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Interview:

The Sebastiani Vegetable Garden

Vicki Sebastiani is a former co-owner of Viansa Winery in the Sonoma Valley of California. Vicki has been a vegetable gardener since the age of four. I visited Vicki a number of years ago to see her garden, renowned for its beauty and bounty. When I spoke with her, Vicki’s garden contained a hundred varieties of vegetables and herbs (most of them Italian), including red and yellow varieties of Italian tomatoes, white eggplant, Italian yellow and light green zucchini, giant cauliflower, variegated and red chicories, and her favorite, yellow romano beans.

Vicki’s vegetable garden was a special place. It was designed with long stone planter boxes arranged in a somewhat informal oval-shaped area. The garden had benches and wrought-iron archways planted with scarlet runner beans and was bordered by a low stone wall and rose garden on one side and an inlaid stone patio and a small pond on the other. The vegetable garden was the focal point of the area, and visitors enjoyed wandering through the garden as well as viewing it from the patio tables when dining. Vicki said that most people had never seen many of the vegetables she grew.

To plant her Italian vegetable garden, said Vicki, “In late winter I send away to specialty seed companies for authentic varieties of Italian vegetable seeds. I order my American varieties from both large, well-known seed companies and small companies that carry heirloom and hard-to-find varieties, and I glean the Italian varieties from some of the large American companies, plus poring over some of the specialty seed company catalogs. I purchased a few of the Italian varieties when I was in Italy and ordered others from an Italian seed company, Fratelli Ingegnoli.”

Vicki Sebastiani’s garden in the Sonoma Valley of California. It’s mid-summer, and the tomatoes and beans are in full production and the cutting chicories and chard are filling in ready for the fall harvest.

The garden is located off the patio. The raised stone planters and archway make it an elegant setting for entertaining. The beds contain the last of the spring peas, leeks, onions, and many varieties of eggplants. Scarlet runner beans grow over the archway.

Vicki harvests cardoon, a close relative of the artichoke. Instead of eating the flower buds of this dramatic plant, the succulent stems are enjoyed.

To get a jump on the season, Vicki would start her tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, basil, chicories, and cardoon in flats early in the spring so that she could transplant them into the garden after all chance of frost has passed. As the soil started to warm up in spring, she would plant the seeds of some of the early vegetables, such as lettuce, beets, carrots, fava beans, endive, arugula, and fennel. In early summer she’d start the leaf chicories for fall harvest, and a little later the broccolis for the next spring harvest.

The plants in Vicki’s garden reflected a rich heritage of vegetables that are at the heart of Italian cuisine. To give you an idea of this vast range of vegetables, as well as the huge selection of Italian varieties unfamiliar to Americans, these are some of her favorites: romanesco broccoli, both the bronze and the chartreuse types; a purple spouting broccoli; ‘Pepperoncini’ peppers for pickling; ‘Roma’ and ‘San Marzano’ tomatoes for sauce; white and green varieties of pattypan squash; black salsify; the peppery arugula; many chicories, including ‘Palla Rossa,’ ‘Castelfranco,’ ‘Treviso,’ and a Catalonian type; three varieties of Italian chard; white and purple eggplant; Italian parsley; yellow and green romano beans; and a type of large vining zucchini that produces long, meaty fruits with almost no seeds.

For many years Vicki used her garden vegetables for everyday eating, as well as for the many visitors at the winery. The vegetables would become part of an antipasto or minestrone or, in many cases, are simply steamed or boiled lightly and served with olive oil and Parmesan cheese. As Vicki said, “When you start with superior vegetables picked at the peak of perfection, they’re very special in themselves.”