Sweetly ripened figs

Talk about delayed gratification.

Fourteen years ago you mailed a cheque and order form to the bluntly yet precisely-named Ernie Grimo’s Nut Nursery, located in Ontario’s Niagara Region. You imagined a small fig orchard on your deck, adding a Mediterranean ambience to your Toronto home. You also envisioned ripe figs, plucked on a summer’s day and eaten fresh as a healthy dessert.

Your fig trees arrived promptly via Canada Post. They were dormant, with bare roots bundled up and still moist. You were out of town when the special delivery arrived and your sister-in-law Karen kindly planted the young trees in large clay pots and put them in a sunny spot on your balcony.

February figs in your TV room

The trees matured and set out fine green broad-leafed canopies each summer. You dutifully hauled the pots inside for the winter to prevent the sensitive young trees from freezing.

The seasons came and went.

The world wide web became quite popular. You got an e-mail account at work. Governments were voted in and voted out. The garbage and blue box went to the curb every Tuesday. And your two little girls became beautiful young women.

But nary a fig in sight.

Meanwhile, you had learned how to propagate the plants, carefully separating new shoots and roots when the trees were dormant, and offering the baby fig trees up for adoption. Eager recipients included a colleague’s father, who had grown figs as a young man in Italy, and your father-in-law Claus, a veteran gardener who immediately started into fig-nurturing competition with you.

Nary a fig in sight — until the winter of 2010. You had left the trees outside unusually late; their leaves had fallen and the top inch of the soil in their pots had been touched by frost. You brought them indoors feeling appropriately guilty, and checked them for signs of life on a weekly basis. The buds kept a hint of green, so you kept the faith, and watered lightly.

In January 2011, the buds became vigorous green leaf clusters.

And by February, the two trees were laden with several dozen swelling green figs.

Byrons shops for fresh ingredients

For Mediterranean ambience inspiration, you turned to Byron Ayanoglu’s fine cookbook: Simply Mediterranean Cooking.  His recipe for Potato and Chickpea Stew with Spicy Sausage called for two figs cut into small cubes. “During the long winter months, this is the kind of hearty, legume-based stew with which Southern Europeans bring the sunshine back into their homes,” noted Byron.

You bounded up the stairs and harvested fresh figs from your TV room and surprised your family with a hearty supper. As a post-mortem, you penned a short note in the margin of Byron’s recipe: “Home-grown figs – nice!”

Meanwhile, your colleague Carm had dropped by at work with her blackberry to show you a photo of her father’s fig tree, the one you had donated to him in its infancy. “Tell your friend, thanks for the figs,” he had said. The photo showed a gargantuan fig tree, loaded with fruit in summer. In contrast to your offseason approach, Carm’s dad had planted his trees outside and kept them in the Canadian soil year-round. To keep the frost at bay in winter, he had constructed a sturdy frame around the tree, which was wrapped with insulation.

Meanwhile, too, in the fig-nurturing contest, your father-in-law Claus is winning. But you are too proud to ask him to reveal his fig-growing secrets.

This year, your fig trees are at it again. They seem to have permanently reversed the gardening season to give your family another indoor, off-season crop.

Instead of a fresh fig on a summer’s day, your figs have become a nutritional counterpoint to the winter-time Guinness-Advil-and-Pizza diet that has become a ritual after your Thursday night pick-up hockey game.

Figs ripen one by one or two by two, rather than in one big-bang crop, so you can savour them over several weeks at the tail end of the Canadian winter (while you put in your seed order for your summer garden plot at Thorncliffe Park). Byron’s Mediterranean recipes beckon.

In the case of a sweetly-ripened fig, there’s something to be said for delayed gratification.