Picking Figs

A good friend of mine asked if we would like to go pick figs at his house.  He has a couple of trees that were loaded with fruit and said that we were welcome to go to his house and pick them.  Our inventory of figs is very low right now.  We only have one jar of fig preserves in the pantry, so we gratefully took him up on the offer and made the short drive over to his house.

Figs are an interesting fruit, and they have been cultivated since ancient times, being prominently mentioned in the Bible from the third chapter of Genesis when Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover their nakedness.  Figs are also mentioned in the New Testament when Jesus saw the fig tree and wanted fruit, but it had only leaves.  Jesus cursed the tree and it withered.

But alas, our friend's fig tree was not withered.  In fact as we walked to the trees, we could smell the sticky sweetness before we got there.  It was loaded with ripened figs that require picking everyday. There are a few ways to tell if a fig is ripe. Depending on the variety, the color of the fig is a good sign. When they turn from green to a reddish-brown tinge, they may be ready.  Also they will droop. You'll notice in the photo below right in the center the reddish fig has drooped over.  It is ready to pick, as opposed to the green one to its left that has not begun to droop.

The Droop!

Another telltale sign is that the ripened figs will get cracks on them.  It is hard to see in the picture below, but cracks have appeared in the skin of the fig.  I don't know for sure what causes this, but I would imagine that the expanding, softening, sugar-filled fig is just too much for the skin to contain - stretch marks on a fig.

Cracks in the fig

You can also tell from feeling the fig.  A ripened fig will be soft to the touch and will be easily pulled from the tree.  Hardly any effort at all is required to pull it off the tree. An unripened fig is hard to the touch and doesn't easily come off.  If they are ripened, you must act fast, for there are competitors in fig-picking.  Birds love them!  Below you can see damage to one ripened fig in which a bird sat in the tree and feasted on one before being chased away.  I can remember people dangling empty pie tins from fig trees to scare off the birds.  A shotgun is also very effective in this effort!

Bird Damage

We get them home and wash them up real good.  They are sticky and leaves and bugs need to be cleaned off of them.  Once they are cleaned, we cut the stems off and arrange them on a cookie sheet.

De-stemming the figs

We stack the stemmed figs in orderly fashion on the cookie sheet, like fat little soldiers.  They'll be placed into the freezer overnight, so that they are frozen solid. We don't have time right now to make preserves, bake with them, or process them further, so freezing them allows us to do that on our time frame and avoids spoilage.   

Figs ready for the Freezer

The very next day we pull them out of the freezer and use a spatula to un-stick the figs from the tray. They are frozen rock solid and because they are frozen in a single layer, they break apart easily.

We load the individually frozen figs into gallon sized freezer bags and place back into the freezer.

This process allows us to pick out exactly the amount of figs to use for recipes. Mostly, we'll grab out a handful of frozen figs and put them into a blender with some kefir, local honey, and a dash of cinnamon for a delicious breakfast smoothie.

I remember when I was young, one of my favorite books was a big book of Aesop's Fables.  It was illustrated nicely and had stories that had a good moral.  One of them, and I found it here, as I recall was about the fig tree:

THE OLIVE-TREE AND THE FIG-TREE

An Olive-tree taunted a Fig-tree with the loss of her leaves at a certain season of the year. "You," she said, "lose your leaves every autumn, and are bare till the spring: whereas I, as you see, remain green and flourishing all the year round." Soon afterwards there came a heavy fall of snow, which settled on the leaves of the Olive so that she bent and broke under the weight; but the flakes fell harmlessly through the bare branches of the Fig, which survived to bear many another crop.

That has a pretty good lesson to it.  We shouldn't boast about appearance or wealth. Anything we have is a blessing that has been given to us and can be taken away with a moment's notice.  We should be grateful for what we have.  I'm grateful for a friend that let us pick figs off of his tree!

Tomorrow we'll show you another thing we do with figs.