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Memories, recipes fuel passion for growing fruit trees
Ralph Crafts can’t help himself.
Almost compulsively, he grows fig trees, as many as skill and the nature gods allow.
He spends more time than a man probably ought to thinking about and practicing new ways to produce the dark and tiny, pear-shaped fruit.
But for Crafts, it’s really not about newfangled growing techniques or the trees or the figs. Indeed, the former Marine Corps jet pilot has never tasted a fig. Never. And in the nearly 20 years that he’s cultivated the trees, Crafts has never been tempted to pluck a fig and pop it in his mouth. Not once.
The bigger and more important truth is that Ralph Crafts grows fig trees because he loves his ailing wife Roseann and wants to honor her "Grandpa," Anthony Moretta of Queens, N.Y., who died in 1995.
Moretta, who produced figs without equal, meant the world to her, recalled Roseann, who for years has endured severe pain caused by an intestinal disease that almost killed her in 2004.
Nearly 20 years ago, Crafts began growing fig trees, using branches from grandpa's tree.
"It's about perpetuating something that meant so much to my wife and her grandpa," said Crafts, who admits his emotions sometimes get the best of him on the topic. "It's not about fig trees. It's about Grandpa's figs!"
And it's about Grandpa himself.
As a child in Queens, N.Y., Roseann, 54, grew up eating the figs grown by her maternal grandfather, and developed a life-long love for the honey-flavored fruit, whose harvest season runs from late August to late October.
"I associate figs with my grandpa," says Rosanne, a superb cook (according to Ralph), who uses them to sweeten recipes, in bread, for sauce over pork loin and other ways too numerous to list. "I think that has a lot to do with it."They also represent a tangible reminder of her long-ago childhood in Corona, where it seemed as if all her Italian neighbors had a fig tree, Roseann says.
"It was part of my everyday life," Roseann recalls at the couple’s dining room table. "Everybody had their [fig] tree. The yards were so close together, they’d overhang from one fence, and you randomly picked. And nobody said anything, because they’re hanging over your fence."Crafts makes fig tree propagation sound and look easy in a recent demonstration at his home.
A burly six-footer with white hair and crystalline blue eyes and a pair of sheers in his right hand, he circles a 10-foot tall, leafless fig tree like a wrestler ready to pounce on his opponent for a take down.
Bundled against the late November cold in a gray wool cap, black-and-red plaid coat and black chinos, he studies "grandpa’s" fig tree, searching for branches to clip and propagate.
Crafts knows his prey. He looks for ones as thick as a pencil and with pert, green tips that interfere with the tree’s shapely growth.
In minutes, he cuts eight branches, each about a dozen inches long.
He deftly bundles the specimens with a strand of white surveyor’s tape, securing them with a half-hitch knot.
He places the cluster, branch tips down, into a hole he’d dug a few feet away from the smaller of two substantial fig trees in the backyard of his 10-acre spread off Cliff Mills Road near Orlean.
He trowels soil over the branches, careful not to cover a 12-inch length of the surveyor’s tape, which serves as a marker and which he labels "small fig" with a black, fine point Sharpie.
He finishes the job with a thick coat of mulch over the hole.
"Now they’re nice and insulated from the winter cold," says Crafts, squinting into the mid-morning sun. "You don’t have to do anything else until April 1."
He repeats the process in an adjacent hole, using branches bound in deep blue surveyor’s tape with "big tree" written across it.
Next April, Crafts will remove the two clusters and plant the branches, tips up, in the ground or in pots in a mixture of Perlite (25 percent), Vermiculite (25 percent) and peat moss (50 percent) and water as needed.
The tape designations ("small fig" and "big fig") refer to clippings from "grandpa’s" fig trees, a pair that he planted in 1996 when he and Roseanne moved to Fauquier.
He began cultivating fig trees about 19 years ago when the couple lived near Harper's Ferry.
Crafts now employs four methods. "I’ve seen some level of success" with all of them, he said.Each method typically produces at least one tree per year. (To learn about three other techniques Crafts uses go to www.fauquier.com).
He has 13 fig trees — 10 in the ground and three in pots. During the winter, he covers the trees in the ground with a tarp to protect them against wind, and brings the potted trees inside. Though Mediterranean, the trees remain cold hardy at 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
Nostalgia aside, for fig enthusiasts nothing quite compares with the experience of eating the lush and sweet orbs right off the tree.
In August, September and October, the Crafts picked up to five pounds of figs per day, an impossible quantity for Roseann to consume. So what becomes of the bounty of figs? Those Roseanne doesn’t use get shared with friends.And what of his ever-expanding tree inventory? Even the most ardent fig fans have a threshold for the number of trees they can reasonably tend (Or do they?).
Crafts, the head of a residential design firm, "barters" them for unusual plantings, a bottle or two of good wine and sometimes for therapeutic treatment, such as massages, to ease Roseann's pain.
Roseann daily receives huge doses of pain-killing medication that her husband administers through an IV.
He cannot precisely explain his disinterest in tasting figs; it could be something about fruit in general.
"I don’t eat melon," Crafts said, even though he grows cantaloupe as well as an array of vegetables, herbs and flowers from seed. "I do like apples. I’ll eat a peach sometime. Fruit never had an appeal to me."Crafts said he gets pleasure from just "watching people’s expressions" when they taste his figs. "It’s just great."
Roseann rolls her eyes. "I keep telling him they taste like honey," she says, needling him with a smile. "He knows he’s weird. That’s the good part, I guess."He laughs, willing to concede the point. "I’m weird."
But he does not discount the possibility he will try a fig someday.
"We have a pact," says Roseann, frail but resolute. "If I get better, if I lose my pain, he will eat a fig."
"That way I put the pressure on her," he adds.
E-mail the reporter: ddelrosso@timespapers
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