Nice mix. If you got more room, add more figs!
Never heard of a haskap.
Stupendous Collection!
You really make the most of your land!
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Great for you!
Stay healthy, relax and enjoy life!
Great use of your land!
Really impressive what you fit in.
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I’m proud to say I’m now down to about 300 varieties from perhaps twice that. After adding like crazy I switched to removing like crazy to only have the things that really worked for me. I confess I am still adding here and there, I added maybe 20 things this year and removed a similar amount.
I was just eating some of my Black Tartarian cherries which reminded me why I liked experimenting with so many varieties… they are absolutely luscious! They are nothing like a store cherry, very soft but loaded with dark rich flavor. It reminded me why I do this. I’d be fine with only that cherry and my sour, Montmorency. Most of the fruits I eliminated were apples and pears - hundreds of varieties just didn’t work in terms of diseases, taste, etc. I still have a bunch more to go, I am seeing several which look too fireblight-prone.
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I just started truly planting things this year, but I have a decent assortment. No/unknown cultivars unless mentioned.
Inground:
2 Peanut Butter Fruit
1 Dwarf Everbearing Mulberry
1 Pawpaw
1 Slim Leaf Pawpaw
2 Smallflower Pawpaw
2 Sugar Belle Citrus
1 Key Lime/Meyer’s Lemon Bush
2 Osage Blackberry Bushes
1 Pineapple Guava
A red Sugarcane patch
2 Ackee trees (this drought has been brutal on them though)
1 Sapodilla
1 Rose Apple
1 Red Jaboticaba
2 Barbados Cherries
3 Pigeon Peas
5 blueberries (2 Sharp Blue, a UF cultivar, and 2 Pink Lemonade)
3 Passion Fruits (2 Purple Possums and a Yellow)
2 Ice Cream Beans
1 Pomegranate
1 Moringa
1 25ft+ tall white fleshed Dragonfruit
1 Miracle Fruit Bush
15ish Cocoplums
4 Fig Leafed Gourd
I have a bunch of seedlings in pots, but for larger plants I have:
1 Black Jaboticaba
1 Ice Cream Banana
1 Coffee Arabica
4 Ice Cream Bean Trees
1 Blackberry Jam Fruit Tree
5 Longan seedlings
1 Sugarloaf Pineapple
1 Pomelo seedling
No large quantities on anything yet, but I’ll probably will get more mulberries in September and hopefully have some of my seedlings to plant out.
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This year:
Apples - 50
Peach - 5
Filberts - 9
Pawpaw - 8
Chestnut - 5
Persimmon - 3
Plums - 2
Cherry - 2
Pear - 1
Medlar - 1
Plus some raspberries, saskatoons, currants, and honeyberires.
Lots of apples, I know. More than we can eat. About a third of those are dedicated cider trees, and most others are dual purpose. Mostly M111 with a few B118. Leaning heavily into my growing cider hobby.
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Always interested in cold hardy cider and dual purpose apples!
Paid a lot of $ to get the property! Figs are in pots because they’re other varieties I propagated from cuttings and still don’t know where to fit them in the ground yet. Eventually, haha
I actually just received most of them this spring. I started the Chicago hardy and the Celeste from cuttings last spring, but they got really setback by some disease.
I looked at the catalog from Richters herbs and picked some varieties that I could find information on. Supposedly, these are varieties that could survive a winter in my zone if properly mulched, but I have them in SIP containers for fast growth as reccomended by the “Notorious Fig”, who grows in a similar climate to my zone 6b/7a.
From my reading
Olympia tastes like peaches and makes very large figs
Desert king tastes melon like, but only produces on second year growth
Verns Brown turkey and Celeste are sugar figs" that taste like brown sugar
Verte is supposed to be like a strawberry jam flavor
Beers black, black mission and Chicago Hardy are supposed to be similar “figgy” figs
Ronde de Bordeaux is a stand out fig as an early ripening, crack resistant, cold hardy-ish berry flavored fig.
I have only ever tasted brown turkey and Chicago hardy fresh, but the flavors were so impressive that I decided to test a bunch of varieties to see which ones I would want to keep and potentially put in ground. They can also be dried really well, which I like a lot. Dried figs are better than most dried fruit in my opinion, certainly better than apples, which lose most of their flavor, and peaches, which smell like booty.
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I haven’t had all the figs on this list but a few thoughts:
Ultimately, figs taste like figs. There is a pretty incredible variety of flavors, yes, but blind tasting any variety from the various flavor groups you’ll still know it’s a fig. I think the fig community exaggerates a bit the extent to which fig flavors vary. Yes, it varies a lot, possibly more than any other fruit, but ultimately figs taste like figs.
