Homegrown: Kitchen Garden Tour returns for 10th year this Sunday

Local backyard food growers will open up their garden gates for Dirt magazine’s Kitchen Garden Tour this Sunday, July 28.

Equipped with a map and descriptions of each garden, ticketholders embark on a self-guided tour at 10 a.m., hopping from one local veggie patch to the next. At each plot, they explore the gardens and meet with the green-thumbed owners to learn new tips. Select ticketholders joing the gardeners Dirt at Meadow Blues afterwards from 5 - 7 p.m. Everyone votes for their favorite gardens at the end of the day, and winners are announced at the event.

The tour is entering its 10th year this Sunday, with over a dozen gardens to see, including some past favorites.

Fig trees and flowers

Dawn Mele’s garden tied for first place in 2022. She has has been cultivating her garden since she was born; growing up, her mother always had a big garden in the family’s Vernon backyard.

“I always grew up with something to pick or something to grow,” Mele said. Today, Mele and her husband live in the same house she grew up in after they purchased it 25 years ago.

The house looks a little bit different now, but the nourishing soil persists. Mele’s current garden was a post-COVID project. She started out by just growing vegetables, to which she soon added cut flowers.

Mele grows her sprawling garden from seed, always introducing new plants and projects. Her favorite time-saving gadget in her garden is drip-irrigation, which is easy and convenient, and also saves water.

Mele’s garden is predominately made up of raised beds, built by her husband, a carpenter. But she also has a greenhouse for special projects, like citrus trees, olive trees, her orchid collection and cacti.

“I don’t plant the same thing twice,” Mele said. “It teaches me something new every day. It teaches me patience.”

Mele’s garden is one of her favorite places to be, and she’s excited to welcome like-minded gardeners into her space to commiserate over garden defeats and share the joy of “little victories.”

Nut trees and honeyberries in the ‘food forest’

Notable Kitchen Garden Tour alum April and Rocco Perciballi are thrilled to be showing their garden again this year.

April grew up around her mom’s garden; she didn’t have much interest in the veggie patch as a child, but as she grew up, she “remembered how good the vegetables were,” and decided to start her own garden in 1999.

“We originally just dug up some dirt and planted some tomatoes,” April said. The tomatoes thrived in their first year, and April went to bed excited to harvest them in the morning. When she woke up, “the tyrannosaurus deer,” had eaten every single one of her tomatoes. The next season, the Perciballi’s added a fence to their plot.

Now, the Perciballis have what April calls “a permanent garden” at their Lafayette, N.J. home. She grows peas, eggplants, garlic, asparagus, zucchini, sweet potatoes and tomato varieties, her favorite being the sun golds.

Rocco has his own vegetable garden “to grow all the stuff I won’t grow,” April said. He also continues to add new experimental plants to the garden. Nut trees, figs and honeyberries are some of the plants that are just beginning to fruit in Rocco’s “food forest.”

The Perciballis are vegan, and eat or can much of their food directly from the garden. They also have three kids and six grandkids, who like to help them take care of any surplus berries.

In addition to experimental plants, the Perciballis added new amendments to their soil; additional calcium and natural fertilizers have helped their garden thrive this season.

“You have to nurture the soil,” April said. She also tried mixing up her raised beds, growing different vegetables together, which has also made for a successful season thus far. She said these trials are “a chance to reduce the amount of work and increase the harvest.”

Farmer-led gardening

Fourth-generation farmer Chris Pawelski will be showing his garden this year. Located in the historic black dirt region, Pawelski plots “a lot of offbeat stuff that’s you’re not going to find anywhere else.”

“I was a conventional onion farmer until COVID,” he explained.

The pandemic disrupted traditional farming markets, and in response, Pawelski and his wife, Eve, pivoted from growing onions to cultivating niche crops such as purple string beans and white peppers.

The Pawelskis run the farm independently and gifted parcels of land to to former farm workers to grow their own food.

“I have the space, so I’m not looking to charge them,” Pawelski said. “If they want anything they pick, they take it home.”

The lifetime farmer has an arsenal of unique tips and tricks to keep pests at bay -- like spraying his crops with purple Kool-Aid to deter birds and small animals. His cats, Oreo and Squatty, also take care of intruders.

Meet these gardeners and more at this year’s Kitchen Garden Tour Sunday, July 28. Tickets can be purchased at kitchengardentours.com