I tasted Mary Lane at Prusch Park a couple years ago. I am not growing it. There was an old-ish man picking figs and I tried starting a conversation with him. He wasn’t very interested in conversation but a bit later he got to the Mary Lane Seedless tree and called me over. He gave me one fruit and said it was perfect, that any of the other fruit would need to sit on the counter for a few days. That dude knows his figs. That one fruit was perfect. Incredible jammy texture and delicious flavor. All the other fruit on the Mary Lane were fine but didn’t knock my socks off.
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Zidi was brought to Condit’s program in Riverside almost a century ago. All instances in the U.S. are likely derived from it. It is DFIC 36 at NCGR Davis.
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Great list, i’ve got a VDB and an olympia im waiting to try out. Kinda worried not seeing the olympia on your list.
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Out of my 40-something varieties:
San Miguel Roxo, Smith, Preto & a Sicilian family heirloom from a neighbor. (His grandfather brought it when he immigrated 100+ years ago)
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Do the Fig trees at Prusch Park have ID labels?
Nothing wrong with a Brown Turkey or a lot of other commonly grown fig trees. Many of the so called “top tier” figs are often over hyped and low yielding. Of course, there is always a new “must have” variety being promoted.
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Yes, I’d like to cull some from this list.
Some of them. And, famously, a Violette de Bordeaux (or something very similar to Violette de Bordeaux) is mislabeled as Black Ischia. This is regularly distributed at CRFG scion exchanges.
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That one is a petit Negri. Get distributed as Black Ischia??? ( with the 3 question marks) in scion exchanges
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also Sultane (most grown in egypt, and common in A.W.).
Zidi is in the second rank for me, and it matures two weeks after Sultane.
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I haven’t seen it with “???”, but that would be an improvement! I don’t cruise the fig section like I used to
It’s interesting how Sultani can do better for you, I wonder how much heat you get during the summer over there as that’s a requirement for a tasty Zidi. In literature, Zidi & BB always score very high, as opposed to the hybrid you mentioned which Condit describes both crops as poor in Riverside.
TSS isn’t everything but this Egyptian article describes it as:
Mature fruits of the widely distributed cultivar Bursa Siyahi contained 20.32% total sugars (Turk ,1989). TSS percentage of Sultani fig fruits ranged from 13.3 to 14.6% (Sourial et al., 1994-c).
Check out Zidi’s score in these references:
http://figs4fun.com/Links/FigLink768.pdf
I’ll keep an eye out for that one. From the tiny sample I had last year, Smith impressed me the most. Granted these were all 1 or 2 year cuttings producing one to three figs and not the best conditions or care, but Smith was an obvious star.
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@ammoun, I am not in Egypt or Tunisia, I live in hot place similar to south TN; ‘Sultani’ is similar to ‘Zidi’ but I lean towards the first; the variety is common in Tunisia and Algeria, also ‘baghli’ in sfax TN is more likely synonym for the same variety.
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Which fig did you mean by “TN” ?
I meant Tunisia country. not fig.
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Oh sorry,
is the entire sentence.
Baghli variety, which is in sfax Tunisia, is very likely a synonym for the variety Sultani.
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