High Summer Fig Harvest
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Birds throughout the neighborhood have alerted each other for about 10 days now that the fig harvest is in over at our house.
The mockingbirds and cardinals also threw a two-day-long actual fit when I wrapped up the lower third of our Brown Turkey fig tree with bird netting. It’s not like I didn’t leave the whole top of the tree for them to feast on, but you would’ve thought I’d stolen their babies and put them in a chili pot.
The tree itself is huge, more like a bush on steriods, with maybe 20 trunks and lower branches that spread across a circle with perhaps a 30-foot diameter. I’ve tried in vain to trim the top in order to keep the higher fruit within at least ladder reach, but it’s probably 18 feet tall or so and too thick to allow ladder access. So I take the figs within arms reach, under the netting, and leave the rest for the birds.
Even giving up that much, we can fill two collanders with ripe brownish-purple figs every three days or so. I’ve made fig jam, various fresh-fig desserts, and tried a pie this year. But I can’t find a better way to eat them than just fresh from the tree. Since there are so many, however, I feel compelled to preserve this gift from God somehow, and thus will can them whole, for those months when we don’t have any fresh fruit here.
We have two other figs growing, one with mission-type fruit that get nearly black, and one with very large fruit that barely turns color – from green to light green – but gets a little wrinkly and very soft when ripe. The trouble with the latter one is that the tree, while only in its fourth year, already is very tall. I’m usually too lazy to haul out a ladder just for a couple of figs, so I tend to shake the branches instead. It takes a steady eye to catch them before they splat on the ground.
While our others are good, and considerably larger than the brown ones, nothing else approaches the incredible sweetness of a perfectly ripe turkey fig. And this year, many of them are ripening to perfection, thanks to a drier-than-usual early summer. I like to wait until they’ve passed the point of maximum plumpness by a couple of days, and started to wrinkle a little and sag on the stem. The sugar content in these slightly dried figs is incredibly high.
While the fig crop is extremely reliable, getting a bunch of bananas in any given year is strictly a bonus. You often need more months of freeze-free weather than we have around here to get a ripe bunch.
Yesterday we got one of those bonuses, and it looks like there will be three or four more to come this year.
The bunch that arrived most recently was hanging at the top of a 14-foot banana plant in a clump that escaped from a neighbor’s yard and crawled under our fence a couple of years ago. Just like last year, the fruit plumped up enough to topple the banana stem, but hasn’t yet turned yellow.
I’ll ripen them fully by closing them up in a box with a couple of apples. The apples give off ethylene, a gas that speeds the ripening process. In a few days, they’ll come out yellow and sweet. This fruit from this unknown variety isn’t quite as large as the commercial varieties, but their flavor is very similar and their flesh is a little denser.
We also have several bunches that formed early this year on our Raja Puri plants, and these are the ones I really look forward to. An Indian variety, the plants grow about 10 feet tall, with wide bluish-green leaves and fat stems. The fruit are fat and small – no more than six inches long when ripe – but they taste great. Very sweet, somewhat like the commercial varieties but with what seems to me to be a hint of lemon.
I highly recommend the Rajas for the Texas Gulf Coast, because they fruit freely and do a great job handling our winters. They can survive short bursts of cold down to 25 degrees without freezing back to the ground, and their roots will survive even the coldest winters around here.
→ B.Dunn, Jul 09, 2008, 06 47 am
