3 front-yard vegetable gardens: Huntington, North Babylon, Elmont

Front-yard vegetable gardens are cropping up across Long Island, whether by chance or design. Here’s a sampling.

HUNTINGTON

On busy Park Avenue in Huntington, daily drivers “have nothing to look at but me bent over in the garden,” said April Zubko, 44, who said she harvests 500 to 1,000 pounds of produce a year from the raised beds in her front yard.

She “didn’t really have a choice” but to plant vegetables in full view of the often-congested road, she said, “because my backyard is unplantable, getting only about one hour of sunlight a day.”

A lifelong gardener, Zubko planted two small beds when she and her husband, Bryan O’Toole, 43, moved into the house in 2011. They’ve expanded every year. These days, she grows tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, peas, potatoes, edamame, lettuce, kale, Swiss chard, bell and hot peppers, eggplants and berries in raised beds on one side of the driveway and in a trellised garden on the other.

Most of the produce is frozen for year-round consumption, saving the couple what Zubko estimates to be $1,500 in groceries annually.

In addition to rubbernecking drivers, Zubko’s garden attracts neighbors. Passersby often stop to take photos, and it’s not unusual for folks to stop and chat with her while she plants, waters and harvests. “That’s what’s so great about having a front-yard vegetable garden. I’ve had so many people knock on my door or stop by when I’m outside, and I give away stuff to people passing on the sidewalk,” she said. “It brings people together.”

Aiming to teach others the joys of growing their own food, the social media expert and website designer launched the YouTube gardening channel ReSprout in 2020.

Growing food “is not as complicated as everyone thinks,” she said. “I’m trying to break down that barrier and make food more sustainable for people. If I can do it, anyone can.”

NORTH BABYLON

Karen Szomoru, 55, of North Babylon, realized she was running out of garden space in her backyard last year, so she repurposed three large wooden boxes into raised beds, set them beside her driveway in front of her house, which borders her neighbor’s backyard, and filled them with tomato and basil plants.

“There’s no fence between us, so I told them I was going to set them up and that they could pick whatever they wanted,” said Szomoru, who works as a member services counselor for AAA in Farmingdale.

She’s planning to expand her front-yard garden this year, perhaps with butternut squash, a favorite, and pumpkins. “They both spread and crawl, and if they run over the grass, then I won’t have to mow,” she said. “I’m also toying with the idea of making arches with cattle panels [sections of fencing used to contain livestock] for my cucumbers.”

“Everything I do in the garden is on a whim. You never know what will end up where,” Szomoru said, adding that her garden gets a lot of “volunteers” — plants that sprout on their own in her homemade compost.

“Whatever it ends up being will be pretty,” she said, adding that she enjoys combining edibles with perennial ornamentals in garden beds and containers. “Once, I planted rainbow Swiss chard in my flower garden and cherry tomatoes by the front door,” she said. “It’s very cool to mix [vegetables] into my flower garden. .  .  . It’s like a little slice of heaven.”

ELMONT

Five years ago, Mike Eubank of Elmont found 15-year-old cucumber, tomato, pepper, pea and marigold seeds in his parents’ home and decided to try growing them at home.

“The whole backyard was full of my cars and concrete, and the soil was poor,” he said, so he planted them in his front yard.

“Once I tasted the first tomatoes,” Eubank said, “I was hooked.” So the next year, he bought a variety of new seeds, dug up his entire lawn and “packed as many plants as possible” into neat rows in his new 20-by-30-foot garden.

Eubank planted a towering privacy border of sunflowers around the perimeter to “camouflage” the peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, corn, grapes, figs, berries, ground cherries, herbs, lettuce and other plants, but he found the garden still “turned a few heads,” he said. “But none of the neighbors complained about it, and they were all definitely happy when I gave them some vegetables.”

This year’s garden will be bittersweet for Eubank. His father, John Eubank, who let him take those first seeds home years ago, died in July. “I know he was pretty impressed by my garden, and having his approval meant everything to me.”