A garden of edible delights

When Jack Vecia returns in April from his winter in Florida, he barges right into the garden and starts pruning his fruit trees.

For two weeks he attacks the apples, cherries, plums, pears, peaches, and apricots growing in his Burlington backyard.

"They last longer when you prune them, and they produce better fruit," says Jack.

Indeed, we are sitting under the shade of a robust 40-year-old cherry tree, and the evidence of Jack's pruning is everywhere in the shapely, graceful fruit trees.

The peaches are just beginning to ripen to that glorious colour that can only be captured by the best artists.

"What kind are they?" I ask Jack.

"I don't know, I call them 'Friend of Mine Peaches'."

The fruit trees came from everywhere over the last 40 years, from friends, and from Sicily where Jack grew up on a farm.

And it is not just one type of fruit per tree. No, Jack is a master graftsman. So on a peach tree he may have 4 types.

He is still grafting new varieties of fruit. On one apple tree he shows me the newly grafted Mutsu, which will join Golden Delicious, Red Delicious and Macintosh for harvesting in the fall. Jack guesses he is growing 30 to 40 different kinds of fruit.

His immaculate garden of edible delights is smack dab in the middle of suburban Burlington. As we walk through his garden his neighbor yells over the fence, "Are you giving another horticulture lesson Jack?"

Oh yes, there is much to learn here. Everything is grown organically. The crops are rotated. Every weed is pulled before it has a chance to go to seed. The soil is conditioned each year and treated with reverence.

"Every year I bring in truckloads of two-year-old aged manure. I mix sheep and rabbit manure and my own compost and dig it into the soil."

We are walking along pristine, raked paths, passing corn and eggplant and flat beans. This July morning he has just finished planting cauliflower and broccoli, crops he will harvest in the fall.

"This is rapinni, 40, 60 and 90 days. If we have a warm fall, the 90-day will be delicious. We cook it with spaghetti."

There is a lot of talk about food in Jack's garden. I ask him the impossible.

"What's your favorite thing to eat from the garden?"

"Kathy, I love it all. When the asparagus comes up, I love the asparagus, when the first lettuces are picked, I love them. But if I had to pick one, I'd say the tomatoes. I like them fresh with a little salt and some good Italian bread."

The tomatoes, yes, Jack has been picking ripe tomatoes since late June. Early ones he started in the greenhouse he shares with his brother.

There are rows and rows of tomatoes, some already so big they are staked to thick bars of reinforcing rod.

Beefsteak, roma, and cherry tomatoes. All unnamed, all selected over 40 years of trial and error.

"I save all my own seed from the best tomatoes. Then I know exactly what I am getting each year."

We walk by two vigorous tomato plants growing in containers.

"I grow these for my friend Tony. When he has fresh tomatoes in the house, he can't sleep at night."

Jack and his wife Mena bottle 150 jars of homemade tomato sauce each year. But it is not made from Jack's tomatoes.

"I like to eat fresh tomatoes from my garden, but they aren't the best for making sauce. Mena and I go out to a farm near Cayuga and pick tomatoes. They're grown in clay soil and they're sweeter. My soil is sandy."

The making of the sauce is a big assembly-line operation. Bushel baskets sit on a big picnic table, under the shade of a 30-year-old fruit tree, close to the basil patch and the homemade barbecue.

And the barbecue just might be stoked with - you guessed it - Jack's homemade charcoal.

That's where those fruit trees pruned in April come into the picture.

"Nothing goes to waste here," says Jack. "I don't throw anything away." The twigs from the fruit trees I use to start the barbecue, the biggest branches I save for the fireplace, and the medium-sized branches I use to make charcoal."

So, sometime between the pruning, the planting, the weeding and watering, Jack finds time to make charcoal.

He puts 3- to 4-inch diameter fruit tree branches in the barbecue and stands over them as they char, occasionally whacking them into smaller pieces. When he deems them ready, he pours them into metal pails for storage.

"Oh, when you taste food barbecued over cherry or apple wood, it's the best."

I have been to a barbecue at Jack's. And I've tasted giant scampi and tender sea bass from that wood-fired barbecue. Those were just the appetizers.

The real focus of the evening was the fig festival. I haven't even begun to tell you about the figs Jack grows in old Zone 6 Burlington. Italian figs, white ones, black ones, each and every one luscious.

The fig trees are scattered over Jack's large garden, in the open or against the house, next to the moscado grapes, where they love the extra heat from the brick. The best way he's found to keep them alive in a cold climate is to bury them late each fall.

He digs a large deep trench, slices around the roots of the fig trees and pushes them over into their "graves". Then he piles all the soil from the hole over them, mounds up extra soil, and covers this little mogul with a tarp.

It is the last big job he does before he and Mena head to Florida to relax for the winter. In Florida Jack doesn't have a garden. The idea there was to walk on the beach, spend time with his wife, play bocce.

"But now I am looking after four or five of my friends' gardens. 'Jack,' they say, 'can you graft some lemons on this tree for me, or tangerines?' Sometimes I have to make excuses."

We finish our talk, underneath the cherry tree, back where we started.

"I love my garden, I can stay in it for hours and hours, none of it is work."

Jack offers me coffee, Mena offers ice cream, and we talk about the future.

"My friend Tony brought me a 45-pound watermelon last year, I saved the seeds and planted this spring. You have to come back in August for some watermelon, and tomatoes of course."