Article by Phoenix writer Michelle Paszek ’24:
Fall is a time of change from the bright summer sun to a cold and dark winter. As the autumn winds sweep away the changing leaves, I watch as the last survivors of the summertime crop push through and give their final yields. Now, as I spend time with my family pickling the last cucumbers and making the last berry jams, I look back and remember how I grew a love for gardening.
Gardening has been a tradition in my family for generations.
It all started with my dad’s great-grandfather, Antoni Szczepański. He was a landowner as well as the owner of a General Store in Sarzyna, Poland. Antoni had a knack for gardening and spent time growing vegetables in his three greenhouses. He sold what he grew in his store until the Communist government came and shut it down for being a private business and seized all but 12 acres of his property.
Antoni’s son-in-law Kazmierz Moskal, my dad’s grandfather, later on picked up gardening as a hobby after his retirement from blacksmithing. As there were still government restrictions on private businesses, he grew vegetables solely for his family. He also converted the land into a flower garden with a shrine to the Blessed Mother Mary.
When my parents were first looking for a house, my dad wanted to continue the family legacy. They removed a couple of trees in our backyard to make space. A few years later, when I was a young child, my parents officially began the garden.
Our garden started off with just a few packets of seeds, some pre-grown seedlings from a plant nursery, and a handful of tools. My dad bought two books on gardening by Alan Buckingham called “Grow Vegetables” and “Grow Fruit.” I remember both of us excitedly flipping through those books for days, brainstorming all of the possibilities we could do.
We started off our first year with tomato sprouts, cucumber seeds, a few grapevines, a gooseberry plant, raspberry bushes, a blackberry bush, two blueberry bushes, a strawberry field, and a handful of herbs like parsley and chives.
The first year was such a success that we have also tried growing corn, apples, cherries, peppers, beans, peas, onions, radishes, and zucchini with varying results throughout the years.
While my family has a fruit and vegetable garden, these aren’t the only things a person can garden. Mrs. Frem, one of the chemistry and environmental science teachers at Kellenberg, has a flower garden, full of both annual flowers and perennials.
Perennials, for those unaware, are flowers that regrow yearly after being planted. “For me they’re the first sign of spring,” started Mrs. Frem. “And then as soon as it gets a little warmer, I like to plant pansies for color and then on Mother’s Day Weekend, I always go to the nursery and buy colorful annuals and I plant those in my front yard and backyard. I just love coming home and seeing all of that color. I feel like the flowers have such a psychological benefit to me – the colors, the patterns. They just bring me a lot of joy.”
Mrs. Frem also shared, “I like the initial planting and planning. And every year it comes out different: I’ll try a new flower or move them around since they grow better in different locations. It’s like a picture that unfolds throughout the seasons – an evolving picture or a work of art.”
Each season, my family has also rotated the plant locations into different areas of the backyard to see where each plant grows the best.
During COVID, we repurposed a sun-bleached crab-shaped sandbox from my childhood into an herb box. We found we had much better results growing herbs using this rather than just planting the herbs directly into the ground. We still use it today, giving the sandbox a new life with another kind of love.
I remember spending most of my childhood summers outside in the sun helping out with the garden. My favorite part when starting the gardening season has always been planting the seeds into the soil and then covering them with dirt with the knowledge that they’ll sprout back up. I would go outside daily to check on the progress of the plants, however little it was. It’s always so special to me to see a plant grow from a seed and just knowing that I did that and helped that plant thrive.
However, for me it’s even better to see how all this love and effort pays off in the end when it’s time to pick all these fruits, vegetables, and herbs.
The end of the summer heading into the beginning of fall is always filled with a challenge, but not necessarily a bad one. Some years we have so much yield that it becomes a struggle to find and pick all of the crops and prepare them for storage in a timely manner. It becomes a race to make jams, pickle cucumbers, and make tomato sauce so we can enjoy them throughout the winter. Sometimes, we end up at the point where we can still have some of these in storage by the next summer.
It’s always been a family tradition to take small woven baskets and have a little competition of who could pick the most berries. I loved this tradition so much when I was a kid, that when I broke my leg, I still wanted to go out to collect my basket’s worth. My parents got out a stroller for me so I could still take part in this and my dad also ended up carrying me around the garden at times.
Last summer, my mom and I made fruit pierogi, which is a traditional summertime Polish dish. They are very similar to regular pierogi, except the filling is made up with berries coated in sugar. We used the blueberries from our garden, which gave the dish a soury sweetness that you just can’t get from store-bought blueberries.
We also use the herbs we grow to add more flavor to everyday meals, whether it be fresh parsley in chicken noodle soup or in some pasta.
Making recipes, especially family ones, with homegrown ingredients just makes it all the more special to me, mainly because I’m very proud of my family heritage and who I am because of it.
One of my close friends, Junior Francesca Papetti also gardens.
She shared, “For as long as I can remember, my grandfather and I would spend the spring cultivating seedlings and planning our arrangement of crops in our small backyard, taking care to note which vegetables deplete the soil of nutrients in certain areas. No matter what, we grew at least three types of tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplant, staples in my grandmother’s kitchen. In my family, food is how we express our love, how we show we care about each other. Having a fruitful garden, not just for ourselves, but for everyone, means the world to me.
My great grandmother who has since passed, used to have this magnificent peach tree sitting in her front yard. It produced so much fruit that there weren’t enough people to give the peaches away to. Instead of wasting the fruit, the neighbors and anyone who was lucky enough to walk by, could take whatever hung over the fence. Now my mom and I have our own garden where we try to create the same atmosphere of love and togetherness that my great grandmother did and that my grandfather still does. We have a young peach tree as the centerpiece of the garden that we hope will soon fruit and be as abundant as my great grandmother’s!”
My own biggest inspiration for all this is my Babcia (aka my maternal grandmother), Halina Krasinska. During her life, she was very supportive of the garden. She adored all things plants and loved being outside in the sun. Babcia constantly brought over different plants and seeds that we could grow. She had such a green thumb and could make anything grow, even if it seemed impossible. She was actually the one who brought over a few clippings of a blackberry bush and spent years tending to it until it thrived into the large blackberry bush it is today. She loved both the hard work of digging in the dirt and the relaxing activity of walking through the grass and seeing the garden flourish. Even battling cancer, she would still go out and work in the garden because it was something she loved. My Babcia is now no longer with us, but every time I see one of our plants, I think of her and all the memories of good times that we had together.
Gardening is something that I will always treasure. It brings me closer to my family and my heritage and that is something I will never give up.