ShareThisThink you're a pretty "green" gardener, with your rain barrel, compost pile and heirloom vegetables? Well, Giuseppe Villella and Giovanni Macchione have you beat -- by several generations.
The two men grew up in the Calabrian villages of Gizzeria and Falerna, respectively, learning from their fathers and grandfathers how an Italian man grows his own food and makes his own wine.
Both ended up in Sewickley, Pa., living several blocks from each other, each creating his own Garden of Eatin', with enough tomatoes, escarole, peppers, beans and other vegetables and herbs to feed his family, his grandchildren, his neighbors and the occasional passer-by.
During an interview, Villella reaches into the tall, tight rows in his backyard and hands tomatoes and peppers to his wife, Miranda, for his visitors to take home.
"How do you get back into that garden?" teases Mary Menniti, a friend and neighbor.
"I like a snake, honey," he replies, a smile creasing his tanned face.
"There is so much we can learn from them," said Menniti. "They use resources so wisely, conserve water, save seeds for generations. ... They live for their gardens."
And their gardens return the favor, giving them a sense of purpose after they have retired.
"They don't really come into their own until they are older," said Menniti, who remembers her grandfather gardening as she grew up in New Castle, Pa., before marrying a second-generation Italian-American from Sewickley.
Some gardeners, such as Villella, are as comfortable with a spoon and ladle as they are with a pirune (wooden planting stick). Others, well, it depends on whom you ask.
"He don't touch a pot in his life," says Maria Macchione before her husband can answer.
He doesn't disagree. He shrugs, smiles and walks over to show a reporter his figs and persimmons. When his visitor comments on how tall the fig tree is (about 10 feet) and asks how it has survived our chilly American winters, Giovanni Macchione replies:
"You gotta lay 'em down and bury 'em,"
Whether learned from their forefathers or by trial and error, the men's garden tips are freely shared with anyone who asks, friend or stranger. Macchione, though the shyer of the two men, will stand by his fence for a half-hour or more, answering questions, identifying plants and sharing what he knows.
But he seems a little baffled by the public's sudden taste for Italian garden sense. He stayed on his porch at first during the first of two tours public tours of his garden, earlier this summer, when 35 people came to admire the fruits of his labors.
"Where all the people come from?" he jokes.
Villella, meanwhile, cultivates compliments as easily as he weeds out detractors, like the man who commented on his garden as he walked by recently.
"He says, 'Oh it looks like a jungle.' I say, 'Don't you come back here again.' "
(E-mail Kevin Kirkland at kkirkland(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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