Snapshot: My Neighbor’s Figs

By: | August 24, 2022

Last summer I wrote in this space about discovering figs. This summer I was ready for them. My neighbor with the fig tree started texting with progress reports in mid July. In August, they hit: Figs. Figs, figs, figs, figs. I’ve been on many fig-retrieval expeditions in the last two weeks. I arrive, bowl in hand, when possible with a taller friend, and I pick and I pick, racing the squirrels and the birds for the ripe, reddish fruits.

Figs caramelized in honey and butter on ice cream? Yes. Figs in a cake with almond and black pepper? Yes and yes. Figs cut up in my morning granola? Yes, please. Figs straight from the tree? Absolutely, as long as they don’t have any bird poop.

The birds are pulling ahead in the race now, but that’s fair; I have access to a supermarket but they have to find their own food. Fall is coming; the peaches will run out and so will the figs. I appreciate that even in my city apartment, surrounded by concrete, the fig tree is there to tell me what season it is.

Photo: Helen Fields

Fig of my Imagination

By: | August 22, 2022

It’s fig season again! But this year, it’s a little lackluster. It’s not the birds getting to the figs. It’s not the squirrels. There are only a few figs, and the ones that have appeared seem tired. Some of them are falling to the ground before they start to ripen, others are sitting small and hard on the tree. Maybe it’s just been a long dry summer. But the light is changing, the days are shortening a handful of minutes at a time. Maybe there are a few more sweet things to come before autumn sets in.

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When we first moved into this house, we planted a fig tree in the backyard. It looked sad and scraggly for a long time—years, in fact. I would go over to the houses of friends who had fig trees in August, and these trees would be dripping with figs. I would ask how old the trees were, and they’d say things like, “Oh, we planted that last year!” I would come home and make puppy dog eyes at my little fig tree.

And then—BOOM! Five years ago, August came, and the figs were there. I’d battle it out with the birds to get the fruit first. We got a net to protect the figs. The birds figured out how to get into the net, although sometimes they needed help getting out. I would curse the birds as I peeled the net away—they’d fly off and I’d feel happy, but slightly miffed that they’d gotten something I wanted. Then a year came when we had to have friends help pick it because there were too many. There were even figs left after the birds got in and out of the net.

This year, there were so many figs that the birds couldn’t keep up either. We never put the net up. Every day, there are more figs, sitting on their stems like purple jewels. The ground below is littered with ones we haven’t gotten in time. In the morning the air around the tree smells sweet; in the height of the day when the sun beats down, it smells like the morning after a fig wine bender.

People have been reveling in the fig for thousands of years—it may be the earliest cultivated fruit. Researchers excavating in a village in the Jordan Valley found nine carbonized figs dating back more than 11,000 years, even before crops like wheat, corn and barley emerged. These were parthenocarpic figs, which means they don’t need insects for pollination—to produce more trees, people would have planted stems. These planted stems grow roots and leaves and their very own figs. The researchers explained that people at the time must have recognized that these fig fruits did not turn into new plants on their own, and started to cultivate these edible—yet non-reproductive—figs, following meandering mutations of these natural clones to develop the taste of the fruit. And the fruit isn’t even really a fruit—it’s a part of the stem that has grown into a teardrop-shaped container for the plant’s flowers.

In the middle of October, the fig leaves are starting to turn yellow; soon, there will be no more fruit. But there is another fig tree on the shadier side of the yard. These ones are Genoa figs, pale green with hot pink inside. We planted this tree about eight years ago, when my son was born. It has been slow to grow, mostly looking like a dowsing stick. This year, it has two short leaf-covered branches and has produced a half-dozen figs.

Elsewhere in the world, researchers are using fig trees like Ficus elastisca and Ficus thonningii to build resilience in the face of climate change. These superpower figs can shore up hillsides and provide drought-resistant food for livestock.

Our little Ficus carica trees can’t do much but feed us and the birds between August and October. But having one fig tree already has given me a little more patience with the second. Someday, we may have to fight the birds over our little green-figged tree. Someday, there may be more than enough to share.

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Image by Flickr user Jack Fussell under Creative Commons license

Redux: Floater

By: | August 19, 2022

This post originally ran on October 11, 2011. Back then, I didn’t really understand why people would use these sensory deprivation pods. In the wake of the past 5 years, I can only hope one day we can all have our own sensory deprivation pods.

image credit: lo.re.n.zo

The second I close the hatch behind me, it occurs to me that I have watched far too many horror movies for this to end well. I’m in the basement of a building in South London where people shell out £45 to spend an hour in a sensory deprivation tank. The shiny white pod is about the size of a SmartCar, and its rounded edges remind me a bit of the futuristic, streamlined vehicles in Minority Report. Inside, the total-immersion bathtub is flooded with an unearthly blue light and a quietly swishing mass of water that’s been doped with enough magnesium salts to let me float handily on top, just a bit more than what’s in the Dead Sea.

