ReportageFrom the start of the pandemic, a garden fever gripped New Yorkers. This return to the land in an urban environment is inherited from an old tradition: the “Victory Gardens”. Gardens cultivated in times of war and economic crisis to ensure self-sufficiency.
Like thousands of other New Yorkers, Chloe Van Waeyenberge spent her confinement in the green, in her second home on Long Island. From the first restrictions, on March 20, she began to bake her bread, then set aside fruit and vegetable seeds with the idea of sowing them. “We wanted to avoid going shopping as much as possible”, explains this volunteer paramedic and mother of a large family – four boys – who until then described herself as “Very urban” and “Zero in gardening”.
At the beginning of April, she germinated her seeds in egg cartons in front of a large window, before transplanting them with other young shoots bought in garden centers. Cauliflower and lettuce did not survive the insects, but she is still dumbfounded by the rest of her harvest, immortalized by photos bursting with freshness: basins of peppers, glossy rosemary, fuchsia radish, bunch of broccoli posed in the heart of a corolla of serrated leaves, bunches of green and red tomatoes and all the intermediate nuances … “Tomatoes, we had too many. And they are ten times better than the ones we bought. It’s amazing to eat what we have grown. It’s a reinvention! In New York, all my plants were dying. “
People “in finance or advertising”
At the same time, still on Long Island, Alexandre Guillot was cutting down a large fir tree to clear the sunniest spot in his garden in order to create a vegetable garden of 25 square meters, irrigated by an automatic system and protected from deer and deer. rabbits by a latticed wooden structure: the great means. Like Chloe Van Waeyenberge, this French real estate investor established in the United States for thirty years has carefully documented the growth of his tomato plants, which reached 1.80 m in two months, and all his summer pickings.
In total, “A harvest of madness” : mint, basil, thyme, tarragon, peppers, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, green and yellow zucchini, tomatoes not to know what to do with. The only downside, melons and watermelons rotted before reaching maturity. “The hardest part was finding things to plant, he asserts. Long Island garden centers have been taken by storm. Even the stock of coriander seeds was exhausted. “ Alexandre adds that almost all of his friends took to cultivation during the lockdown, not neo-murals, rather people “In finance or advertising”. Next year he wants to make corn and beans.
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