The crops are ready down yonder in N.Y. City : Time to bring in the beets on the Big Apple’s last family farm.

The corn swaying in the prematurely chill breeze stood as high as an elephant’s eye. But the nearby red brick houses and public school stood even higher.

It’s harvest time on the last remaining working family farm in New York City. The carrots are being pulled from the rich dark soil. Radishes and dill, beets and turnips, parsley, scallions and other crops are being picked, cleaned and sold.

The harvest of 1990--the 105th yearly harvest on the Klein family’s land--has been bountiful, the end product of a process that began in April.

“You plant these little seeds. You watch them grow,” said John Klein, a fourth-generation farmer. “You crawl up and down the rows weeding. You give fertilizer, and five days later the plant is twice as big. Then it’s a carrot and people are eating it.

“Harvest time is the best time of the year. You are doing all this hard work, and you are getting something out of it.”

Klein, 25, wore a blue sweat shirt emblazoned with the word “Boss,” short sweat pants and dirty white high-top basketball sneakers as he looked over the crops.

“Some people get off the expressway and drive by. They can’t believe they are in New York City,” he said. “It’s a little bit of the twilight zone.”

If the notion that a farm still exists in New York City brings shock, even suspension of belief, that notion quickly passes upon closer inspection of the land and its sturdy three-story red brick farmhouse with a basement kitchen big enough to feed 50 farmhands.

Stand under the tall maple tree Klein’s great-grandfather planted, glance at the gray Ford tractor, circa 1950, look out over the crops, and for a moment time stands still. If the Klein family farm is the last working farm in New York City, it is something more: a memorial to a gentler era, to continuity, to a quieter, more orderly life.

The Klein family settled in rural Flushing, Queens, in 1895. Adam Klein’s father, who operated a farm in Brooklyn, decided to stake his son to a spread. At one point, the Klein family owned 140 acres in the general area where the present farm stands. Nowadays, it owns just two acres.

The shrinkage is testimony to urban growth, profit taking and pressures from highway builders, developers, speculators and city officials.

“My father wishes his father and his grandfather had not sold off the land,” Klein said.

As land prices and urban pressures rose, the family also acquired a series of farms on nearby Long Island. In addition to the remaining two acres in Queens, it owns 97 acres in Riverhead, N.Y. But as Long Island becomes more developed, pressure to put the land to other uses increases.

“The next step is the ocean,” Klein said. “We will be farming fish.”

In the 1950s, the Klein family sold off part of its farm to the Board of Education, which built Public School 26. The school next door and the farm share a somewhat symbiotic relationship. Some classes visit the farm and write essays. Other students help work the land, doing odd jobs.

A while back things got out of hand. The kids had a tomato war in the schoolyard.

Klein, who attended the University of Buffalo for three years, shares chores on the farm with his father. They commute on alternate days from their home in Riverhead. Klein’s aunt lives in the Queens farmhouse.

The commute makes it a long day. Klein awakens early--not to the sound of a rooster but to the chatter of an all-sports radio station. By 7 a.m., he has made the journey to Queens. Even working two acres can be hard.

“You go home, you’re tired,” he said.

Occasionally, he ventures deeper into New York City--a journey he views warily.

“I get nervous going into the city,” he explained. “If I drive my car in, I have to worry. I went to Shea Stadium and they stole the radio. They don’t care any more. They just shoot and stab you. It’s laid back out here,” Klein said. “It’s not like people on Wall Street or in downtown Manhattan. The people who work in the stock market yell and scream. I don’t yell and scream.”

But things aren’t quite that easy on the farm. Klein pointed to a row of tall corn plants swaying in the breeze.

“The squirrels are eating the corn,” he said.