The Fig Tree: One of History’s Greatest Plants

This is the very first post I’m writing about gardening, which I can say I’ve definitely gotten into over the last few years. If the internet is to be trusted, a lot of new people got into gardening during the pandemic, so hopefully that interest is sustained for the foreseeable future. 

Gardening is Resiliency

I think home gardens offer a bit more resiliency for those that have them, and perhaps for society as a whole if there were enough around. I’m thinking about the effect of Victory Gardens during World War II… If this National Garden Association report is correct, 42 million US households participated in food gardening in 2013. Even though that’s more households than existed in the US during World War II, the effect of gardening is less so than during the war effort. Tom Philpott, writing in Mother Jones in May 2020, points out that to be on par with that effort, you would have to see gardens everywhere. “Not just in private lawns, but also in vacant city lots, schoolyards, public parks, the strip between sidewalks and streets? That’s what Victory Gardens looked like, during World War II and also during World War I’s lesser-known gardening bonanza. These were giant mobilizations, harnessing grassroots energy with massive public investment.” Hey, a boy can dream, right?

My Start

My foray into gardening started in 2014 when my wife asked me to build her a raised bed at our old house. I told her I would build it for her but that I was not interested in tending it once it was put together—that was going to be her responsibility. In a matter of weeks, though, I was hooked.

I’m lucky that I took to it, though, because we also had ordered a sapling fig tree the prior fall and had been babying it for the winter. And I’m glad you asked, because there’s a story behind that, too (albeit a short one). Our honeymoon the prior fall took us to a beautiful inn a few hours south of where we live. As a way to congratulate us on our nuptials, the manager gave us the chef’s table the first evening of our stay. For those unaccustomed (which was us at the time), the chef’s table is a private table in the kitchen of the restaurant where you get to watch the chefs work. They provide you with a special menu and course after course of delightful food. At one point in our meal, I guess we had been sitting too long without new food in front of us, so the chef (Tucker Yoder, whose food was unbelievable) whipped up a little amuse-bouche of prosciutto-wrapped figs.* I had never had figs before; and holy crap they were good. He explained to us that these figs came out of his garden on the grounds of the inn where he had cultivated several trees. He emphasized that for our particular climate, the Chicago Hardy fig was the varietal of choice. So on a whim after the honeymoon was over, we ordered one from Amazon.

After babying ours in a pot for two winters, we finally felt bold enough to plant it in spring 2015. It yielded figs the very first year it was in the ground and they were worth the wait. As it turns out, the chef was right—the Chicago Hardy fig is the perfect varietal for our DC-area climate. It’s cold-hardy (as the name would suggest) and drought tolerant. A neighbor of ours had a brown turkey fig which routinely died back to the roots each winter before re-sprouting in the spring; it evidently couldn’t bear the cold. As a result, his fig spread out into a bush-like form each spring and encumbered a lot of space in his front yard. Since I was trying to avoid the bush-like look for our fig tree, I was happy I didn’t have to worry about it dying back each winter. There’s another benefit to that, which is that fig trees typically yield two batches of figs each year. The first batch (called the “breba” crop) is produced on the old wood from the previous season, so if your whole tree has had to regrow then you’ll miss out on half of its crop! The second batch of figs grow on the new limb growth from that same year. Fig trees can add over a foot of new limb growth per year, so luckily there’s plenty of real estate on the tree for this second batch.

By the time we moved in 2020, our tree had grown to about 8 feet tall (had it not gotten attacked by some kind of boring insect in 2018, it would have probably been well over 10 feet tall). I had tried my hand at propagating the tree the year before we moved to no avail, so I wasn’t super confident that I’d be able to do it when pruning back the tree during the fall we moved. You see, figs are a bit finicky when it comes to reproducing. You can’t just take the seeds out of the fruit and put them in some soil to grow a new plant. Sadly, you need to have fig wasps do the job for you.** Since I was fresh out of fig wasps, I had to propagate by either (1) clipping off some branches, applying rooting hormone to one side and praying it rooted when I put it into soil,*** or (2) getting lucky by having the fig tree send up a shoot with its own attached roots. Well, I did both. We now have one living tree from a rooted shoot sitting in the family room of our new house, and we have one (of the two I took) living pruned sections that took root and leafed out. With enough time, patience, good luck, and care, these two little trees should be yielding us fruit in our yard within a few years!

Useful and Interesting Fig Knowledge

I’ve come to learn a fair amount of info about cultivating figs in the years since we happened upon them. The first thing is that far more people grow them in this area than I ever imagined. Now that I know what they look like, I see them everywhere! People walking by our house often stop to talk to me about ours and tell me about their endeavors with their own. It’s like a secret society! Second, I was shocked when I searched for fig trees elsewhere in the world. I knew what fig trees looked like in the US, but holy crap some of these varietals in their native habitats are unbelievably large. Lastly, and this is more important if you’re planning on getting a fig tree yourself, they need aggressive pruning to keep them vigorous. Each winter when the tree is dormant, in addition to unsightly or inconvenient growth, I prune back about a third of the new growth from that year. This focuses the tree’s energy on fruiting.

I have also learned a fair bit about the history of the fig. A BBC article contends it is the tree that shaped human history. To summarize: It plays a part in every major religion. There is apparently a theory that human hands evolved in part to be able to determine the ripeness of figs by touch. Figs are considered to be a keystone resource, since they bear fruit year round in some areas of the world in order to keep their fig wasp pollinators alive. As a result, they also feed a huge amount of species with their fruit—more species of wildlife than any other fruit on the planet. Pretty cool, I’d say.

If this post is what drew you here, then stay tuned! In addition to the myriad of other topics I like to write about, I will also be detailing how I’m creating a permaculture setup at our new house as well as building new vegetable gardens. I want every plant on our property to have a purpose, in what I’m right now inventing and calling the Three P’s: Privacy, Pollination, or Provisions. Feel free to use that, but don’t forget where you read it first!

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*Sorry for writing “amuse-bouche.” I promise I’m more accessible than that phrase might indicate.

**For a fascinating story on this, take a look at this BBC article

***I watched a few different videos about this procedure, and followed this one pretty closely with a 50% success rate (out of my measly 2 attempts)