15 Italian Immigrant Vegetables You Plant Once And Harvest For Years

Subscribe to the channel:    / @forgottengardenamerica   👉 Forgotten Garden Ebook on How To Start Saving Money: https://forgottengarden.netlify.app/ In 1922, a stonecutter's wife from Cosenza planted fifteen vegetables in the backyard of a row house on Union Street in Brooklyn — and never planted most of them again. She had carried the crowns wrapped in wet newspaper from a cousin in Bensonhurst, who had carried them off a ship from Calabria. Every one of them came back the following spring without being asked. Fourteen were still producing when her granddaughter married in that backyard in 1962. She never called it a garden — she called it the yard. The one plant she put in the ground first — on the day she understood she was not going home — is number one on this list. She was not unusual. In every Italian block in Brooklyn, in South Philadelphia, in the North End of Boston, in the Hill in Pittsburgh, there were women doing exactly what she had done — carrying crowns, cuttings, and root divisions from plants the American grocery store had never heard of, plants that came back without replanting for thirty, forty, fifty years. That knowledge made the Italian immigrant garden a different thing from the American seasonal garden — not a project, not a season, but a permanent arrangement with the ground. We let it die with the generation that built it.