Kitchen Garden

From Why I Cook, by Tom Colicchio:

Elizabeth is an industrial town nestled into northern New Jersey’s historic manufacturing belt. It’s best known for its shipping container port (one of the eastern seaboard’s largest), the titanic Singer Sewing Machine plant (where Grandpa Felix worked), and (as Lori reminds me) for having produced that totem of young-adult fiction, Judy Blume, who went to school with my mom. Rumor was that Elizabeth had once been lovely, but by the 1970s there were few parks and green spaces, unless you counted the thatch of trees by the Elizabeth River that also grew old tires and retired refrigerators. Maybe that’s why almost every Italian family I knew had a grandparent like mine, patiently coaxing vegetables and plants from small backyard patches of concrete, following the rhythms of their home country. Is that what has me out weeding in the mornings? Is it in my DNA?

This certainly describes my father’s parents, who cultivated a thriving garden in the yard of their house at 97 Mary Street in Brantford, Ontario.

They would have inherited this from my Ukrainian and Croatian great-grandparents, and doubtless didn’t give it a second thought: it’s what you did  

If memory serves, it was more a garden they tended in parallel rather than collaboratively, but tend it they did, and the produce they harvested from that postage stamp-sized plot was awe-inspiring.

Here’s a photo of my grandmother holding my 2½ month old father, standing beside my Baba in her garden, in Fort William, Ontario in 1937:

And here’s a photo, one I’ve posted before, from the Brantford Expositor newspaper, of my grandfather in that Brantford garden, holding prized beans: