Your Incredible Neighbors: Gardener grows bulk of crop for Community Food Bank

Off the beaten path and through a barely marked dirt road in Sahuarita lies a plot of land known as the Allen J. Ogden Community Garden.

A project of the Green Valley Garden Club, it’s an important part of life for about 20 gardeners, including Angelo Lascala, who handles five 10-by-40-foot plots.

He plants, tends and harvests his plentiful crops of tomatoes, squash, eggplant, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers and onions.

Paying no mind to the intense heat on a recent August afternoon, Lascala showed off some of the produce he’s so proud of.

Now 87, he says he’s been gardening for over 70 years. He describes his close attachment to the land by saying, “I was born the son of an immigrant sharecropper in the eastern part of the country. In my formative years, I acquired a love of the soil, which has become a part of my life.”

Living in Middletown, N.Y. in the Catskill Mountain region, he said, his father owned a huge truck farm and they would truck their produce to markets in New York City. Working with his father, he learned what it took to produce quality crops, and the knowledge has remained.

The soil, which was an important part of Lascala’s formative years, has become an important part of his senior years.

Producing hefty quantities of vegetables way beyond what any couple could consume, Lascala gives some of his crop away, but donates most of it to the Community Food Bank.

So far this year, he has donated 1,300 pounds. Included were 500 pounds of a top tomato crop, which he says typically takes 88 days from planting to picking.

For the year-round gardening, Lascala says, the Green Valley Garden Club furnished the irrigation, shed, tools, fencing and port-a-potty. “The owner of the land provides the water; we pay $10 per plot per month. In the summer, we water twice a day for 30 minutes at a time.”

Looking about the expanse of garden, there’s corn, watermelon, grapes, peppers and eggplant.

Lascala says, “We’ll try just about anything here; we’ll always try new varieties of vegetables. We tried artichokes, but what you get out of them it’s better to buy them. We plant tomatoes in July and have them from September through frost. Onions, we plant them in December and harvest them in April.”

As he said this, he handed over a shiny, white, perfectly formed one-pound onion.

Thanks to Richard Lundy and Gene and Alice Keene, there’s a professionally built wood gazebo on the premises, complete with cushioned chairs where gardeners can step in out of the heat and relax.

Asked why he doesn’t garden at home, Lascala’s answer was simple, “I don’t have room at home. I don’t have this much room. At home, it’s all cactus.”

Ellen Sussman is a freelance writer in Green Valley. Contact her at ellen2414@cox.net.