The Berry Harvest

Ms. Johana gives a cooking lesson

An on-going series about a feisty woman and her East New York community garden. Read part 1 and 2

Ms. Johana and I have been dipping two-gallon watering cans in rain barrels all morning to make sure her rambunctious crops won’t wilt in the July heat. We could have used the hoses hooked up to the fire hydrants outside the garden fence but, after a couple of decades doing things her way, she believes hand watering is best. For one thing, two gallons is exactly the amount of water needed to grow long roots. More importantly, hand watering allows a close look at how everything is growing. Inspect whether the stems are strong or rotting, check for bugs, and while you’re at it, pull weeds. And also this: Be on the lookout for plants that might have escaped the city’s rake through her garden.

Take her Egyptian garlic. She thought she lost it, but enough strays have been found to fill a whole bucket.

“One time there were these sanitation men standing around, and one comes over and asks me, ‘Miss, what are those?,’ pointing to my garlic. And I say, ‘Garlic.’ And he says, ‘That can’t be; it doesn’t grow like that with that kind of flower on top.’ I look at him and I say, ‘How can you tell someone that’s growing it, that it isn’t garlic? What do I have to do? Stand in Macy’s window and tell you?’ And he says, ‘Boy, you have a fuse.’ ‘Yeah, it’s called nitroglycerine dynamite,’ and I take one out, wash it, and give it to him. ‘Now you see this?’ meaning the flower. ‘You chop it and put it in oil and you use it in salad. And you chop the stalks up and use it in sofrito, and the other part you use like regular garlic.’ And he says, ‘How much they are?’ I say, ‘$5.’ He bought four. Comes back next week and says, ‘I gave it to my wife and she used it all up and told me I better come back and try to get more.’

We lean on a water barrel, have a great bend over laugh about that one, and go on lugging cans.

Every now and then, I soak my straw hat and shirt in a barrel, then slap them back on, drenched but cool for about 15 minutes. The heat doesn’t bother Ms. Johana, and there’s too much to do.

We work on deep into the afternoon when I decide there’s no shame in admitting you’re about to have heatstroke. “How about we sit for a bit, Ms. Johana?” I call.

“Allll right,” she says.

We make it over to the yellow painted picnic table bench under the cherry tree. I’ve brought two large soda bottles filled with what was once frozen water, now merely bracing. Both of us drain half our bottles in a series of long gulps, fine with letting some drip over our chins, delighted with its cool trail down our necks.

She nudges an old cake pan full of big black cherries over. “Try some of these.”

She picked them as soon as she arrived this morning, the ones the squirrels and birds overlooked. In another pan is harvested raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and tiny strawberries.

“Let me tell you what to do with these,” Ms. Johana says. “You go buy those small round biscuits in the store. You can make your own but it doesn’t matter. You cut one open, butter both sides, and then put some of whatever berries you want on. Smush the top a little down over them. Not a lot, just some. Then you take your cast iron pan and fry it.”

“What in?”

“Oh, whatever,” she says, sounding like she’s giving me a pass on asking a stupid question. “Butter. Oil. Whatever you got. You just want it crisp. But not too crisp. Then you wrap it up in wax paper and you can put it in your pocket and take it anywhere for a treat later. Keeps really nice and I’m telling you, gooood, oh so good,” she laughs.

If it wasn’t for her recipe, both pans would be devoured, so perfectly sweet and firm. The stopper is knowing that I’ll stop at a store for biscuits on my way home.

First, though, Ms. Johana tells me to go cut dead branches off the crepe myrtle tree.

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