period recipes.
“We came to agriculture through our love of history,” Dianna said. “We do 18th and 19th century living history and my specialty is food history, so I wanted to grow varieties that matched the time period.”
Adam made a career change, which helped launch a business selling heirloom vegetables at farmers markets and branching out their urban farm into Community Supported Agriculture memberships. The couple ended up leaving the city and starting Founding Fathers Farm in tribute to Adam’s German immigrant fore fathers who settled in Eastern Wisconsin.
“It was nice to come back full circle,” Adam said. “I remember the stories my grandmother and grandfather would tell me,” he recalled. “We had an ‘aha’ moment, realizing what they were doing.”
The Diehls strive to share their passion, teaching their urban family members where their food comes from.
“One day we put on a big country breakfast after butchering hogs two weeks before,” Dianna recounts. “Our nieces had named the hogs and little Leila looked at her plate of bacon and asked, ‘Uncle Adam, is that Cricket or Pooah?’ He answered, ‘No, it’s bacon. It was, but that is how we get bacon.’ She tried a bit and said, ‘This is really good bacon!’”
The recipes often come from old cookbooks Dianna collects. For example, they wanted to create something with radishes, so they wanted to know what radishes were like in the 1840s. After finding a variety of radishes, they found a quote that the purple ones were the best and red the worst.
“It was a recipe for a radish salad, and the author was expounding on the ingredients,” Dianna said. “You have a recipe that talks about a certain variety, you find the seeds, you grow it, you make it and then you get to taste something that nobody has tasted since the 1880s.”
Adam’s Heirlooms can be found at Green Bay’s Washington Street Farmers Market on summer Saturdays and the New Leaf Winter Farmers Market. They also are at the Manitowoc Farmers Market two Wednesday nights a month. Learn more at AdamsHeirlooms.com.
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