My family was die-hard New Yorkers. Ahhhhh, concrete! Brick, tall buildings, and views of the urban canyon! But when I was in about sixth grade, my father was lured into taking a job as the maintenance chief for a large suburban residential development on nearby Long Island. The country. No, not really. But to folks from The City at that time, anything on Long Island was bucolic – the suburbs shouldering out tranquil vistas of potato farms and truck gardens as the area developed in the 1950’s.
So off we trotted to Long Island. For me, the biggest adjustment was the walk home from school. The town we were in was suburban, and for a kid from New York’s Washington Heights, it might as well have been the country. I walked past single-family homes! Yards, patches of woods, and someone’s home that had a dog running in it and a garden. Please don’t snicker; I know I was naive, but I was only used to apartment buildings, city streets, and dogs on leashes. Gardens were obscure things you saw on television or the movies.
The dog and I became buddies. Every day, he ran along beside me as I walked past his yard, and I told him about my day, and he’d bark in wonder. Eventually, I met his owner, was invited into the yard, and was given a tour of the garden. This was something totally new for me. I returned regularly and became a sponge for information on gardening.
Eventually, I was offered a plant to start my very own garden. Just so you won’t think my home was without plants, we did have some- houseplants- and they were the extent of the horticultural interests at the Carreras home. We lived in a patio apartment with a nice sunny terrace outside that was the home of my new plant. But then I got another, and another. My father became interested, and soon a potted tomato plant joined my small collection.
Sometime later that spring, my father surprised me by constructing a retaining wall in an area of our patio and filling it with topsoil. The Carreras’ had an actual garden. That year we had a harvest of tomatoes and cucumbers from our garden. Members of the family still in The City were amazed. Growing food, in dirt! Who’d of guessed?
This suburban idle did not last and we returned to The City. The garden faded into memory. Then in about 1971 I moved into my little studio by the railroad tracks. There was an idle patch of dirt alongside the studio that was a weed patch. On a whim I planted some sun flowers. the sun flowers looked lonely so I gradually added some marigolds, tomatoes, pumpkins and a host of other stuff. A few trips to the bookstore insured that I gradually added a shelf of gardening books to enlighten me on the best techniques for growing. That fall I had my friends over for a harvest party.
Since then there has always been a garden where I live.
Discover more from Louis N. Carreras, Woodcarver
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Yep, I’d go along with that. For someone raised in a concrete jungle there is nothing i now like more than my green space.
It does, so to say, grow on you.
I loved, loved, loved this story. I could see young you being amazed by the “nature” of the suburbs. Funny, I was the exact opposite, and still am! I’ve only ever lived either in the suburbs or the actual countryside. I’ve lived in San Jose and Cincinnati, but never IN them. In fact, if/when I move to Edinburgh, this will be the first time for me to live IN a city. I suspect I’ll have the same kind of wonderment in my eyes as you did in yours. Alas, I won’t get the gardening bug. That ship has sailed with my notoriously brown thumb. 🙂
Edinburgh will be enough of a an experience that your brown thumb won’t matter!
What a beautiful photograph of a pumpkin! Our pumpkins this year are all volunteers, and seem to be hybrids so they have green and yellow stripes. Very cool.
That must be attractive. I wonder what the crosses were?
This is wonderful, Lou, and the pumpkin is beautiful. It’s difficult to grow them here but my neighbor tries every year. One year she brought Aussie pumpkin seeds back from visiting her family. I grew one. I completely fell in love with it. It only got to be about 6 inches in diameter before the frost hit. I brought her in the house and set her on my table. I named her “faith” because she never gave up. Aussie pumpkins are blue/gray outside, or green. That’s my pumpkin story and I’m sticking to it.
Those pumpkins are also grown around here, but I never knew where the variety came from before.
I don’t know if those are the only gray/green pumpkins but they are really beautiful.
You were ahead of the game. Folks are starting to get back to the home gardens, and chickens too!
We thought about chickens a few years ago, but my wife grew up in a family that kept them and vetoed the idea. Cleaning them and getting feathers off – Yuck!