As you all probably know, I’m a city girl. Born In New York (Brooklyn), we then moved to Queens, and eventually to the suburbs of Long Island. We grew nothing in New York, except for one crab apple tree and a pear tree, that never bore fruit. Our vegetables didn’t come from the ground; they lived in little white boxes in the freezer. My mother would boil salted water, drop in the frozen vegetables, then cook the life out of them.

We eventually moved to Tucson, Arizona, because my father’s arthritis became debilitating from the cold weather. The only thing that grows in Tucson is cactus! We had...