Expressway: Impatient again to get planting

I grew up in a small house on Manhasset Bay in Port Washington. It sat between Clifton's boat storage yard and Augie's Italian restaurant, just about five feet from Shore Road. The only gardening we did was to clip a privet hedge near the sidewalk -- and in some years, even that didn't get done.

The rear yard was small and would have been the envy of modern environmentalists. No fertilizer or pesticides ever touched it. Weeds had free reign.

So it's a surprise to me that I would someday become a passionate gardener.

I was first attracted to horticulture at age 20 by the PBS TV series "Crockett's Victory Garden." Jim Crockett's gardens in Boston were tidy and symmetrically laid out. They appealed to my sense of order.

In a year or so, my wife and I had a yard big enough to attempt a vegetable garden. At our house in Port Washington, I built four raised beds, each 6 feet by 12 feet. That is when I learned my first gardening lesson -- bigger is not necessarily better, and usually means more work. But I went at it with gusto and made many mistakes -- blocking the sun by putting tall tomato plants in front of short carrots, for instance.

When we moved to a house with a bigger yard, still in Port Washington, I built smaller raised beds, but used the intensive method called "square-foot gardening" to grow more vegetables in limited space.

Eventually, I learned how to create landscape borders. Masses of tulips and daffodils can produce colorful floral waves in spring. Dense forsythia and purple butterfly bushes soften the look of a concrete wall.

The Cornell Cooperative Extension of Nassau County gave me advice on soil compaction, insects, shrubs, flowers and plant diseases. Its volunteer master gardeners were a great source of information. I eventually studied to be a master gardener. The training was extensive and interesting.

When I retired and moved out east to Cutchogue, I stopped growing vegetables. I figured it was cheaper to buy produce at local farm stands than to spend time and effort growing my own. But I soon realized that I missed what had attracted me to gardening in the first place: the creativity of planning a garden, the feeling of accomplishment when my landscape design explodes with the colors of white, pink and blue hydrangea, dark red weigela and red crape myrtle. And there's the enjoyment of eating my gnarly heirloom tomatoes, dark green acorn squash and crisp sugar snap peas.

So, my inner gardener, which had slept through a few recent growing seasons, is awake again.

New raised beds await the tender eggplant, tomato, pepper and squash seedlings. Landscape borders will change as new oakleaf hydrangea take the place of older overgrown rhododendron that will be moved to more spacious locations. And I'm volunteering at the Peconic Land Trust's community gardens in Southold, where I hope to share my master gardener skills.

My growing interest is alive and in full bloom as I anxiously look forward to a new season in the dirt.

Reader Peter J. Zwerlein lives in Cutchogue.