Living off the land, in Port Chester
October 2, 2024 at 11:43 p.m.
Sophia Fragiacomo celebrated her first birthday on Oct. 1.
A week before the occasion, she was gleefully demonstrating how successfully she had found her legs. It was dusk, and as if challenging one to a race, she’d intensely lock her moon-like, dark eyes with anyone who would look before zipping through the rows of her family garden. Passing the patty pans, the prolific butternut squash, she headed straight toward tomato ally, where inevitably, and strategically, she plopped—right in front of her favorite snack.
“The kids, they learn to work with us, or play alongside us while we’re working, and it’s good for them. You’ll see, they just pick and eat their own vegetables,” said Sophia’s father, Greg. “They get most of the vegetables out here, they’ll just pick it fresh and eat it.”
On cue, Sophia started crying.
“She thought it was a tomato,” her mother Mary called out, laughing. “She was trying to eat a hot pepper, and I took it away.”
In Port Chester, a Village often characterized by its high density with more than 30,000 people living in a 2.4-square-mile area, the Fragiacomo family looks to live off the land.
John Fragicomo, 3, helps his mother Mary pick a cucuzza gourd from a vine, one of the unusual seeds the family chose to experiment with this year.By Sarah Wolpoff
Over the last three years, they’ve converted their quarter-acre sized property on Indian Road into an operation that, with meticulous planning, feeds them through the winter. Akin to micro-farming, a trend popular among sustainability-driven and mindful eating folks in urban areas, their set up is slated to produce a harvest totaling over 630 pounds this year.
During a time when inflation and grocery price increases engulf the public rhetoric, the Fragiacomo family has at least one burden lifted—they don’t go to the store for produce anymore and have gotten their production cost down to just under $2.50 a pound, Greg said.
“And that’s for fresh, organic vegetables,” he continued. “Every year, we’re improving our cost per pound ratio. It’s a little nerdy to have all these numbers, but we enjoy it.”
After Greg and Mary got married in 2016, they rented the Indian Road house from his grandmother, and three years later, ultimately purchased it. That’s when they started transforming the space.
It began with a small tomato plot, “but then we got frustrated with the way it was going,” Greg said. So, they started reading—seeking farming and gardening books to study, with every word fueling a newfound passion that they didn’t anticipate having.
When their son John, now 3 years old, was born, the garden vastly expanded beyond the traditional tomato plot. Children, Mary said, were a driver.
“The biggest inspiration for me has been the kids, that I want them to be as healthy as I can make them,” she said. “If I ate McDonald’s or a doughnut, it didn’t matter so much. But when we had John, I got into this mindset of: ‘What am I feeding him? How is he going to be healthy? What’s in the food?’ I wanted to give him the best head start he could have. And here, we’re not spraying anything, I know where it’s coming from, and I know it’s healthy.”
Greg, recalling stories from his grandmother, said he’s also pulled inspiration from the stories he heard growing up of Victory Gardens—a wartime movement encouraging residents to reduce pressures on the food supply by growing their own produce. Modern day micro-farmers often see them with a lens of new relevance: to detach from dependency on the mass-produced food industry.
Books taught the couple most of what they know—they started reading about farming a lot, because studying also comes naturally to them.
It’s funny, Greg remarked, how a world so connected makes people so distracted. That’s why they’ve made their home a “safe zone.” They don’t own a television, there is no internet connection, and their smartphones don’t have data. They read, they garden, and they parent John and Sophia.
“I feel like, at their age, we can be much more focused with them, as opposed to standing there on my phone while trying to talk to or play with John,” Greg said.
Sophia, 1, noshes on a sweet Roma sauce tomato while her 3-year-old brother John helps their mother Mary collect produce from the garden’s tomato rows.By Sarah Wolpoff
“Phones, social media, it can be so addicting. I think it can be very positive, I can see my friends and their pictures, but I don’t need it 24/7; we have a boundary,” Mary added. “When we got rid of all of it, my productivity skyrocketed, and I don’t think I was even that attached to it. Now that time I used to spend scrolling, I’m looking for these projects to do instead.”
Those projects, often, revolve around the garden.
In the Fragiacomos’ backyard, they’ve constructed a 30-by-30 plot that was once just grass. Mary, an artist who now stays at home full-time with the children, drew the designs. Greg, an operations manager engineer, builds up the space and works with the numbers.