There’s also a light switch, an intercom and a spray bottle of freshwater. I find out soon enough why that spray bottle is there. It takes me only about five seconds to get the super-saline water in my eyes, and the stinging is as horrible as it was predictable. I spend the first few minutes alternating between accidentally rubbing my eyes and frantic spritzing. So much for sensory deprivation.

But even after I figure out how to stop injuring myself, I can’t surrender to feeling nothing. Each time I turn off the light and succumb to the pitch black, a tentacled monster emerges from a far corner of my Hollywood-sullied imagination and I immediately need to flip the switch to convince myself that I’m not about to die an ignominious death worthy of another Final Destination sequel. I don’t know what all this says about my psyche, but I do know, as I reach for the light for the 15th time, that I have a very long hour ahead of me.

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Baltimore in August

By: | August 17, 2022

I have nothing good to say about Baltimore in August. Ok, the farmers’ market is moving into high season, peaches & tomatoes, also okra — that’s good. Digression: I spent childhood on a small farm in the midwest making internal proclamations and declarations about freezing beans and canning applesauce in a hot kitchen, like, if I ever get outa here I’m never doing this again, not me. Until decades later, I ran into the irrevocable fact that peaches and tomatoes have a few-weeks’ season and the rest of the year aren’t worth eating, so now I’m freezing peach crisp and tomato sauce and apologizing to the sweaty irritated young Ann. Anyway, I think that’s it for anything good about Baltimore in August.

The sun is out, temperatures are in the 90s and dew points are in the 70s, dew points being the temperature at which water condenses out of the air so that was 20 degrees ago — meaning that gills would have been the better evolutionary option here because the air is 52.76% water. At these dew points, the air is holding all the water it can so you can’t cool by sweating; these dew points, says our beloved Capital Weather Gang, are not just oppressive but offensive and “very gross.” Digression: I asked a neighbor who was a public health scientist just back from equatorial Africa what it was like there and she said, “About like here.”

Nights might get down to the upper 70s, same dew points; another neighbor had a friend visiting from California ask when the evening would cool off, and the neighbor just snorted. Digression: once I asked my gyn when I was going to stop having hot flashes and she too just snorted. So anyhow, that’s the Baltimore days and nights.

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A Neighborhood Beaver Pond, Gone Too Dam Soon

By: | August 12, 2022

Two weeks ago, wandering my central Colorado town, I stumbled upon a beaver dam. This was both typical — I’ve spent much of the last eight years finding and loitering near beaver ponds — and surprising, insofar as the dam was tucked into a little suburban stream in a little suburban neighborhood, one of those generic out-of-the-box developments that seem to be popping up all over the place here in the Arkansas Valley. It was a reminder that beavers will live just about anywhere that we let them live — that they’re as comfortable in, say, Seattle as in Yellowstone; that, given human tolerance, they can be as urban as squirrels or raccoons.

As I recently reported on LWON, I’ve become obsessed with my trail-cam. So, that evening, I pounded a metal post into the streambed, strapped my camera to it, and immediately recorded the following:

I was, of course, delighted. I’d been camera-trapping at beaver ponds for months, with little success — and now, all of a sudden, I’d found a dam with a very obliging construction worker. (The other beaver complexes had been so expansive that it was hard to know where the rodents were actively logging and building; they always seemed to work on whatever dam I wasn’t filming.) And, my own voyeuristic motives aside, it was thrilling to know that beavers were active in my neighborhood: creating wildlife habitat, filtering pollutants, storing water, sequestering carbon, and just being beavers, not ten minutes from my house.

That delight curdled to disappointment a few days later, when I returned to the dam to find it… gone. The stream now raced freely along its course, with only a few gnawed sticks still clinging to the banks to indicate that it had ever been dammed at all. What happened? We’d been getting monsoon rains for weeks, and the creek looked unusually stained and swollen; perhaps the dam had blown out. (The stream gauge on this creek doesn’t appear to be currently collecting data, so USGS is no help.) Or maybe the adjacent homeowners had felt threatened by the pond, even though it hadn’t yet risen anywhere near their property, and had torn the dam out. Given society’s aversion to these resourceful, meddlesome critters, I suspected the latter. Maybe I should distribute some pro-castor pamphlets.

I’ll continue monitoring the stream in the weeks to come, in hopes that the colony sticks around and attempts to #BuildBackBetter. 

The Scientist in the Garden

By: | August 11, 2022

This post first appeared in 2012, when I was full of enthusiasm for seed catalogs and tomatoes. Now, my tomatoes are full of enthusiasm, too. A volunteer that sprung up in a planter with succulents in it has now been growing strong since last year, bursting with tomatoes even through the winter. What kind is it? No idea. Maybe I should call it “Happy.”

