Crop Circles
(Garden • )
By now it’s clear that nature’s bounty has been whacked out of joint by the fiery sun this year and yet, amid today’s 104-degree heat and still more grazing tobacco hornworms, I found four large tomatoes, at least a dozen cherry tomatoes, three ripe, red and hot Guajilla peppers, six fruity-hot Mirasol peppers, two unidentified blunt triangular peppers that were supposed to be purple Serranos but are not, one very small eggplant and a mess of good-looking green chiles.
Damn good food, no cash expended.
And a major added bonus: The figs are on. Our enormous bush-tree in back, a Brown Turkey or Texas Everbearing offshoot, yielded a modest colander of fruit today – but yesterday nothing had really turned completely ripe yet. Tomorrow, judging from what I and about 15 mocking birds and cardinals observed and chewed on, a lot more will be ready. Whatever this exact fig variety is, it is terrifically acclimated to our weather. Even in the current baking drought, it is set to produce a bumper crop – a good thing, because the weather has minimized the blackberry harvest. We’re getting some, but haven’t been able to give them the moisture they need for a really good crop. By contrast, if anything the brown figs are slightly drier and noticeably sweeter than usual this year.
The now-matured young fig tree in the front also has a heavy crop ripening in the sun, and the birds don’t have a clue. I tasted the first few ripe ones yesterday and today, and they, too, seem sweeter than last year’s crop, likely because we’ve had so much less rain. Also an unknown variety, this tree produces green fruit that suddenly almost double in size and turn a subtle yellowish green just as they become ripe – a color that apparently triggers no hint of recognition in the local feathered fruit peckers. These figs are enormous when ripe – at least three times the size of the brown ones in back.
My 5-year-old daughter has insisted for months that she intends to be a chef. She has been watching the figs getting bigger on the vine, and sometimes when I’m working on the computer she comes and climbs into my lap and demands I do a Google image search for figs. Then she has me click on good-looking photos in the hopes that there will be a recipe attached. She’s found some good ones that way, and is really determined to try them out.
→ B.Dunn, Jun 27, 2009, 03 31 pm
