Growing produce at home has its rewards –and challenges
EAT YOUR (OWN) VEGETABLES
Advice for new vegetable gardeners: Don’t dig in more than you can chew. By harvest time, you could be overtaken by tomatoes, attacked by zucchini and up to your ankles in peppers. In fact, it’s best to stay within a manageable 8-by- 10-foot plot for a first-year effort.
More people are getting into growing vegetables –the first time it’s been this popular since the inflationary days of the 1970s, according to some reports.
The reasons are obvious –the savings, the desire to walk to the backyard for some dinner makings and, mostly, the flavor –the sweet taste of a warm tomato, beans snapped from the vine, turnips eaten with Thanksgiving dinner.
As Zoe Lavatelli of Grassroots Gardens explains the phenomenon: “People are trying to be more self-sustaining and realizing you can actually get a lot of food out of a minimum cost of seeds and some labor. It’s in the air right now.”
When a passer-by saw her urban front yard with its intermingled vegetables and flowers, a combination that’s more commonly used now, Lavatelli heard the comment: “Oh, I see the Victory Garden is coming back.”
Though Lavatelli is reassuring to those working in the community gardens she oversees, vegetable gardening comes with peril, as well as pleasure. There are seasons of too much (or not enough) rain, obnoxious weeds and the sometimes-fussy needs of a particular plant. Then, if all goes well, the garden becomes a “lunch counter” for hungry insects and animals.
Even so, many local gardeners can’t imagine a summer without their favorite crops. Toni Sciog of Tonawanda, for one, looks forward to the annual cycle of planting, harvesting and canning. Again, this year, 18 tomato plants tower over her head, heavy with ripening fruit.
Her secret?
“It’s all in the bracing,” said Sciog, a recently retired teacher from the Ken-Ton School District. She’s referring to the cages that support a growing plant; this year her grandson made some out of rebar (used for concrete reinforcement) that’s almost 10 feet high.
Because the soil is so rich, with years of composting, Sciog only fertilizes when she plants, she said, adding 1/4 cup of granular fertilizer, some in the bottom of the hole and some around the edges.
“My ‘Early Girls’ are producing the best right now,” she said. “Sometimes, I’ll eat three a day when I’m picking, but I don’t eat a tomato all winter because there’s no taste.”
Across the street, her neighbor Fred Conway oversees 20 kinds of vegetables, including celery, parsnips, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, beans and peas. And he would have actually eaten the peas if he had gotten there before the resident rabbit.
“My grandchildren call me Mr. McGregor because I’m always trying to get rid of that rabbit,” said Conway.
“My garden got cleaned out the other day,” he said, referring to the picking done by some of his nine children and 25 grandchildren, who also work in the garden.
To nourish the soil, Conway throws grass clippings onto the paths between the mounded rows of plants.
“The grass decomposes right into the ground, and it’s a good piece of ground,” said Conway, who is 83. “I learned a lot from the old-timers.”
Conway takes the view that none of the growing is completely predictable or under his control. For example, when 11 of his 16 tomato plants died earlier this season, he replaced them and started over.
“I got some new ones at the North Tonawanda market,” he said, “and those have worked out well.”
A tour of the thriving and colorful Parkside gardens of Sheila and Stephen Rovner shows quite clearly that they have an innate sense about growing flowers. “We’ve spent the last five or six years creating flower beds,” said Sheila Rovner, a Buffalo teacher.
But for the first time this year, they decided to get serious about growing vegetables, too. Their previous experience was mainly with squash and pumpkin plants that sprouted, as volunteers, from a compost heap.
“That was a highly successful garden, with no effort,” she said.
Encouraged, they dug grass out of a sunny corner spot and dumped in “tons of compost and manure” for a new bed, Rovner said. “I’ve found out that I can fill up the back of my car with 12 of those bags.”
And now they are being rewarded.
After “overdosing” on zucchini, Rovner is experiencing the ripening of tomatoes. She held up a hand-filling Cherokee Purple variety as evidence that the endeavor is going well. The Cherokee, along with Mortgage Lifter and Moonshine, are heirloom tomatoes, which she bought from a Buffalo gardener.
“I went down the day of the sale,” she said. “I thought that every old hippie in the world would be there, and indeed every old hippie in the world was there in the line, a long line.
“When we got the plants they were this big,” she said, indicating an inches-high seedling, “but they’ve turned into monsters producing copious amounts of tomatoes. And they are all better than any tomato I’ve ever tasted.”
Asked if vegetable gardening is cost-effective, she said: “All I can say is that everything we’ve planted has produced, so I figure it’s cost-effective.”
In true gardener’s style, she’s already thinking about next year, when she wants to expand and make room for lettuce, spinach and Swiss chard.
“Those are things I’m buying every week, so why not just do it myself?” she said. “And next year I’d like to save seeds and start growing in April.”
