My mom’s been cleaning out her house in the Bronx, where I and a prodigious collection of cooking and gardening books were both raised, each growing ever bigger, each likely to get spattered with sticky substances during cooking experiments, each dog-eared and brittle-paged…alright, I suppose I have over-reached my analogy. Anyhow, my mom and I have discovered a highly compatible interest not only in both cooking and growing (though she prefers flowers while I don’t grow what I can’t eat) but also in collecting enormous piles of books. Fittingly, I have become the repository of old books on gardening, disturbingly dated books on ethnic cuisine (one “African” cookbook actually contains a picture of the white, British author in a pith helmet) and other entertaining relics.

One acid-stained but otherwise unruffled paperback that came into my hands a few weeks ago seemed too hilarious a premise to pass up. The After-Dinner Gardening Book is a 1970s how-to guide for growing tropical plants from the pits and seeds of imported fruits. It seemed to me, little locavore whose gall rises on the Metro North in Jersey whenever the endless fields of invasive phragmites stretch along the railroad tracks, like an appalling idea. Grow papayas in my apartment? Why, when I can instead watch my scraggly sage plants get eaten up by tiny gray things that appear to live on the evolutionary edge between worm and mold? Why mess around with sprouting lychee nuts, when I can escort a baby walnut tree from my friend’s farm in Wisconsin, get patted down and have all my bags unpacked accordingly (walnut tree = terrorist) and my hair gel taken away from me, only to watch the poor thing languish in the greasy Brooklyn air? Apparently, burger king fumes do not a walnut tree inspire.

All this points to my real problem, I am not a gardener, certainly not such a refined thing as an indoor gardener. Indoor gardeners sprout individual seeds in little containers and water them carefully by hand, they name individual plants sometimes, they attentively mix so much humus to so much soil, they prune their papayas. Me, I like the kind of growing where you throw a handful of seeds in the ground, slap some drip tape on top of it and then weed madly when a great profusion of life over-takes it, stopping only to proudly snip off a cucumber when one can make it through the mess. Indoor gardening is for the truly detail-oriented, the ones every job posting is aimed at.

But despite my now duly acknowledged window sill gardening issues, I cracked “The After-Dinner Gardening Book” just after dawn one winter morning and didn’t put it down until the sun shone brightly on the new snow, and a jungle of deep crimson mango leaves and lustrous avocado leaves had unfurled around my brain. I was seriously questioning my excuses for why my sage and walnut tree are so poorly adjusted. Richard W. Langer, the author, tells of indoor gardening in a dark little New York apartment in the 1960s, when his attempts to dig soil from the park met with “a layer of soot, followed by a layer of gum wrappers, then another of popsicle sticks” not to mention a lecture on citizenship from a police officer who thought he should support city tax revenue by buying his soil at the store. In Langer’s New York, the local elementary school burned coal in the winter, yet he managed to coax mango seeds, notorious for being fickle and viable for only a short time, to sprout, and though he labored without hope of ever actually eating the offspring of his after-dinner fruit, he did get some really nice houseplants out of them, and along the way he teaches readers how to make attractive coffee can pots, create proper drainage, sprout seeds in a discarded jam jar, and generally sets forth plenty of evidence in support of a life of curiosity, thrift and delight. His writing is effortless, his voice is likeable and his imagination, which leads him to do things like climb up a ladder and hurl coconuts into the bathtub in order to simulate seeding in their natural environment, is something like a comic side-kick.

So, in honor of the picture on the cover of our new The Jew and The Carrot Tastebook, and of the chosen people as a whole, I reproduce his instructions on how to grow a pomegranate, in hopes that whoever acquired this little book in the great publishing mergers of the new New York will put it back into print and bring pineapples once again into proliferation on the windowsills of the east coast.

In chapter 12, “Ponderings on the Pithy Pomegranate,” Langer begins by recounting his struggle to peel the fruit without making a mess of himself and ends up holding the thing at arms length with the knob end (calyx) facing away from him, cutting a slice off at that end and then peeling down from there. He then extricates the seeds, eats the tasty part, and places them in a clear jar on two layers of soaked cheesecloth until a taproot sprouts in four to six weeks, when he transfers it to a pot filled two thirds with soil and one with humus. Leaves will sprout in another couple of weeks, and Langer then suggests keeping the pomegranate plant in the warmest area possible, such as on top of a covered radiator, where other plants won’t thrive. He tells readers not to get the pomegranate’s leaves wet, but to water the base of the plant as much as you would any other. He keeps the soil dry one month a year in hopes of forcing a bloom in the desert plant, but as of 1971, he appeared to have been as yet unsuccessful. Since indoors, pomegranates grow straight up in little shrubs instead of branching, he plants multiple ones to a pot for a lush effect. Personally, the idea delights me, and I might just root up that ill-favored walnut tree, mix in some humus and give it a go.

After all, in my New York you can pick ten pounds of cherries off the trees in Prospect Park, dig up dock roots for making chips along the center drive and strip new leaves off the oaks and wild grapes to crisp your pickles with. The furnace runs on oil in my building and there is honest to goodness dirt in the parks. If Langer could raise gooseberries in coal dust, I bet I can make due among the SUVs and fast food joints of Flatbush Avenue.