Adam Hodgson writes in a travel account, “We visited the little dwellings of the Negroes. These generally grouped together round something like a farm – yard; and behind each of them was a little garden, which they cultivate on their own account,” he writes in Remarks During a Journey Through North America In the Years 1819, 1820, and 1821 in a Series of Letters. Enslaved people kept subsistence gardens to obtain food needed for good nutrition and herbal medicines. Subsistence gardening refers to the practice of planting produce for you or your family’s consumption. Subsistence crops in the antebellum South might include greens (collards, kale, and turnip greens), beans (black-eyed peas, butter beans, pinto beans, snap peas) squash, tomatoes, beets, garlic, onions, and herbs.