Longing for Long Island's spring soil

When I lived in Bellmore, each spring I would eagerly anticipate planting season. Though that phrase prompts visions of muddy overalls to a girl who grew up in an apartment in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, it was that little patch of planet I bought when I was 30 that turned me into a gardener.

Tulip Lane, my nickname for the strip of earth that ran between my stone driveway and my neighbor’s wooden fence, boasted perky, bold tulips. The backyard flowerbeds’ New Guinea impatiens highlighted the curved perimeter of the larger beds of rosebushes and evergreens along the rear fence, including my huge hydrangea bushes that produced mopheads almost as big as soccer balls.

When I met my husband, Billy, we discovered our mutual interest in gardening, a skill he learned from his Ukrainian mother, whose gardens yielded a cornucopia of vegetables. Before Billy lived in Bellmore, he grew peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers in Bohemia and had a huge strawberry patch in Lindenhurst.

“My dad would talk of all the potato farms he saw when he moved from the Bronx in the 1950s,” said Billy, who grew up in Franklin Square and Elmont.

Long Island soil is fertile.

Billy transformed our Bellmore backyard, and for the first time in my 21 years of gardening, there was a vegetable patch. I was worried when his design grew to 9 feet by 12 feet and he started digging up all that sod! But it paid off. Year after year, we harvested kale, lettuces, cucumbers, and tomatoes so delicious they warranted exclamation points and my renaming “summer’s end” to “BLT season.”

When Billy and I were preparing to relocate to southern Delaware, he took cuttings of our prized Nikko blue hydrangea to plant on our new property.

The builder-planted Knock Out Roses and other Delaware plants are beautiful, but my hydrangea plant didn’t bloom. We chalked it up to transplant shock. The second year, nothing. The third year rendered one bloom so scrawny it didn’t warrant the term mophead. We replaced it with another locally purchased hydrangea, but it did poorly.

As for a vegetable garden, the deer were a problem, so we opted for potted tomato plants on our stone patio. After a long weekend away, we returned to leafless plants — the brazen deer were empowered by our absence. The next year, Billy built a raised bed surrounded by 3-foot-high chicken wire. The tomatoes survived. But when the mediocre offerings landed on our BLTs, we wistfully recalled our sumptuous Bellmore bounty: beefsteaks, Romas, Better Boys, cherry tomatoes. So prolific was our garden, we gave away produce.

Coincidentally, we’re surrounded by farms boasting cornfields as far as the eye can see. My former and present hometowns are part of the Atlantic Coastal Plain, have sandy soil and share the same USDA Plant Hardiness Zone, 7b. But no healthy hydrangeas.

Yet.

We’ve spoken to experts at local garden centers and will try again this spring, creating a new flowerbed along the side of the house, changing sun exposure and adding nutrients to the soil in hopes of replicating the Bellmore soccer-ball hydrangeas.

The BLTs? We still visit family, friends and neighbors on Long Island, some of whom have vegetable gardens. On our trip this summer, we’ll be sure to bring back some homegrown tomatoes.

 READER PAULA GANZI MCGLOIN now lives in Millsboro, Delaware.