To plant a fig tree in our climate is an act of faith. Most figs are native to the tropics—and in the heat and sweat of this world they do amazing things. They’ve co-evolved with a wasp that crawls into the fruit and pollinates it from the inside out. Birds drop seeds in the canopy of the forest and some fig trees germinate up there, then send roots down to the ground. Some of the world’s 800 plus species of figs can even produce fruit year-round.
The common fig, Ficus carica, is the miracle happening in my yard. There is some evidence that the common fig was among the first—or maybe even the first—plant bred for agriculture in the Middle East and it’s one of a handful of fig species that grows in the temperate world. I got my seedling eleven years ago from an Italian family in town. Plant it on a south facing wall, they told me—it likes the heat and the alkaline lime that leaches from concrete—and when winter comes, sever all the roots but the main root, fold the tree down, and bury it, or at least wrap it in burlap, to protect from the cold. The cutting they gave me came from an unspecified Italian tree—some relative of the cultivar Brown Turkey, I think—that the family brought over from the Old Country decades before.
In Italy and Spain and Turkey and the Mediterranean countries where the Common Fig is from the fruit has a long history as a staple food. In 1584 a far-sighted governor decreed that all the residents of the island of Corsica, off the coast of Italy, must plant four trees every year: one chestnut, one mulberry, one olive, and one fig. A single common fig tree can produce as much as 50 pounds of figs after just a few years. The ripe fruit can be eaten fresh, made into jams, and dried. Hunger soon stopped visiting Corsica.
When Italian immigrants first started planting figs in New England, they’d bury them in the winter as was described to me. A hard winter can kill a fig tree back to the ground and though it won’t die but will usually resprout, under these conditions, the tree won’t produce much. This is because a well-cared for fig can produce two crops each summer: an early or breba crop that ripens in July or August on last year’s growth, and a main crop on the current year’s shoots that ripens in the fall. Botanically, the fruits of the fig are actually not fruits at all, but syconia. They’re a part of the stem that expands into a sac with flowers that grow inside. The soft, tear shaped figs are an inflorescence, an inverted cluster of hundreds or even thousands of flowers and seeds wrapped up in a bulbous stem.
I’ve never wrapped or buried my fig, and it’s often been killed back to the ground. But the tree always recovers and recent winters have been mild. Last year I got my first harvest: three ripe figs. I ate them sliced in half with generous hunks of gorgonzola crumbled on top, drizzled with honey, and sprinkled with sea salt. And this year, I got my first breba crop. These first early figs are huge and literally dripping with sugars. I’ve never had a breba crop—a round of figs to eat now and another harvest come fall! The word breva comes from Spanish, where it also translates as a windfall, or sheer luck.
Here are some links about growing figs:
Cold hardy varieties
A trial of cold hardy figs
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This piece first aired in August 2021.
