136. The garden

I have always wanted to be a person who could grow her own food.

When I was very young, my grandfather from Italy lived with us, and I remember we had a vegetable garden in the back yard that produced tomatoes, zucchini and peppers. He must have taken the family green thumb with him when he passed away, because my family was never able to replicate his productivity, or really any productivity at all.

To this day, I still try. We move the garden to various locations in the yard, hoping to find just the right spot. We build a raised bed. We hire garden consultants to explain to us just how we should pinch back tomato plants. I long to be one of those people who humblebrags about running out of zucchini recipes to accommodate their garden’s endless yield. But every year, it’s more or less a bust.

My fondest wish, though, is to be able to grow figs. I was inspired by a wonderful 2012 article by Melissa Clark in the New York Times, “Italy to Brooklyn, Fig by Fig.” She writes that Brooklyn, a destination for many of the Italian immigrants in the first half of the previous century, is filled with backyard fig trees, often started by cuttings that were brought by their forebears as prized possessions on the overseas journey to their new home. If a plant from temperate southern Italy could thrive in Brooklyn, surely it would thrive outside of Philadelphia, a hundred miles to the south and a degree or two warmer. So nearly a decade ago, we planted a tree.

And thrive it did, spreading eight feet high and wide, and producing the most plentiful, gorgeous green leaves imaginable. But alas, no fruit. Year after year, no fruit, except for a few tiny, rock hard green ones. We decided our tree was defective, and bought a second one. Still no luck.

But then a miracle happened. This year must have had perfect proportions of heat and rain, because we ended up with a dozen edible tomatoes and four or five giant-size zucchini.

And best of all, forty or fifty figs, thumb-nail size, juicy and sweet.

Melissa Clark’s fig tree also tried her patience, starting with very few fruit but increasing exponentially year by year. She writes, “when the figs arrive, it still seems like a miracle.” I know exactly what she means.