Martinenca Rimada
My first MR so i wanted to let it get really ripe but the hoop house has a tiny leak and the entire pot became waterlogged after 2 days of rain dripping in it so i figured if i didnt pick now it would likely split by tomorrow.
First photo is from a few days ago to show the color change.
Panache grown inground inside my hoophouse and my last CDDB.
CDDB really is an amazing fig. Easily top five for me i just wish it ripened earlier.
Last Fig Harvest here in the cold PNW. It froze last 3 nights in a row!
Lone persimmon is Morris Burton.
Malta Black and LdA are still sweet and good. One even dried up on the tree! The Dels Ermitans looks wonderful but lacks sweetness.
Morris Burton persimmon is not worth growing here – no sweetness
Picked some figs before the frost.
Sorrento AD:
Italian 258. Fig skin is chewy.
Vasilika Sika (Adriatic):
We had a earlier than usual end to fig season this year… with 3 nights in the 29-32 range… my CH fig looks like this now.
It will drop leaves soon now and i will collect cuttings and protect it for winter.
A few years ago… we had no frost hard enough to stop it until Dec 3rd. Too bad that does not happen every year.
It still has 100+ figs on now… perhaps some of those will be worth dehydrating.
Same here, frost knocked out all the figs, passionfruit, peppers, etc. The sad part is, we’re probably not going to get another frost until December. Coulda had an entire month more in the growing season were it not for the last two nights.
They look so good!
Same freeze knocked out 8 Chicago Hardy in our community orchard, TNHunter. I’m in Kansas City, Z6. How much longer do you think they needed to ripen? Debating putting some in ground on my property next spring, but not sure if I’ll see any fruit without a good deal of protection.
@PHorchard — here in my Southern middle TN location… Chicago Hardy Fig (in ground, good microclimate location, a few feet south of brick wall, south slope) normally starts ripening figs Mid August… and ends with our first hard enough frost.
That first hard enough frost in the fall can vary quite a bit… a few years ago I got my last figs and raspberries on Dec 3 — this year barley made it to November. I picked thru what was left on my tree yesterday and found 8-10 worthy of eating fresh and dehydrating…
Where I say “normally starts ripening” above… let me explain that a bit.
Year before last I protected my fig well and it fared well all thru winter and early spring… our low that winter was like 14 F. Not bad at all. In the spring I uncovered it and all went well…
I cut my fig tree back to short stumps (after it drops leaves / goes dormant) 18-24 inch long… and protect those stumps over the winter. then in the spring when I uncover it… it starts developing shoots and leaves off of those stumps in early April… and before long things are well underway. In a case like that… I can expect it to start ripening figs mid August.
But… now last winter… I protected my fig the same way as the year before… but our low was 3F (before Christmas) and yikes … my protection was not quite enough for that extreme. This spring when I uncovered it… it did nothing for several weeks… and then I started noticing shoots coming up from the ground (not off the stumps)… Eventually a few shoots did come off the stumps, like 3… but the rest came up from the ground… and it took it longer to get going because of that. I got my first ripe figs Mid September this year… a good month later than usual.
From Mid September until first of November we got at least a couple hundred figs off it… last year we probably got 100 more than this year.
When they do get some cold damage, it can delay shoots and leaves, and can force them to send up growth from the roots… which will typically put you 3-4 weeks behind… and then you start getting ripe fruit later in the season. That has been my experience.
Good Luck to you.
Thanks! KC winters always get down to single digits, so your explanation helps a lot. I was planning on die-back and growing out of the ground every spring. Knowing that you still get a “decent” amount of fruit seems to make this option worthwhile to me.
Whaddya know… I don’t think I ever had an Italian 258 in November up here in Boston. Surprisingly delicious and syrupy for this time of the year.
Have your seasons in the north east been getting longer? Very impressive figs!
I don’t know how those Moscatel Preto ripened so nicely. I just noticed them on an in ground tree earlier today after a frost earlier this week, and somehow they were excellent. For the CdD Mutante, I brought that one inside to finish ripening the last few figs that were close.
Gorgeous! Mine got a late start and failed to ripen the figs it had set. Here’s hoping for a bumper crop of I 258 next year!
I was stripping the frozen leaves off my Chicago Hardy today and saw that it’s still attempting to ripen a couple figs. We’ll see if they make it in under the wire before the end of the week.
@ramv I’m sure others up here in my neck of the woods would echo the sentiment that this has been a very erratic season. Any heat loving plant for the most part (with the exception of hot peppers) took a backseat this year, as we faced a cooler summer and one of the rainiest seasons on record. This was just an abnormal and definitely shorter summer season than last year’s. Anything leafy or fall crops are loving it. Lettuce, celery, fennel, kale, etc. did very well. Tomatoes, figs, eggplant, sweet peppers, etc. have performed significantly below the norm and general expectations this year.
Yes, definitely. The tomatoes did better than I thought they would, but definitely not as well as they should have. Figs were almost a bust. Even though I had my largest harvests to date, the quality was nowhere near where it should have been. In a “normal” year the trees would have ripened at least 50% more of the figs they had set.
The furthest on the right looks like a tarp, but the rest look like black trash bags. Is that right?
