When Mo Katz-Christy was growing up in the Spring Hill neighborhood of Somerville in the 2010s, they had a neighbor with a beautiful grape arbor on his property. Champagne grapes hung above the door, stretched over the driveway and around the entire house.
“It was magical,” they said. “It felt like infinite grapes.”
Neighbors, including Katz-Christy’s family, asked to harvest the grapes and would come by with shopping bags to pick fruit off the vines. Katz-Christy’s family would use their harvest to make juice, ideally 52 quarts for Shabbat every week of the year.
But as their neighbor aged, the grape arbor fell into neglect, growing over his garage. So, Katz-Christy’s family began pruning the vines. “It was a testament to our love for that arbor and our desire for it to continue,” they said.
Katz-Christy no longer lives next door and that neighbor’s grape arbor is long gone.
“Somerville is all grapes”
Although grapevines are often considered a nuisance by developers or new residents and are uprooted, many still exist in backyards and interstices around Somerville and Cambridge. Katz-Christy, 29, is now an herbalist who teaches classes about medicinal herbs and local plants, including grapes.
At a recent workshop on pruning grape arbors, Katz-Christy encouraged local residents to turn their “grape eyes” on. “When you start looking, Somerville is all grapes,” they said.
One of the largest local arbors is above the patio at The Neighborhood Restaurant in Union Square. Owner Sheila Borges-Foley, 57, says she has white grapes that were planted by the property’s last owner, and Concord grapes that her Portuguese father planted when he bought the property in the 80s. Concord grapes are common in the area, having been developed in 1849 by farmer Ephraim Wales Bull in nearby Concord.
“In the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, all the Italians and Portuguese [immigrants] had a grapevine,” she said. “There was a grapevine in everybody’s backyard.”
Locals say immigrants brought cuttings with them from their home countries. It’s possible they were grafted onto local American grape vines, which could survive the Northeast’s cold climate.
Borges-Foley’s father used his grapes to make wine, which the family served as an aperitif or used to cook. But, “It tasted like dirt,” she said. “It was deep, very robust. The old school guys liked it.”
Although she still has her father’s wine barrels on the patio, Borges-Foley says she doesn’t have time for wine making. Instead, Borges-Foley and her staff harvest the grapes when they ripen over her patio, then make jelly, which gets served with toast to diners, or sold in jars.
Borges-Foley’s grape arbor is pruned annually by a Portuguese man named Manny, who first provided the service for Borges-Foley’s father.
“I prefer that old Portuguese tradition over someone who studied it [in school],” she says of her grape vine maintenance. “It’s an art that they learned in the old country.”
But not everyone has a Manny.
Emily Borkowski, 28, rents a unit of a house in Ward Two and prunes an extensive grape arbor on the property with her boyfriend. Borkowski’s landlord told her that the vines were planted by the house’s previous Portuguese owner, who harvested the grapes to make wine for his neighbors. It still yields hundreds of pounds of grapes a year, but now, “It’s like a rat’s nest,” she said. “Quite literally. There are rats living in them.”
If Borkowski and her boyfriend don’t prune the vines in the spring, the vines can’t support the fruit that grows. The grapes don’t fully ripen, and eventually shrivel up and die. But pruning means harvesting ripe fruit in the fall — before it falls to the ground and attracts wasps and rats.
“I either care for them or deal with the consequences,” she said, of her “love-hate relationship” with the arbor.
Other local residents have cultivated their own relationships to grapes. Matt McKeon, 49, owns a home near the Somerville Armory. Maintaining grapevines is hard work, but to him, the effort is worth it. His family harvests 20 to 35 pounds of grapes from their arbor each year, to make over 100 jars of jam that they gift to friends.
“The idea that we can take this stuff that is growing in our yard and make something delightful and useful is its own reward,” he said. “It’s about learning to do something new that you’re not familiar with, experimenting and getting some things wrong but still having something to show for it.”
McKeon dreams of one day selling his family’s jam — one version with cinnamon and cloves and another with cardamom, ginger, and turmeric — at the farmer’s market at the Armory. Luckily for him, Cambridge and Somerville both have permitting processes for making food in a residential kitchen and selling directly to a consumer.
Not all urban plants are safe to eat, but eating urban fruit is safe, according to local experts. Although soil in urban areas is often contaminated with lead, Elsa Petit, a lecturer at University of Massachusetts Stockbridge School of Agriculture, says that grapevines behave like “excluder plants,” which do not take in toxic elements like heavy metals from soil. Although lead can accumulate in the roots, there is a “much lower” concentration in the leaves and “extremely low” levels in the berries, making fruit and wine “not a major pathway of exposure” to lead, she said.
Beyond the utility to humans, tending to arbors is also “huge for biodiversity,” she said. “If you have a diversity of plants, you have a diversity of microbes [which in turn] feed different birds and [other] species.”
McKeon’s grapevines also have roots in Portugal, or at least people from there. They were gifted to his home’s prior owner by their Portuguese neighbors, who hailed from the Azores. In a rapidly changing neighborhood, grape arbors are reminders of past families and species who lived in the area, tended to, and enjoyed local gardens.
“Keeping these vines going and making things from them… it feels like I have this connection to the history of my town,” said McKeon. “It roots me here in ways that make me feel at home.”
Katz-Christy agrees. Taking care of grape arbors, laborious as it may be, is a way of “tending to our ancestors, plant and human.”
A stronger
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