The soil is comprised of layers of rotting leaves, dirt and compost. “The leaves provide nutrients, kind of like compost,” Greg said. “It breaks down and provides nutrients for the plants to feed off of.”
One row, the first after walking thought the swinging wooden gate, barely gets touched. “It’s stuff that comes back every year,” Greg said, like strawberries, rhubarb and asparagus.
“Then we have seven rows, and those we rotate with different crops,” he continued. From beets, turnips and squash varieties to green beans, okra and carrots, Greg said they’ve grown 60 different varieties of fruits and vegetables. They harvest peppers, eggplant and watermelons, as well as an overwhelming number of tomatoes—in their peak, they’d collect over 10 pounds a day.
Every year, the couple charmingly laughed, they try to incorporate something unusual. This season, it’s their “gootza,” Italian slang for cucuzza, a long, thin gourd that grows on vines.
“The garlic is one of my favorites to grow,” Greg said, moving into his garage to show the dozens of bulbs hanging to dry. “One head will give you eight or nine cloves, and then you just replant it. My great uncle in Vermont gave us three heads of organic garlic, and now we have so much that we hang it around the house and just use it throughout the year.”
Outside of the garden, they’ve planted trees. Leading to the backyard is the beginning of an archway, young apple trees Mary has tied into fan-like positions to train their growth trajectory. One tree, on the edge of the property, belongs to John—an Italian plum planted when he was born. Another, a persimmon in the front yard, is for Sophia.
The front yard, perfect for the season, also sees a corn and pumpkin patch.
“We learned from a few books we read, the Native Americans would plant what they call The Three Sisters,” Greg explained. “It’s corn, and then pumpkins that grow around it, and string beans that climb the stalks. And they all feed each other, it all helps. The beans provide nitrogen for the corn, and the pumpkins keep the rodents out.”
Every day, when the family collects their produce, they take their rewards to their back porch to weigh and log the haul. Then, Mary blanches the produce accordingly to freeze—they’ve filled a basement chest freezer, the biggest one they could buy, to the brim. Throughout the winter, when there’s nothing left to harvest, Mary will spend her time tapping into their storage to make soups and sauces.
“What’s the most satisfying is when we sit down for dinner and you realize there’s nothing from the grocery store,” Mary smiled. And that’s particularly possible when the couple is actively hunting, which they prefer.
Through their space on a quarter-acre of land, the Fragicomo family grows over 60 different varieties of fruits and vegetables, enough to keep them sustained throughout the entire year.By Sarah Wolpoff
Before starting their garden production, Greg and Mary were already the outdoorsy type—they met downhill biking in New Jersey. Upon starting a family, they realized their hobbies needed to shift; some were too time-consuming, and others not worth the risk of injury.
Hunting, specifically with a bow, was a sport to keep. Mary, as Greg touted, is an expert, and it aligns with their philosophy of living off the land.
“Don’t let her fool you, she’s an expert on deer,” Greg laughed. “She knows their biology, how they work, the way they think, where they sleep.”
“It makes you appreciate and actually love the animal, which is kind of ironic,” Mary added, noting the respect for nature encourages them to prevent food waste. “There’s nothing against grocery stores, I love the convenience of them. But when you go to the store, nothing has a face. You buy your meat, and you don’t know where it comes from. There’s no relationship towards it, so it’s easy to dispose of. Everyone wastes so much meat and vegetables, but with us, nothing goes to waste because we put so much work into it.”
With young children, the couple doesn’t get to hunt as much as they’d like—and even if they could, they’re out of freezer space to store the gains. But it’s something over the next few years they’d like to incorporate into their lives more, all on the path of total self-sufficiency.
It’s a philosophy they started embracing for their children, and John and Sophia, whether they know it or not, are already learning the ways.
There’s no struggle in the Fragiacomo household to get the kids to eat their vegetables. As it is, Mary and Greg hardly get to try their grapes and cherry tomatoes; the kids beat them to it when a snack is ready for the picking.
And they also already know the value of a book.
When John was born, he loved the Peter Rabbit stories, Greg said. And reading the tales over and over again aligned masterfully with the couple’s farming journey.
In honor of the children’s book, and thus in honor of their children, Greg and Mary brandished the gate to their garden with a plaque that reads: “Mr. McGregor’s Garden.” Though it’s a space named after a character keen on keeping critters out, the couple is opposingly eager to keep their children in—where they can continue to grow with the plants, while learning to play, read and appreciate their food.
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