I can’t remember why the seed catalogs started showing up, but once they did, I was a goner. If you haven’t ever gotten one, imagine full color photo spreads of produce, like the striped Tigger Melon and and the orange-red lusciousness of the French pumpkin Rouge Vif d’Etampes. I suppose the names don’t have quite the ring of “Miss September,” but compared to some centerfold beauty, these fruits and vegetables are much more alluring — maybe because some September, a new variety might appear in my own garden, one that I could give any name I wanted.

This is how I ended up with at least six different varieties of tomato seeds last year. I’m not quite sure what it is about tomatoes. Even before I had a real garden, I’d buy the plants every year. They always seemed so hopeful, appearing in the nursery in winter, when you can’t even imagine that by fall you’ll be saying ridiculous things like, “Caprese salad, again? I don’t think I can do it.”

Somewhere along the lines, I realized there were more options out there then the plants we could find at our local nursery.  I knew I had to grow from seed once I learned that there was a variety named after the writer Michael Pollan. I could even figure out how to crossbreed my own tomatoes (and wondered what I’d call a Black & Brown Boar crossed with a Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye–oh, the possibilities!).

So there I found myself, one morning last winter, in front of a tray of dirt with seeds and Sharpies and labels in hand.

As I planted, I got to thinking about Gregor Mendel and his pea experiments. I’d first learned about them in high school, when the charts showing tall and dwarf pea plants, yellow and green peas, made it all seem so easy. But with seeds in hand, I started to buckle under the logistics. To do anything, first these seeds would have to grow.

Even if they did, I’d then have to do some tricky tweezer work (I read a bit about crossing tomatoes here). Then the tomatoes would have to grow, produce seeds. I’d have to save the seeds, grow the first generation the next winter, and do it all over again. If I was lucky, I’d start seeing crazy new phenotypes two summers from now.

That’s what Brad Gates does.  At Wild Boar Farms (the California farm where I bought many of my seeds), he grows and tends thousands of plants each year, always keeping an eye out for novel tomatoes. (Brad’s Black Heart was a result of a random mutation that he spotted).

Gates used to ship some of his seeds off to the Southern Hemisphere, so he could grow two generations of tomatoes and try to speed through the breeding process. But he was never sure what was happening with his tomatoes, if someone was choosing exactly what he would.

Even though I’ll never know exactly what Mendel was thinking every day, when he went out to tend his peas (although Robin Marantz Henig’s A Monk and Two Peas gave me a good idea), but I did ask Gates.  When it comes to growing tomatoes, he said,“the fun part is all the Christmas presents I get to open every year,” he said, Whether it’s new flavors, textures, shapes, and sizes—“there are hundreds of surprises.”

And as my tomatoes began to grow, I started to get it. Every day, I watched my little plants unfold. Maybe it’s crazy that I had to set up hundreds of seeds to finally take the time to watch something grow. My curiosity about my future tomatoes grew each day—but at the same time, so did my patience.

What happened next shouldn’t really have surprised someone who once required a hazmat team to descend on her freshman chemistry lab (mercury spill from carelessly placed thermometer). When I set the starts out for hardening, a spring windstorm set all the labels flying. Then friends started to pick up some of my extra seedlings (I couldn’t fit all 144 in our raised beds). By the time I planted, I had a vague idea of which one was which, but then old tomatillos grew up among them and everything became a tangled mass of vine. Even the seeds I tried to save once the season was done got thrown out by accident.

Winter is here again, and so are my seed catalogs. I don’t think I will discover anything that hasn’t already been grown, and it’s unlikely that I will create a variety that will someday lure gardeners from between the pages of a seed catalog. But I do have a new respect for genetics, and for farmers. And I’ve certainly learned one thing already: Michael Pollan is delicious.

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Photo credits: Thamizhpparithi Maari, Goldlocki, Wikimedia Commons

Make Me Like a Tree, and Leave Me

By: | August 10, 2022

These days I find it hard not to ponder the end of things…the pandemic (if ever!), menopause (I’ve heard 10 years of hot flashes?!), life. I wrote this about the third one a little ways back and I haven’t changed my mind.

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When I die, I want to be gently curled into the fetal position and put into one of those biodegradable pods from which a tree of my choice will grow. (I’m thinking weeping willow, for the drama of its wild hair, or maybe something ancient and delicious-smelling like a magnolia.)

Or dress me in a mushroom suit that feeds the soil and plant me in the woods. Really, this is a thing. 

Don’t preserve me or put makeup on me or dye my skin to prompt people’s lies: They did such a nice job, she looks so natural; keep away with the creepy mouth formers and eye caps that prop up a sunken face. I don’t need a big polished coffin lined with silk, or a concrete urn to keep the worms out. I don’t need anything at all.

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