Front-yard vegetable gardens grow in Oakdale

Driving into Oakdale’s Artists Colony neighborhood feels like stepping back in time. At its entrance, arched underpasses and the brick Clock Tower surprise with old-world charm; homes with names like The Dairy, The Eagle’s Nest and The Palm House stand both stately and quaint, isolated from busy Montauk Highway, just five minutes away. Around the bend, a long row of unusual, connected buildings called The Chicken Coop seem to have jumped from the pages of a fairy tale — but with a twist: front-yard vegetable gardens.

In a return to World War II-era victory gardens, encouraged by the U.S. government to help relieve wartime strain on the food supply, people around the country are increasingly growing fruits and vegetables in their front yards, and Long Island is no exception.

Stacey DeFelice lives in one of the Artists Colony Chicken Coop homes with her husband, Anthony DeSimone, and 18-year-old daughter, Charlotte DeSimone. The walk to their front door entails traipsing along a white-pebbled path among beds of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash, corn, luffa, tomatillos, ground cherries, cucamelons and an array of herbs and sunflowers.

“These homes have a little strip [of land] and trees in the back,” she said, “but I’ve never been able to use ours because you can’t take historical trees down in the neighborhood.”

The trees were planted by William K. Vanderbilt around the turn of the 20th century, when the property and its structures made up his Idle Hour estate. Vanderbilt, who built Long Island’s Motor Parkway in 1908, was the grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad and shipping magnate. Several years after William’s death in 1920, the neglected farm buildings were sold and turned into an artists colony where creative types including, for a time, Andy Warhol, lived and worked.

When DeFelice and DeSimone moved in 20 years ago, there wasn’t much usable land in their front yard. But a nor’easter in March 2010 took care of that, knocking down many of the mature cedars in the street-facing yards on the block.

Lauren Sikorski and Chris Demchak, who lived next door, immediately took advantage of their newly acquired open space and sunlight by planting tomatoes and cucumbers in their front yard. “We could never do that before,” Sikorski said. “We just had a tiny patio and a silly square of grass in the back and all the cedars in the front.”

What did the neighbors think? “People were happy for us to have a garden,” she said. “We’d be working outside, and they would walk by and stop to talk about it.”

Then, one by one, other Chicken Coop residents started their own vegetable gardens.

DeFelice was first, planting tomatoes and basil in a 4-by-4-foot bed carved out of the front lawn. But when Superstorm Sandy deluged her property in 2012, “the salt water killed everything, so we had to put in raised beds and new soil,” she said. “Little by little, I started expanding,” she said, adding that in 2019, gardening became therapy, helping her cope with symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and panic disorder. “I poured myself into the garden, and that’s what keeps me sane on a daily basis.”

That garden has made DeFelice, 47, inadvertently Instagram-famous. Although by day she works as director of services for students with disabilities at SUNY Old Westbury, she’s known as @staceydigs, promoting front-yard gardening to more than 7,500 followers with whom she shares photos of endeavors like jug-sowing and potato-chitting.

Her success on Instagram is “a mystery,” DeFelice said, adding she didn’t aim for notoriety. “I don’t have time for that. I’m at work 10 hours a day, and I’m so tired when I get home. I just needed something to get [me] out of my head, so I started to post pictures of dirt and seed packets, and people started following and commenting. I thought it was funny because I was just using it as a journal to keep track of what I’m doing.”

In the gardening shoulder seasons — spring and fall — DeFelice grows radishes, garlic, broccoli rabe, bok choy, lettuce and potatoes. This summer, she said, “I’m going to experiment with fruit for the first time and grow either a raspberry or blueberry bush and Sakura melon.”

In 2012, Sikorski and Demchak moved to a larger home three doors down and immediately began work on their new garden. “Planting fruit and vegetables has always been a priority for us,” said Sikorski, 47, who works as a veterinary internal medicine specialist. Demchak, 48, a builder specializing in historic homes, does most of the heavy lifting in the garden.

Sharing know-how (and plants)

Over the years, their garden has grown to 200 square feet, including blackberry and raspberry plants near the street, which “everybody walks by and picks,” Sikorski said. There are also cucumbers, eggplants, squash, edible nasturtiums, herbs and 120 tomato plants, which, she admits, is too many. But sharing the bounty is part of the experience, she said: “We invite the neighbors over to take them, and they come with grocery bags. The garden invites people in, and we love that.”

Sikorski and Demchak still own the house next door to DeFelice, but now they rent it to Dee Kenny and Dan Magee. And it comes with an unusual perk: thriving vegetable and flower gardens that both couples maintain.

“Lauren and Chris grow everything from seed, then they come and plant about 40 tomato plants, garlic and whatever else they have left over in rows in our front yard,” said Kenny, 65, who works in customer service for a textile company.

“They plant, and we harvest,” she said, adding that she and Magee, her partner, also help weed and water, then keep some of the harvest. The rest they walk down the block to their landlords.

“I wish more people would do stuff like this because .  .  . it’s good for everyone to keep their hands in the soil and know where everything is coming from,” Kenny said.

Next door, Donna Prox, 48, and Dennis DeSousa, 45, both attorneys, also grow vegetables and herbs in front of their home. “Chris and Lauren inspired us,” Prox said. “We learned everything from them.”

Prox and DeSousa grow most of their plants in containers. “We have some eggplants and peppers in the ground,” Prox said, “but containers are good because you can move them around in terms of the sun.”

The couple grow tomatoes, salad greens, edamame and bush beans in a vertical planter, kale in a pot and two types of smokable tobacco — Virginia and American — by the driveway.

Tobacco for fragrance

“We grow the tobacco for their [floral] fragrance, but we did try drying and smoking it,” said Prox, who is not a smoker. “The leaves also have a stickiness to them that helps with mosquito control because the mosquitoes land on them and stick to them.”

The biggest benefit of growing vegetables, Prox said, is control. “I can grow things I wouldn’t necessarily have access to in a supermarket, and the quality is so much better,” she said, adding that she makes tomato jam and “tons of hot sauce, crushed red peppers, pickled peppers, peppers in oil [and] salsa” with harvests of specialty pepper varieties like Carolina Reaper, Genghis Khan, Black Scorpion and Italian Pepperoncini. She also grows luffa, which she dries to use as “natural scrubbers.”

“More and more people are starting to look at alternatives to lawns — planting natives, meadows and vegetables in front of their homes,” Prox said. “It’s such a rewarding hobby, and it attracts birds and bees. It’s so nice to see the results, and nothing beats a homegrown tomato — absolutely nothing.”

Source: newsday.com