Interview with Stephanie Bella

This interview was conducted on February 26, 2011 in the kitchen of Stephanie Bella’s home over a perfectly brewed pot of coffee.  Full disclosure on this interview, she is my younger sister, for the purpose of the interview I asked her to pretend we were not related and that I did not know her back story.  I choose to interview her because we were both taught as kids the same valuable lessons of farming, gardening and preserving a harvest and knew this would be valuable information for my research topic.

Christina Todd: Tell me how the garden started.

Stephanie Bella: We are poor, we both work two jobs and can never seem to get ahead, and we had cut our budget time and time again and still couldn’t find the money to pay for everything.  I was having a really bad day after making another call to another utility company begging for more time to pay the bills.  I was crying at our patio door when it dawned on me, I own land, I know how to work land, I know how to grow things and preserve things, I am totally going grow stuff as much as I can to help with our grocery bill this summer.

CT: How did you know how to do these things?

SB:  My grandma taught me.  I grew up on an apple farm in California, farming is in my blood.  My grandparent’s land produced so much food.  There where berry bushes, plum trees, orange trees, lemon trees, a huge garden was planted every year, there was an herb garden and when I was about 12 they even installed a green house to continue to grow through the whole year.  I can jar with the best of them, make strawberry jams and syrups, all sorts of good stuff.  It was weird when I was old enough to be in school and realized that most of my classmates didn’t do any of this stuff.

CT: How did you start?

SB: I have Scott (her husband) remove all the sod on the left hand side of the house and just started growing stuff, before I knew it I had kind of an obsession going.  After the first year we put in the berry bushes and the fruit trees and I packed every space I could with a food producing plant.

CT:  How much does this really help you, is it really worth the time and energy?

SB: For sure.  Don’t get me wrong, we still struggle, especially in early spring when the harvest runs out and the new one has yet to be produced, buy my grocery bill certainly feels relief at harvest time.  We even compost our own stuff now, I feel good about that, it makes me feel very environmentally savvy.

CT: Tell me about your homemade baby food.

SB: I make my own baby food with fruit and veggies from my garden and a food processor, I pureed tons of vegetables and fruit from our garden last year and froze them, and that is what Charlie has been eating since he started on solid foods.