Farm Share: Figging Around at Dancing Bear Farm
The Recorder, December 13, 2016, by Tinky Weisblat.
The harvest season is over in Franklin County — although local produce still abounds: apples, cabbages, garlic, beets. At this time of year, farmers have the mental and physical energy to plan for next year. Best of all, they find time to dream.
At Dancing Bear Farm in Leyden, Tom Ashley and his wife, The Recorder’s own Trish Crapo, are dreaming of something they will call the “figtorium.”
The figtorium will be a greenhouse designed to accommodate Ashley’s growing fig business. Dancing Bear Farm has been in business for 25 years, but Ashley grew his first figs just eight years ago.
When I spoke recently with the couple, Ashley explained that his love of figs began in the fall of 2008. He was inspired by a longtime customer named Marie.
Marie, a teacher who lives in Brooklyn, has a second home in Leyden. She has been a loyal customer of Dancing Bear since the farm started in 1981.
“She is Italian-American and lives in an Italian neighborhood,” Ashley told me. “Everybody there has their fig trees and their grapes and a small garden (of plants) that they brought from the old country.
“We’ve had a very nice relationship over the years of sending stuff home with her in the fall, (such as) garlic for her neighborhood. Eight years ago, she brought me four dead sticks and said, ‘Here, put these in the greenhouse, and see what happens.’
“At that point, I knew nothing of figs. They sat around the greenhouse for a couple of weeks.”
He received a phone call from Marie, urging him to plant the sticks.
“I said, ‘Yeah, sure. Figs. All right, Marie,’” Ashley remembered.
The sticks went into the ground. Two of the four took root, combined themselves into one large tree, and began producing fruit the following spring. That tree is still going strong today.
Ashley said he was impressed when he tasted the fruit. “I had never experienced anything like that before,” he said. “I’d had dried figs or Fig Newtons…. It was very different from any other fruit. Very sweet.”
“Sweet but light,” chimed in Crapo.
Ashley discovered that his fig tree grew quickly. Soon it hugged the ceiling of his plastic greenhouse. “I had to prune the tree. It just took off like a sumac,” he recalled. “Whatever (cuttings) I took off the tree, I thought, those will grow, too.”
He placed the cuttings in pots. “The next year, I had more figs and all these trees growing in pots.”
Soon Ashley began doing research about fig trees. Native to many areas of the world and cherished particularly in the Middle East and the Mediterranean region, figs are an ancient plant.
They are also a healthy fruit — full of antioxidants. They contain ingredients that can help fight cancer, obesity, osteoporosis and many other diseases.
“A fig may have been the fruit in the Garden of Eden, not an apple,” Crapo said.
In the warmer climates of figs’ native habitat, they grow profusely outdoors.
I had never seen figs growing so I enjoyed visiting Dancing Bear Farm in late October to see what all the fuss was about. Ashley’s fig trees were lush and tall then. The winding wood was pleasing to the eye and the large leaves were highly decorative.
“No wonder they used to wear them back in the old days,” Ashley told me with a smile.
He picked a fig off a tree for me to taste on the spot. Figs are unusual in that they flower on the inside. My fig tasted sweet and rich. The skin, fruit, and seeds provided a nice combination of textures.
Ashley and Crapo first met at Hampshire College, where Ashley managed the co-op and was among the first people to think of starting an organic garden on a college campus.
“We already valued sustainability and local agriculture in 1980,” Crapo said.
After college, the two looked for a plot of land of their own. They fell in love with the land that would become Dancing Bear Farm, which has a spectacular view of the Pioneer Valley. Soon, they set down literal and figurative roots.
Looking forward, Ashley sees his fig cultivation and the planned figtorium as key. He admitted that he could repair his current plastic greenhouse instead of constructing a new one. He sees defects in this plan, however.
“The greenhouse isn’t quite big enough for the trees, and it’s a little tight on the sides,” he observed. “Why would you put new soles on a pair of shoes that didn’t really fit you?”
With the figtorium — a larger, non-plastic greenhouse — he will be able to accommodate his fig trees and expand his fig crop. He hopes that figs will become one of three or four strong crops on which he can concentrate in the future.
This concentration will strengthen his crops and give him more time to do the educational outreach he has already begun through newsletters to customers.
At the moment, he sells both figs and fig trees. Eventually, he would like to work with etymologists to do research on the fig wasp — a miniscule insect that helps figs spread in the wild. He would also like to experiment with farming methods that might help fig trees survive in colder weather.
Ashley hopes that the figtorium will make his life richer, more interesting, and less physically stressful.
“I want his life to be a lot easier,” Crapo said of her husband. “He works really hard.”
Meanwhile, Ashley takes pride in his figs and fig trees. Several years ago, he told me, his friend Marie brought him a new fig-tree cutting from friends who were visiting from Sicily. When the friends returned to the United States a couple of years later, she brought them to Dancing Bear Farm.
The friends don’t speak English so not a lot was said. Nevertheless, Ashley informed me, they managed to give him two thumbs up when they saw the tree their cutting had produced.
“We communicated back and forth our mutual respect. Marie told me later that my tree was doing better (than the one her friends had) back in Sicily,” he recalled.
“Somewhere along the line, I seem to have developed a fig thumb.”
Food writer Tinky Weisblat of Hawley is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook” and “Pulling Taffy.” For more information about Tinky visit her website.
