After five years, we finally have figs!  Not yet edible but definitely there and growing.  It was five years ago that I told Rita that I’d love to have a cutting from a fig tree she knew in Brooklyn.  For two years it was kept in the house during the winter until it was a couple of feet tall.  For two more years it stayed outdoors during our Connecticut winter, wrapped up in a old down coat.  Each year in the spring I wondered if it had survived, the old branches looked so wretched, but it due course it would arise from the roots and give life another try.   This last year, after a relatively mild winter, and a rainy, hot , hot summer it again sprang forth and it now taller than I am, with those great big fig leaves as in the paintings of naked people, and now, at last, FIGS are growing in the crotches of the branches.  The largest is not yet the size of a walnut and it is time I studied up on figs.

Here they are, in all their figgy beauty:

From Wikipedia

The flower is not visible, as it blooms inside the infructescence. Although commonly referred to as a fruit, the fig is actually the infructescence or sсion of the tree, known as a false fruit or multiple fruit, in which the flowers and seeds are borne. It is a hollow-ended stem containing many flowers. The small orifice (ostiole) visible on the middle of the fruit is a narrow passage, which allows the specialized fig wasp to enter the fruit and pollinate the flower, whereafter the fruit grows seeds.

When you read this you wonder how figs ever got going!  That they continue is surely some sort of miracle!

The infrutescence is pollinated by a symbiosis with a kind of fig wasp. The fertilized female wasp enters the fig through the sicon, which is a tiny hole in the crown (the ostiole). She crawls on the inflorescence inside the fig and pollinates some of the female flowers. She lays her eggs inside some of the flowers and dies. After weeks of development in their galls, the male wasps emerge before females through holes they produce by chewing the galls. The male wasps then fertilize the females by depositing semen in the hole in the gall. The males later return to the females and enlarge the holes to facilitate the females to emerge. Then some males enlarge holes in the sicon, which enables females to disperse after collecting pollen from the developed male flowers. Females have a short time (<48 hours) to find another fig tree with receptive siconios to spread the pollen and assist the tree in reproduction.

I hope everyone will forgive me if I have decided the understanding how figs reproduce in above my paygrade. I, will, however, let you know how they taste and what we do with them, once I know myself.

I am seriously worried about the fig wasps that seem to be necessary to get figs.  Where, or where, are they going to find another fig tree hereabouts within 48 hours????