MinnPost: Gardens of Eagan farmer cultivates a page-turner

Amy Goetzman reviews Atina Diffley's TURN HERE SWEET CORN for MinnPost.

Diffley_Turn coverEvery day, thousands of people drive on' Eagan’s Diffley Road, but few of them know the road is named for the Diffley family, five generations of whom lived on the acres that ran along it. Once, those acres were known as the Gardens of Eagan organic farm. If you bought produce at a food co-op in the 1970s or 80s, visited a farmer’s market, or stopped at a roadside produce stand in Eagan, there’s a fair chance some of the nutrients from that land are inside of you.

Atina Diffley’s memoir, "Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works" (University of Minnesota Press) describes how she, a self-described “gardener” in the 1970s, married into one of the last traditional farm communities in the Twin Cities, and fed her family and thousands of others produce raised without chemicals, years before organic and local food became hot topics.

Read the full article

Published in: MinnPost
By: Amy Goetzman