Dancing with the Smurfs, Drunken Woman Frizzy-Headed, Candystick Dessert … those aren’t the names of up-and-coming indie rock bands. They are just three of the over 400 varieties of organic vegetables and herbs you can grow in your own backyard using starter plants from a family-run nursery in East Marion.
In the summer months, this little stretch of Main Road is teeming with tourists looking to snap photos in front of a picturesque sea of purple fields at Lavender by the Bay. But in early May, the action is on Rocky Point Road at Papa’s Organic Plants.
It’s a stunning Mother’s Day Sunday, and while many are celebrating with brunch or wine tasting around the North Fork, plenty of others are participating in a little garden retail therapy. Shoppers roll around double-decker carts as they peruse tables full of hardened-off seedlings ready to take home and put in the earth.
A man zips up on a three-wheeled orange “stock chaser,” hops off and introduces himself. Walter Gaipa is the proud owner of this family-run business, which was affectionately named because his grandchildren call him “Papa.” The 1,500 square foot retail space is open to the public just a few months a year and they essentially sell one thing: USDA Certified Organic plants.
“So you’re looking to start your garden! How can we help?” he says, before offering to take us on a quick tour of the whole operation.
Business is booming
It’s no secret that the cost of food is getting harder to stomach for many Americans. The USDA and the Food Industry Association report that the weekly cost of groceries for households has skyrocketed by 40% since 2020. And while overall “food-at-home” prices are projected to rise by 2.4% in 2026, the cost of fresh vegetables is predicted to jump by 4.8%.
Even with the abundance of locally grown produce and farm stands on the North Fork, the spike in prices appears to be inspiring more people to plant their own backyard harvests. As we walk past endless rows of vibrant greenery, Walter points out popular higher-yield options like zucchini and tomatoes, which give home gardeners more bang for their buck. He adds that the current demand reminds him of the wild rush they saw when the pandemic hit.
“This year is not like COVID. But similar,” he says. “Vegetables have certainly picked up, maybe with the cost of everything.”
A family operation with deep roots
Gaipa fell into agriculture almost by accident. He started out in the ’70s and ’80s doing landscape construction and growing bonsai trees under the name “Marion Gardens East.” He jokes that it’s a hard industry to make money in because most people end up killing the trees anyway. Later, the 1987 stock market crash wiped out his landscaping jobs, and a customer’s suggestion led him to grow herbs in clay pots, which they sold out of a station wagon at farmers markets in NYC.
“He would go in this station wagon to the city twice a week, went to Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn and Sheffield Plaza in the city,” Gaipa remembers. “And that’s how we started selling plants.”
His wife, Linell, took samples to garden centers on Long Island, and they began making deliveries out of Walter’s pickup truck. What started as two hoop houses covering 1,500 square feet has grown exponentially; today, they operate 21 greenhouses covering 50,000 square feet and utilize three box trucks for wholesale deliveries.
“When we started, we basically started from dirt, from nothing,” he says. “And we built this and our whole family’s involved… It’s certified organic. We live that way. We eat that way.”
‘So you’re looking to start your garden! How can we help?’ Walter ‘Papa’ Gaipa
Even with the massive growth, it remains very much a family-run operation. Walter’s wife enters invoices, his daughter Mary Gaipa Cornier is a school teacher in Connecticut and remotely handles social media and wholesale order entry, and his son Chris and daughter-in-law Angela ran the retail side before moving to Florida to run their own nationwide organic shipping business, The Organic Harvest.
“My dad is my hero,” Mary gushes. “ [He’s] an incredible guy who has turned his vision into something quite special and unique over the last 35-40 years.”
Maximizing the footprint
While avid North Fork gardeners might know Papa’s for their wide retail selection, the real bulk of the business happens on the wholesale side, accounting for 90-95% of revenue, selling to garden centers from Montauk to Whitestone under the name Marion Gardens, Organic Herbs.
A peek behind the curtain reveals a fascinating, highly efficient system of optimizing their two acres. Our first stop is an automated seed machine from Australia, which is capable of planting 3,000 seeds an hour directly into plug trays before they are eventually transplanted on a carousel potting machine imported from the Netherlands.
Next, we walk out into the network of greenhouses. Sort of like an old library with rolling bookshelves, Gaipa demonstrates the rows of benches on rolling tracks designed to maximize capacity.
Everything gets rotated on a strict schedule. If a variety such as basil doesn’t like wet leaves, Papa’s uses “flood benches” that water from the bottom up for eight minutes, to keep the foliage dry and prevent disease, while beam flicker lights move at night to stop diseases from sporulating. In the winter, they even utilize “floating benches”—trays resting on reinforcing rods—to squeeze out extra growing space.
“It’s like a restaurant. Somebody else takes the table. So even though we’re over an acre of total space, we probably grow like we have three acres… because things just constantly cycle through,” Gaipa explains.
Quirky names and global sourcing
Papa’s earned its USDA Certified Organic designation in 2007, long before it was a trendy marketing tactic. Their operation goes far beyond what’s required for the official certification; instead of spraying pesticides, they release beneficial insects to manage pests naturally.
They also go to great lengths to ensure quality, buying vegetative strawberries from California, root tip cuttings from Israel, and seeds from the Netherlands. When they started, they offered 40 varieties of vegetables and herbs. That number now stands at more than 400.
Sometimes an addition comes from a customer request, but often, Gaipa admits he makes selections based on the names alone. Looking over the 2026 order form, it’s easy to see why. Alongside grocery store staples, you’ll find Pink Champagne cherry tomatoes, Cow’s Horn okra, and the blistering Carolina Reaper pepper.
“We have a tomato called Dancing with the Smurfs,” he says with a smile. “It’s a small tomato. You’re not going to find it anywhere.”
Giving back & giving advice
The nursery operates at a breakneck pace in May, made even more chaotic this year by an unusually cold spring that delayed planting. As all farmers will tell you, the unpredictable weather is just part of the job. Gaipa recalls one winter when the property was buried in 26 inches of snow, forcing the crew to clear the greenhouses with snowblowers.
It’s impossible to sell every last transplant, but they don’t go to waste. Papa’s is a longtime partner of Island Harvest, Long Island’s largest hunger-relief organization, donating truckloads of excess inventory. Leftovers also go to local charities like CAST and school gardens in Greenport and Oysterponds.
“I mean, why not? It’s just the right thing to do, you know? I hate to throw them away.”
After our tour, I make my own path through the retail space to pick out my backyard additions. I’m especially excited about the Nutterbutter squash, which is a smaller and sweeter version of a butternut squash. Most importantly, I’m soaking up as much wisdom from Walter as I can before embarking on my second year of growing my own food.
“Make sure you have good soil… acclimate the plants correctly until they’re ready for outside,” he advises. “Tether your expectations, understand nature, and expect problems. You can’t be in agriculture if you don’t want to ride this wild roller coaster.”