I stopped by to see Ralph LePino a couple of weeks ago. In his very friendly way, he’d been pestering me to drop by his house in Harrison and taste some of the figs from his three trees—they were particularly good this September.

Here’s Ralph:

Ralph is crazy about figs. I wrote about him for the paper a few years ago (see below).

The trees have grown so tall that he needs a ladder and bucket to pick the fruit.

They taste fantastic, right off the tree. Ralph sent me off to the office with a couple of dozen perfectly ripe figs. Delicious. This is a white one.

Here’s the trunk of his oldest tree, from his grandfather’s day. Ralph and lots of friends spend a few weekends every fall wrapping the trees to keep them alive till spring.

Ralph works with real estate investors nationwide. Along the way, he’s become friends with Fess Parker (of “Daniel Boone” TV fame, from the old days), who makes his own wine now. Great bottle.

Ralph even got him to autograph the bottle as Daniel Boone.

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Here’s a link to a recent Washington Post article on fig growers in the mid-Atlantic states.
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Here’s my story for the paper from a few years ago (a few things have probably changed in the intervening years):

Ralph LePino is a bit of an anachronism. At 51, he still lives in the same house he was born in, the one that was built by his grandfather in 1938. He grows hundreds of tomatoes, peppers, lettuces and eggplants in his smallish back yard, most of it to give away to his neighbors and relatives in the Brentwood Plaza section of Harrison.

And just like his father and grandfather before him, he still tends the three fig trees that his grandfather planted in the 1920s.

“I was brought up to care for these trees,” LePino says. “When I was away at school, my father had to do it alone.”

Caring for fig trees is no easy task this time of year. Fig trees do fine in the Mediterranean, but they’re nothing but folly for gardeners in the Northeast.

To get his trees to survive each winter, LePino spends several fall weekends climbing around his trees, tying the branches together and wrapping the trees in plastic tarp.

His father, also named Ralph, died a couple of years ago, but he was still climbing ladders and tying up the trees for the winter well into his 70s.

For his son, it’s mostly a labor of love. When the figs are in season – usually from late August to mid-September, but later this year because of the cold, wet spring – LePino says he eats up to 50 a day.

“Would I be spending a month out of my life every year if I didn’t love figs?” he asks. “It really is a month of weekends to do all three trees.”

On Saturday, as they do every year now, LePino and his girlfriend, Susan Storms, hosted an all-day party for friends who volunteer to help him do the final bundling and wrapping.

As a boy, he remembers burying the trees for the winter. But the trees are way too big for that now. One of them, a black fig tree, is easily 30 feet tall and 30 feet wide.

“This is the biggest fig tree on the East Coast,” LePino insists. “I dare anybody to find one bigger. Nobody has a tree this big – nobody.”

LePino’s family first came from the Calabria section of Italy to the Brentwood neighborhood in Harrison in the 1890s.

“Our family is huge – I bet I have 2,000 cousins in this area,” he says, gesturing out toward other houses from his back yard. “That’s my aunt’s house, that’s my aunt’s house ….”

When asked how he gets along with his closest neighbor, whose house is just behind his, over a low row of shrubs, the answer comes quickly: “Of course we get along – it’s my cousin.”

“My uncle has a butcher shop across the street,” LePino says. “I bring the figs in for the old men – those old men, they’re worse than the birds.”

(Flocks of starlings and other birds descend on the trees as soon as the figs begin to ripen.)

Storms recalls watching a group of men, ranging in age from 82 to 96, standing around a ladder next to one of the trees. “The old men were fighting over who was going to climb and who was going to reap the bounty.”

When you meet a gardener with bushels of extra zucchini and tomatoes, you’ll likely find a pile of recipes to use up all the extras, when friends and neighbors have had their fill.

Not so with figs, which are fragile and don’t travel well, Storms explains.

“When you pick a fig, you say, `Well, that was good, but that one looks a little sweeter. Let me try that one, too.’ Most of the figs never make it to recipes.”

“Most people go through 10 to 20 figs in a sitting,” she says. “You keep eating until you find the perfect fig.”

And how do you find the perfect fig?

“You can always tell when they’re ready,” Storms says. “They crack and start to look ugly.”

LePino has his own motto. “You know, figs are like women – the uglier they are, the sweeter they are. Oh, I shouldn’t say that – you’ll get me in trouble.”

“When you taste them in the morning, it’s the best,” he says.

“I always tell Ralph that the figs are the only reason I stay with him,” Storms says. “Every time we have an argument, I say to myself, `I guess I can wait until September for the figs.’ ”

Most years, the big fig tree produces more than 1,000 figs. “You get a fig for every leaf – that was my father’s saying,” LePino says.

But the cold, wet spring this year has meant a thin crop as well as a late crop.

“We only got 200 to 300 this year,” LePino says. And the figs are smaller and not as sweet.

He also has a sour cherry tree in his yard. For the brief season, around the Fourth of July each year, he has friends and neighbors over to enjoy the tender cherries.

“We make 10 to 15 cherry pies and make some ice cream,” he says. “We make a day out of just eating. You’d think I’d be big as a house, but I’m not.”

LePino, a former engineer trained at Cornell University who now helps people raise capital for investment in large resorts, has no children and he worries about the future of his trees.

“I hope my nephews will move back (from Colorado) and maybe they’ll take over,” he says.

But that’s a long way away and there’s still plenty of time to enjoy the bounty.

“Imagine just sitting here and eating figs all day. Could life be any better than this?”