Stories from your garden

The Ripka Family

In the spring of 2020, Brett and Kristen Ripka joined the Community Garden in a world that had gone quiet from COVID and quarantine. But the cucumbers, tomatoes, and strawberries weren’t the only things growing. Kristen was pregnant with their second child. Meanwhile, 5-year-old Emma made garden life an extension of her personal world, finding friends, cruising the pathways, and stopping at the table to snack under the trellis.

In some ways, finding the garden was coming full circle for the Ripkas. Brett, a Westporter, had gone to Long Lots Elementary, and now Emma would be attending the same school. They also lived close by and started walking to the garden in the mornings. Their plot transformed from the circle of rubber they had inherited into a family project, with Brett, a real estate developer, building and watering, and Emma and Kristen planting and harvesting.

“When Emma started going to Long Lots,” Kristen says, “she was so proud to look over and see the plots beyond the fence. We could stop in before or after school to check on the status of life in the garden.”

The Ripkas had existing friends in the Wilkinson family, also at the garden, and soon Emma made the acquaintance of Lou Weinberg. The two began bonding over the whereabouts of Groundhog Slim, the beauty of butterflies, and the art of playing bocce. Emma would often visit the garden wearing her butterfly skirt to coordinate with the surroundings.

Two years later, the world has speeded up again, and having almost 2-year-old Josephine makes scheduling more complicated. Kristen, an account executive with Dooney & Bourke, says, “We still walk over to the garden, now with Emma and Josephine, and love to go for a snack and check on our plot, but it’s not as often as we’d like. Nevertheless, we are growing lettuce, tomatoes, basil, sweet peas and jalapeños. Emma now loves picking the lettuce and eating it right out of the garden.”

Brett remembers what Longs Lots was like before the garden was there and is glad Emma can glance over at her plot as she leaves soccer practice, or runs to camp, or starts classes again in the fall. In many ways, the Community Garden has become a fitting backdrop for their greater life in the community of Westport.

Cris Singer

“We gardeners are an optimistic lot,” Cris Singer wrote in a 2006 letter to the Westport News. And she has proved those words many times in her 93 years. She is one of the few who can remember the beginning of the Westport Community Gardens some fifty years ago and can still be found today, digging, weeding, and tending to her zinnias and dahlias close to the parking lot and the gate. “I thought I had snagged the perfect spot,” she confesses, “But it does take me 15 minutes to get the hose over there.”

Singer may be optimistic, but she’s also tough, having fought for the idea of the Westport Community Gardens, the location, and the soil itself, which in its beginning stages next to the Long Lots School required a pickaxe to penetrate. The Gardens were threatened and moved a few times to make way for things like soccer fields, but Singer insisted throughout that the town should be able to support both youth sports and gardens.

“When we had to leave our Wakeman location to make way for Bedford Middle School fields,” she remembers, “my neighboring gardener and I were determined to find a new home. He was great at bothering the town and nagged so much they finally gave us our present space.”

Moving near Long Lots wasn’t easy either. The Superintendent of Schools feared “we might harbor pedophiles,” as Singer remembers, and everyone had to have criminal background checks to protect the school children. They started to dig, only to find “soil only a weed could love,” and the number of gardeners declined.

But no longer. Optimism has prevailed on the part of many, and the WCG is its own thriving community. Singer, like many fellow gardeners, has a lovely Westport home but on small acreage, with little protection from deer and salt water. Although her home of fifty years opens onto Long Island Sound, she is happy to make the trek to the Gardens to raise her crops in the company of like-minded souls.

Also, like many, Singer has maintained both a family and professional life, not just her garden. A graduate of Wellesley College, she got her first job with IBM in Boston, “teaching people to set up these business machines.” After taking twenty years to raise three children, she put her resume out again, and when people saw IBM, they hired her. “They didn’t know I had to learn computers while on the job,” she says with a glint in her eye, “but I did know how to teach technology to non-tech people.” It turned into a career of “getting into the minds of people who needed to know how to operate a PC.” Still teaching, she admits she may have to learn the Apple products to stay up to speed with the world.

Singer knows the benefit of working patiently over time. “Mine is an old-fashioned garden,” she says, “that I’ve been improving over the years. I still use hay mulch, which seems to keep the weeds down.”

But, lest anyone mistake her for a master gardener, she says, “Incidentally I don’t know what I’m doing. The garden next to mine is perfect. Not a weed, staked, and full of fabulous vegetables, but I just love the process.”

Singer says the happiest part of the garden has been the relationships with the people around her. “Terribly nice people wander by. The community feeling is so good. I don’t have a lot of time and I care for a handicapped son. But gardening gets you away from sad stories and puts your attention on growing things. Things growing is my love.”

Coming Soon

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