Damned Figs!


“In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once.”
-Matthew 21:18-19

We find it hard to cut down a mature tree, especially a fruit tree. But after living with a substandard fig tree for ten years we finally understood this biblical episode, and chopped the sucker down.

Our holy land type climate in Los Angeles makes it a cinch to grow figs. It also makes it possible for all the fig trees in the neighborhood to hybridize. We speculate that the previous residents of our humble compound let a feral fig tree grow. Unfortunately this tree produced fruit with the texture of Styrofoam packing materials and the flavor of . . . Styrofoam packing materials. We tried everything from drying to making jam with these accursed figs but never got satisfactory results. During the day flies laid their larvae in the fruits yielding gooey masses that would drop to the ground to provide rotting fig feasts to visiting rats and possums.

We replaced the fig tree with the Valencia orange tree in the photo above. One of the most important lessons we’ve learned in our ten years at this address is that if you’re going to plant a tree to choose varieties carefully and, when space is at a premium, plant trees that yield food or medicine. We’ve also never regretted cutting down the forest of useless trees we found when we first moved here–Frederic Law Olmstead cut down a few thousand to build Central Park after all.

More on our new front yard orchard soon (which, of course, includes a fig tree).

UPDATE:

Homegrown Evolution reader Krystel sent us a link to a very amusing site, God Hates Figs.

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4 Comments

  1. We have a gangly tentacle-y fig tree in our backyard that every spring produces glorious leaves (that I then get to spend the rest of the summer and fall sweeping up) along with baskets full of ever-unripening fruit that ultimately rain down on us either by gravity or the squirrels that take bites out of them and pitch down in disgust.

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