As a child, Mary Menniti spent a lot of time with her Italian grandfather, who visited their rural home to tend his figs. “He came from a lifestyle of surviving on what he could grow and brought that knowledge to New Castle,” she says.

Even then, she could tell there was a special connection between her grandfather and those figs. They grew easily in Italy but are one of the plants that need a lot of work to thrive in Pennsylvania. “It represented self-sufficiency to them,” she says, “because the fig was something they could depend on.”