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"Do you have any more fig jam?" asked the customer at Manhattan's Union Square Farmers' Market. "Nope," Beth Linesky of Beth's Farm Kitchen from Stuyvesant Falls, NY responded, "Thanks for asking, you reminded me it's time to call my fig guy in Brooklyn." This response piqued my curiosity. When I go to the Farmer's Market I think of the produce traveling from bucolic settings in rural areas, not the backyards of my native Brooklyn.
The exchange made me recall my boyhood neighbor in Sunset Park an elderly Italian immigrant who often rang our doorbell to give my mother a brown bag containing fruit from the tree in his yard. I now understand that tree grew from a sapling brought along on the journey to his new home. I certainly didn't consider then how a Mediterranean fruit could possibly grow in New York's harsher clime. Then, when Beth told me she had gotten 60 pounds from her source, I had to learn more.
While trees are found throughout Brooklyn and Queens, Canarsie and Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, both historically Italian enclaves, are centers of fig cultivation. It is in Sheepshead Bay we find the "grove" of Mr. Richard Warden, the "fig guy" of Union Square. East 19th, Mr. Warden's "block", is a street of well-maintained, tightly spaced homes dating back some eighty years. The yards reflect a micro climate created by tight urban confines says Chris Roddick, Head Arborist at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. This architecturally defined microclimate protects the delicate trees from harsh winter winds and precipitation. Roddick also explains that the fig trees' root systems are expansive (more than twice the trees girth) and surprisingly hearty. In the end though, he says that the fruit's survival boils down to "a bit of skill and luck"
In Warden's yard there is one one tree and he tends three others in the yards of his neighbors. Three are black fig and one white. His neighbor's immigrant grandfather planted the white eighty years ago. The remaining three all trace their root to cuttings from another tree from the "old country". Mr. Warden's tree alone has an average yield of sixty pounds. He keeps about half for himself. He eats a half dozen a day out of hand and makes the fig preserve recipe below and a fig and Almond tart from “Patricia Wells at Home in Provence” as well as fig, Prosciutto & Mozzarella Sandwiches for his wife, Joanna, to take to work every other day.
All four trees enjoy a southern exposure and Warden's white garage serves as both a windbreak and a source of reflected light to warm and protect the trees in winter. His neighbors house behind his own provide a further windbreak. Warden has found that, contrary to conventional wisdom wrapping the trees in burlap doesn't protect them from frost. During the last frost both trees that were shrouded in burlap were lost along with those that were not.
Instead, Warden sets cuttings from the trees around the trunks which merged with the root system so they grow like a bush rather than a single trunk tree. This provides strength in numbers for the delicate branches as they huddle together, thus minimizing losses should a serious frost occur. Fig trees root so easily, so simply securing a cutting in place with a brick to bolster it upright can result in rooting.
This year Warden expects a record crop of about 120 pounds by the end of October. Of this, eighty pounds will be frozen and sent off to Beth; by mid November her fig jam will be available in the cities Farmer's Markets or at at 1-800-331-JAMS(5267) and bethsfarmkitchen.com.
These prolific "mini-groves" recreate a bucolic pathos in a world of brick and mortar. For those who tend the trees they are a link to the world of their forbears, but for all of us they can serve to remind us of the rich agricultural and cultural history of every corner of our Island.
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