I don’t give a fig
Friday, August 31, 2007
Figs are coming in hot and heavy at the farm stands around town, and I am overwhelmed with delight to see it. I love fresh figs...so much so that I bought a couple of fig trees earlier this Summer (which are doing great in our USDA hardiness zone, I might add. South Philly, in particular, is filled with little back yards overrun with fig trees).
My little trees may not be bearing fruit yet, but the Fair Food Farmstand has found a source for figs in South Philly - her name is Becky. She plucks figs from her tree every week and delivers them to the stand on Wednesday morning. Act quickly - as I found out yesterday, those babies don’t last long. I was told by the woman on duty that the figs are gone by Wednesday afternoon.
Figs from some random woman’s tree in South Philly? Yeah, that’s totally worth an extra stop into Reading Terminal Market.
It kind of reminds me of the Fallen Fruit initiative out of Los Angeles - residents are encouraged to contact city administrators to ask that fruit trees be planted in the city, rather than a tree that doesn’t produce anything. The idea is that any person on the street can than feed themselves from public trees. And not that I have any plans to stand outside Becky the Fig Woman’s house and hope for her fig trees to bear fruit on the street, but I like the idea of finding public and free sources of food. It satisfies my inner forager.
Have you found any public fruit in the city or the surrounding areas? Perhaps we start our own little mapping project.
On KYW a few weeks back they had a story about plans for making orchards in Philadelphia. I wish I remembered the name of the organization- they were looking for volunteers.
My mom’s neighbors just gave her a bag of figs from their tree which she’s passing on to me. Too much roughage for her!
That’s a lovely picture of figs, Nicole. 
And I feel so useful about this subject—I have two things to add!
1) You don’t necessarily need to panic if you miss Becky’s Wednesday morning delivery. During my Friday morning volunteer shift at the Farmstand, she showed up again with at least half a dozen egg cartons with figs nestled in them! Plus, we had another man visit with figs to sell, although his name escapes me, perhaps Giovanni? He was definitely Italian. Emily the Farmstand manager bought the couple dozen he’d brought with him, and he said he’d stop by every couple days. His figs are more green than Becky’s, but sadly I didn’t sample both to elaborate on the taste difference.
2) Jackie, I wonder if the organization you heard about was POP (Philly Orchard Project). They have a website. (And even if that wasn’t the organization you heard about, anybody with an inner forager is probably interested in finding out about POP!) Early in this farmers’ market job, I met a man named Paul (who may be one of the leaders), and the way he explained the project at that point was that POP wants to plant fruit trees on abandoned lots in particular. The website looks like it has a lot of other approaches to the project, too.
Joanna, that’s the one!
it’s not “public”, but we get our figs from the trees on either side of our house, which belong to neighbors; but any overhang is fair game, they have said, and so i was able to line a roasting pan with just-picked figs last week when i made a pork loin.
we get grapes from the same neighbors. both sides. it’s nice.
i think the fruit tree idea in cities may not take off due to the pollen issues… a lot of city trees are sterile males, i believe, just for the reason of not releasing a lot of extra pollen into the air.
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We have fig trees in planters in our back area of the house. Some of the fruit is ripe enough to eat, and yummy.