WEST STOCKBRIDGE — Because Ron says.
For decades, that’s been a common retort here in Western Massachusetts for gardeners who feel obliged to defend their decisions.
Why have you placed cedar shakes in the ground next to vegetable transplants?
Because Ron says. (They protect fledgling plants from the drying effects of wind.)
Why aren’t you mulching your herbs?
Because Ron says. (Herbs prefer dry conditions.)
Why are you placing stiff paper collars around your leeks?
Because Ron says. (It’s an alternative for blanching.)
We’re talking about Ron Kujawski, the Ron Kujawski: educator, horticultural consultant, lecturer, founding father of the Western Massachusetts Master Gardener Association — and the now-retired newspaper garden columnist who, for decades, has been telling readers what they should be doing (now!) and why.
“Because Ron says, because Ron says,” joked his wife, Patricia, mimicking the many spouses she’s run into who feign impatience for their beloveds’ obsessive, Ron-inspired gardening choices. But she gets it.
Indeed, it’s one thing to pick green tomatoes and place them on your windowsill for ripening. It’s another thing to pick green tomatoes and hasten their ripening by placing them in a paper bag with a ripe apple — because Ron says.
Yes, Kujawski, 78, a soft-spoken scientist who simply wants to embolden the world with the ennobling joys of gardening, has written his last gardening column, which appears in Saturday’s Eagle.
His Eagle column, “Garden Journal,” began 27 years ago with the words, “I should warn you. A poet I’m not, but when it comes to care of gardens, a nag I can be.”
The retirement of this benevolent nag also brings to an end a separate weekly “Gardener’s Checklist” column that Kujawski has written for various publications beginning in 1979.
“For 43 years, every week,” he said, letting out an exhausted sigh.
You can bet he agonized over today’s column. He’s agonized over all of them.
“It has reached the point where his stress is just too much,” said Patricia, his proofreader and the “CEO of Food Preservation” at the Kujawski homestead.
By the way, Kujawski didn’t want this story about him written. (Of course, he didn’t!)
“Do I have to?” he politely asked.
But you can’t be Ron Kujawski —the go-to gardening guru for generations of would-be, could-be, want-to-be home gardeners — and then simply disappear into your cabbage patch without comment.
“OK, OK, OK,” he relented, and then proceeded to prepare fresh-baked scones for the interview and set up a space to talk in his toasty greenhouse on a chilly October morning. The fall leaves gushed with the beautifully outlandish colors of decay. A murder of crows gave the bum’s rush to a hawk surveilling the neighbors’ chickens. Occupied with stern affairs, sparrows and wrens dropped in and out of the sky to help themselves to seeds exposed in freshly turned-over earth in Kujawski’s productive, quarter-acre garden that still has traces of corn rows from a distant past.
Here, in this garden, Kujawski continually experiments. He plants ornamental flowers with his vegetables to fake-out species looking for a free lunch. Here, he gets his exercise and his inspiration.
“It’s my retreat,” he said.
He delights in weeding on his hands and knees, “the holy crawl,” he calls it. He’s been doing the holy crawl since he was a boy, raised in a family of sharecroppers in Upstate New York.
He began the interview by rubbing his calloused hands together and declaring, “I don’t really have anything to say.”
And, of course, that’s flagrantly untrue.
His wife shakes her head before heading inside. She’s been known to give the universal gesture for “time to wrap it up” — running her hand across her neck — from the back of the room where he’s holding court, giving a talk. Those talks — which he still gives to garden clubs, horticultural students and whatnot — can extend deeply into overtime.
Ask him about anything — about pest control, compost, Canada thistle, soil structure, the effects of elevation on the taste of 32 varieties of garlic — and his answers will be systematic, protracted and good fun.
Which is ironic, considering the fact that, on the flip side, writing has been tortuous for him.
“I have never enjoyed writing,” he said.
Still, countless others have relished his written words, his orderly, oracular and often amusing gardening columns.
“Without slighting our local news, I confess I always skip to Ron Kujawski’s garden articles first before reading anything else,” said Naomi Blumenthal, a garden consultant who lives in Great Barrington. “It’s not so often that you see an incredibly vast knowledge of all things horticultural and insect-related mixed with such gentle humor and self-deprecation that it makes the knowing-ness not intimidating.”
“I so admire Ron’s expertise and his quiet way of sharing that knowledge with all of us in the gardening world,” said Page Dickey, the Connecticut-based author and garden designer.
“Ron is a horticultural hero to me,” said Jenna O’Brien, of Becket, owner of Viridissima Horticulture and Design.
Chief among his many fans is his longtime former editor at The Eagle, Lindsey Hollenbaugh, who now serves as The Eagle’s managing editor of content engagement.
“One summer, after we worked together for a few years, he invited me to visit his garden,” she recalled. “It felt like an invite to a celebrity’s home. … Imagining an Eagle weekend edition without Ron’s trustworthy advice of when to transplant tomato seedlings, or how to use up our surplus of squash, seems almost impossible. While I wish him a well-deserved, restful retirement, I know him better. Like he once told me, ‘There’s always weeds to be pulled.’”
In addition to Patricia, whom he met in college and married 54 years ago, Ron’s family includes two children and a grandchild. With his daughter, Jennifer, he co-wrote the book Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook, published by Storey in 2010.
For years, Kujawski had commuted from Great Barrington to his garden behind Jennifer’s West Stockbridge home. He and Patricia recently sold their home of nearly 50 years and moved in here, to be closer to their daughter, closer to his garden.
“He goes out to the garden in the morning, and if he remembers, he comes back in for lunch,” Patricia said.
When the westbound train blows through town at 5 p.m., he knows it’s time to head in for supper.
The garden is home. It always has been. Kujawski’s parents and extended family were onion farmers in the famous black dirt region of Florida, N.Y., in Orange County. He grew up working in those fields, weeding, pulling onions and marveling at the complex structure of wildflowers.
He still wears a jacket that had belonged to his father, who died in 1989. It’s the color of fieldstone.
Kujawski earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in biological sciences from the State University of New York, at Albany. He went on to develop and run for five years the environmental studies program at Simon’s Rock before taking a job with the University of Massachusetts as an extension educator in the Landscape, Nursery and Urban Forestry Program. Along the way, he was instrumental on the founding of the non-profit Northampton-based Western Massachusetts Master Gardener Association, a breeding ground for many of the region’s most talented gardeners.
And though retired from UMass, he continues to contribute scouting reports on pests, diseases and weather-related problems for UMass Extension’s Landscape Message newsletter and to serve on Berkshire Botanical Garden’s Horticulture Advisory Committee.
With the column writing out of his life, he said he’ll use that spare time to revisit his love for oil painting and playing guitar.
“More than anything else, I love being here,” Kujawski said, pointing down to the dirt of his garden.
Now if you’ll excuse him, it’s time to till his mustard greens into the soil in preparation for a late October planting of garlic. You see, it’s best for those greens to decay in the soil for about two weeks before planting the garlic.
Ron says.
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