Let`s say Victor Mongelli`s oceanfront land in Ventnor, N.J., near Atlantic City, is worth $1 million. It could be worth more; it could be worth less-land`s value, after all, is judged by the person holding the money. But let`s say it would go for a million.
How much, then, would one of his tomatoes be worth-$50, as some astonished urban refugees say when they pass what could be the most expensive vegetable garden in the world? How would you price a head of Victor Mongelli`s lettuce-$200, maybe? A bowl of minestrone from this garden would represent a capital investment.
Well, it`s all good fun, but it is something to think about. Here is Mongelli, living on the last land before the ocean, dirt that has become more valuable than diamonds in Atlantic City`s casino-driven economy, and he plants vegetables on it. We`re talking about three lots, probably less than half an acre. His big white house covers one lot; the garden takes up the rest. Mongelli has no idea what it`s worth.
”The house down the street was just built on a lot like this,” Mongelli says. ”It sold for $600,000.”
Just for the lot?
”No,” he says, ”the house and the lot. This lot is on the beach and is worth more than that lot was. So this lot could be worth $400,000, $500,000. But that`s not the point. We don`t want to sell it. We want this view.”
Something to do
Then he waves his hand to the house directly across the street. It`s kind of the same situation. Only instead of a vegetable garden there`s a lawn, which may make each blade of grass worth . . . enough already. ”He has a lawn; we have a garden,” Mongelli says. ”It gives me something to do.”
A Ventnor real estate agent said she, like anybody else who has been on the Ventnor boardwalk, knows the Mongelli garden. She asked that she not be identified and seemed embarrassed even to talk about what has happened to the price of land around Atlantic City in the last 10 years. She didn`t want to guess what Mongelli`s land might be worth but conceded that the ”standard price ranges from $400,000 to $700,000”-per lot.
He`s vaguely aware of such things, but Mongelli doesn`t spend much time thinking about it; 1988 is a year in which such moneymen as Donald Trump are celebrated as heroes of the masses. Mongelli is 72. He comes from a different time and place; his attachment is to concepts he may not even fathom. But somewhere inside him is the understanding that money can`t get you the feeling of eating a pepper you grew from seed.
The garden is his now, a legacy from his father-in-law, John Simei, who died last year at 92. Simei`s father before him was a farmer in Italy, and later in Brazil. Simei himself was a successful businessman who never disconnected from the earth. In 1947, he bought the Ventnor property for $50,000, not a small price even in those days, and began what would become one of the most celebrated truck patches on the shore.
Dedicated to dirt
Mongelli-who, with his wife, Elizabeth, lived with his father-in-law-was reared in Philadelphia, where there was no yard, no dirt and, therefore, no garden. His parents had come from Avellino, near Naples, however, and in that part of the world, there is no such thing as grass and lawnmowers. Where there is dirt, there is food. So you might say Mongelli had it in his genes. He became second-in-command-that is, he prepared the ground. The actual planting was done by Simei.
Simei had his own way of doing things. He watered the plants his own way. He spaced them according to his own methods. He planted lots of peas, because he loved peas. He was content to do things his father-in-law`s way, because if there`s anything more valuable than food you have grown yourself, it`s respect for old people. Four years ago, Simei, ailing, passed the hoe to Mongelli.
”The garden was for him,” Mongelli says. ”He loved to come out and look at it.”
Now that his father-in-law is gone, Mongelli keeps planting, and if you ask him why, all he can say is it`s just a hobby.
Rain, maybe the only rain of the summer so far, is making love to Mongelli`s plants. Beyond the garden, rough weather has roiled up the Atlantic, and it`s breaking with great noisy waves on a gray beach. On his back porch, looking from some angles like Pablo Picasso, is Mongelli. He is tan and solid; he has the smile of a man who has much to look forward to. His hands, like the hands on Michelangelo`s ”David,” are oversize and flat and knotty, victims of arthritis, a college boxing career that never knew a loss, and gardening.
He started almost everything in his garden from seed inside the house and transplanted when the weather was safe. Almost all the seeds are standard varieties except for hot frying peppers, whose seeds were used by Simei and may have come over from the old country.
Mongelli walks through the garden, a tour guide in the rain. ”This row is bell peppers,” he says. ”The next row is Roma beans. That`s an Italian bean. Big bean. I love them. You eat the pod and all, like string beans.”
He passes honeydew melons, two kinds of tomatoes, radishes, sweet basil, onions, shallots and mounds of sweet potatoes. The Mighty Joe Young of cabbages grows up out of the foundation of the garage, an orphan seed that rooted there on its own. At least four fig trees along the porch fight the northern climate. There`s no other way to eat a fig except fresh, but keeping the subtropical tree alive through the New Jersey winter exacts a heavy price in labor.
Mongelli stops and bends down over the carrots. ”I thin `em out every so often,” he says, yanking at them where they grow too close. Suddenly he looks up with a Santa Claus smile. ”See how nice they are. You want some?”
Absolutely.
Lettuce to go
”I`ll give you lettuce to take home, too. How many you want?” he says, pulling carrots out with abandon. ”They`ve got a different flavor. You`re right. The basil. You wanted to see the basil. This is your basil. You take a piece like this and you cut it off,” he says, using his fingernails to nip the top off a plant. In a few days the plant will send two shoots out where he nipped the single shaft.
Then to the lettuce. Where he has cut off a head, the other heads will grow larger because they now have extra space.
Such is gardening. You clip one shoot and it makes two. The seeds from one hot pepper grow bushels next year. Forget for a moment $50 tomatoes and $200 heads of lettuce grown on a million-dollar lot. Instead, think of Victor Mongelli`s garden, and how he makes it multiply, and then how he eats from it and freezes it and stores some in the cellar to get him through winter. And, maybe best of all, how he gives it away, because giving it away makes his labor sweeter. –