That being said, if you plan to have multiple figs, then having figs from each flavor group is a very good idea. Like I said, figs quite possibly have the greatest range of flavors of any fruit. If nothing else, you’ll find out which ones your like best. Fig flavors are pretty climate dependant, so your best tasting fig might not be someone else’s best, even if you have the same palette, which you likely don’t.
Fig cold hardiness is a bit complicated. Most fig varieties have just about the same winter hardiness, with a few being somewhat less hardy. By and large, figs less than about three years old are far less hardy than older, established figs, and wood with wider calipers is much hardier than smaller newer wood. Roots, once established, are close to two full zones hardier than above ground wood. When people talk about some figs being good for cold climates, usually they don’t mean that the fig is actually more cold hardy than normal in the true sense of it not dying to the ground in cold winters. They mean that either the fig is early so it ripens while you still have heat, or more often they mean that the fig will reliable set fruit even after freezing to the ground. Chicago Hardy and other Mt. Etna figs meet the latter, while Celeste is an example of the former.
As to some specific varieties, including ones you mentioned:
Olympian is a fairly large fig, yes. It’s definitely a sugar fig. None of the ones I’ve had were particularly peach flavored, but I’ve not had any from a mature tree or that were dead ripe. Most secondary flavors only show up in very, very ripe figs. Underripe figs generally taste pretty similar, figgy, melon, and sweet. The differences between the varieties are most pronounced with very, very ripe figs.
Celeste is a bit lighter tasting than Brown Turkey. Despite being smaller, I prefer it, as there are some nice subtleties that Brown Turkey doesn’t have.
Ronde de Bordeaux is very good tasting. It’s pretty heavy on both the fig and the berry flavors. I’ve not had anything off my Beer’s Black yet, but I suspect it’ll be similar.
True Adriatic figs, like Strawberry Verte, can be quite late. Smith is very similar to the true Adriatics but earlier (though considered less cold hardy).
Looks like you’ve got the sugar, Bordeaux berry, Dark Berry, Adriatic, and Mt. Etna flavor groups/fig categories covered. I’d recommend considering a good honey fig and perhaps a complex berry fig (on the mid Atlantic and in the South, probably Colonel Littman’s Black Cross if you can find it for a reasonable price).
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yeah, from what I have read, it does seem to be a ripeness thing that sets the flavors apart. That is true for most fruits too, ripeness/brix will largely determine the flavors that are expressed. A raspberry picked a day early will basically just taste like sweet-tart, but when they are dead ripe they have such a powerful flavor that a single berry can flavor a whole glass of water or will linger on your palate for a long time.
The Figs I have bought from the store just tasted like sweet dirt. The ones I picked off of a friends tree tasted like molasses and everything good about dried fruit. The others I got from a market tasted like cantaloupe/ peachy. I have not had a berry one yet, so I am interested in what that is supposed to be.
As for the varieties of figs, I am going to wait and see if I can reliably crop the ones I have in before I add anymore, or maybe I find a few of them to just not be great/ prone to issues. They are mostly an experiment that, if I don’t really like them, I will just sell on marketplace for a profit. there is a guy near me, bills figs I think, who has all sorts of figs that he can ripen. Mine are all in full sun, and in pots for extra heat so I don’t think ripening will be much of an issue for the early set fruits, but it wont be like I live in the south or anything.
I wanted to make a trip to fig fest this year and try a bunch more varieties.
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What are your winter protection plans?
Had 133 grafts. Threw out 14 grafts today. 10 G.214, 3 P.2 and an M111. All dead rootstock. Still have to go through the pad, But most of those are doing well. There might be 6 bad ones. Also the batch that can in really late is too early to tell. Some of those scions were rough looking. So we will see.
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I have them in pots and just put them in my garage/ basement.
The ones I have outside, I just bend and bury with mulch. Even if they die to the ground, they should still grow back and produce a fall crop.
I have seen one dude actually protect his desert king fig for a breba crop in zone 5 by bending and burying. Example of the Buried Desert King
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Too many trees for someone with other hobbies. I don’t understand how everyone else here keeps up with the labor! 28 trees total. Only a few doubles. We’re a former 5B zone now known as a 6A near Champaign, Illinois. Great soil. Good sunlight. Currently minimal cicadas. This is our second season in a row without any peaches due to -12 degree temperatures both winters. Painful.
We currently have the following;
Peaches: Gala, Red Haven, Red Star, Coral Star, PF 19-007, PF 15A, PF 24-007, PF 5D Big, PF 9A-007, Laurol, Prima 1A, Flame Prince, Contender, FlavrBurst, Cresthaven, Summer Serenade.
Nectarines: Royal Giant and Hardired
Sweet Cherries: Windsor, Van, Black Tartarian.
Apples: Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, Zestar, Jon-a-red, Snow-Sweet.
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Sounds like you’ve got it figured out. Congrats.
For starters, my place won’t be confused for a manicured park! 
In other words, I have lower standards.
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Absolutely lovely!!
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