On the record with Rich Tobiasz

From the Sunday, July 20, 2008 edition of the Northwest Herald:

On the record with... Rich Tobiasz
At the end of a long day at the Spring Grove Fire Protection District, Chief Rich Tobiasz relaxes by tending to more than an acre of gardens at his home.

Tobiasz, a master gardener, has been the town’s fire chief for the past 15 years.

When he’s not at the firehouse, he grows a wide variety of vegetables, herbs and fruits at his Spring Grove home.

Tobiasz moved to the area from Chicago after graduating from high school and has lived there since.

He relishes in the rural atmosphere, which complements the passion for botany that he’s had since childhood.

From the Japanese gardens to his bulb garden, Tobiasz said he and his wife spent about four hours gardening daily – as well as tending to their sheep, goat and chickens.

All their produce is grown organically, and the couple even garden through winter months.

Tobiasz sat down with reporter Diana Sroka to talk about his passion for gardening.

Sroka: How long have you been gardening?

Tobiasz: There’s pictures of me in my busia’s – “busia” is Polish for grandmother – in her garden at age 2 with a rake in my hand in my garden.

Sroka: What do you plant?

Tobiasz: Just about everything in the way of vegetables. A lot of tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, onions, squash, corn and an orchard ... and we do some small fruits, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries.

Sroka: What do you do with all the fruit and vegetables?

Tobiasz: Freeze it, can it, eat it, give some away to the food pantry, and that’s pretty much what we do with it.

Sroka: Has there ever been a major catastrophe in the garden?

Tobiasz: We had the corn blow down one year with a big storm. We grow small patches of sweet corn, and it knocked it down one year. We periodically have a Colorado potato beetle problem. Pretty common. This year’s kind of tough because there’s been so much rain that the weeds are growing faster than the gardens, so we’re spending more time weeding than usual. Drought years are very tough. But no one major catastrophe.

Sroka: What about the winter?

Tobiasz: We do some winter gardening. I have a small heated greenhouse, and we have experimented with something called a high tunnel, or a hoop house. ... We ate lettuce through Jan. 15 last year; we ate lettuce from the high tunnel. Then we started planting in the greenhouse, transferred it to the hoop house, and by March 15, we were eating fresh lettuce this year.

Sroka: What advice can you give to someone who wants to get into gardening?

Tobiasz: Do it, that’s the first one. I would say, take a class if you can. There are plenty of seminars, things like Garden Fest at the college in the spring, take a class that can give you some basics. Read everything you can about gardening because there’s plenty of information out there. And grow things you like.