Even the pros learn as they grow

Lyn Hecker and Dan Wolff have never met, but their gardening philosophies are remarkably similar: No muss, no fuss. It’s all about family. And nothing compares to the feeling you get giving away fresh, homegrown produce all summer long.

For vegetable gardeners, this is as good as it gets. Our plants are finally in the ground. Day by day, we watch them grow, heading out back first thing in the morning, after work, before bed, to drink in that indescribable fragrance, touch the leaves, pull the weeds.

We’ve waited all year for this. Time to enjoy.

Hecker, 51, cultivates a long list of fruits and vegetables on five acres in Southampton Township, N.J. Her husband and four kids all pitch in, but, as is often the case in gardening families, one child seems to heed the call more than the others. Thirteen-year-old Christine is most often at her mother’s side, especially when it’s time to pick strawberries.

“Here’s a perfect one,” she says one recent afternoon, popping a huge deep-red berry into her mouth.

Wolff, 36, is strictly a veggie guy, growing 200 tomato plants and more in his backyard in Deptford Township, N.J., and in a large plot on a nearby farm. His wife and three kids are valued helpers, but, just as with the Heckers, it’s his youngest child — 7-year-old Sean — who’s caught the gardening bug big time.

Like his father, Sean starts his own seeds under a grow light in the heater room. They nurse their seedlings through the dark winter and, come spring, they’re in the garden every day, inseparable.

Lyn Hecker and her husband, Dave, bought their five acres in 1986 and built their Colonial house four years later. It’s easy to see why they picked this spot.

The area’s full of wildlife, even if some can be pests in the garden — rabbits, groundhogs, deer, birds. Others are always welcome: butterflies, hummingbirds, bees.

It’s quiet, country quiet, with room for everything they want to grow — at least for now.

Start with the apple, peach and pear trees out front, the Nanking cherries in back. The many Christmas trees all werebought for $1 when they were inches high.

There’s a passel of herbs, four watermelon hills, blueberries and a beehive, blackberries, grapes, and strawberries that go all summer long.

Hecker makes just about everything from scratch and freezes fruits and vegetables for winter use. Even daughter Christine has a favorite recipe: frozen Italian water ice at the bottom of a glass layered with just-picked strawberries and blueberries, whipped cream on top.

“Berry Delight,” Christine calls it.

Her mother also has red, yellow and green cherry tomatoes, plum tomatoes, and Big Boys; eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers and peppers, lettuce, corn, and horseradish.

Everything organic.

Gardening didn’t bring Dan and Jeannine Wolff together in 1994 — a mutual acquaintance did — but the more they thought about it, it seemed a natural thing to share.

Now, they preside over a large backyard garden and a farm plot about the size of half a football field. In soil enriched by the pigs that once lived on the farm, the Wolffs grow 18 varieties of tomatoes, some quite unusual.

They grow herbs and corn, eggplant, peppers, lettuces, peas, beans, beets, fennel, spinach, squash and sweet potatoes. But tomatoes are their thing.

The Wolffs give away much of their harvest to friends, family, even a local diner. And this year, Dan’s aiming to win the New Jersey Tomato Festival’s contest for the biggest, tastiest, or ugliest tomato.

So much fun. But what keeps him out there, weeding and walking the rows, is the serenity it brings.

“I can be all stressed out,” he says, “and out here, everything just blows away.”