FIGS.
The rich, sugary, amber figs that lie packed tightly together in boxes shipped from faraway Smyrna, in Asia Minor, should form a part of every child's Christmas. They are a delicious and wholesome sweet, both food and candy. Americans use them increasingly in desserts and cakes. Tons are imported every year from the warm countries to the east of the Mediterranean Sea —from Turkey in Europe and in Asia.
Why not grow our own figs? That question has been asked by people who see fig trees growing luxuriantly in various regions of the United States. Anybody who takes the trouble can raise fig trees from seed, and the trees are hardy as far north as Philadelphia.
They grow thriftily and fruit abundantly in the warm states. One, two, and three crops a year, almost without attention — white figs, black figs, purple, and golden — the trees produce. Splendid fruit for eating green or ripe, for preserves, for fattening hogs. But for drying, for taking the place in commerce of the Smyrna fig, practically worthless. Here was the rub.
Trials without number were made with seeds of this imported fig. Time and again cuttings were brought from Smyrna and planted in Cali fornia and in the South. Some of them grew and set fruit, but invariably it dropped before maturity.
Now we shall have to stop, as the fig-growers did, and study the peculiarities of the fig tree, which in many of its ways will surprise us. The scientist came to the rescue of the fruit-growers, and the result is that the best Smyrna figs on the market to-day are home-grown. But the industry was not born until the puzzling problem was solved by experts in the United States Department of Agriculture. This happened in 1899.
There is a general idea that fig trees do not blossom. Yet the fruit is full of seeds, and seeds follow flowers. You will see little green figs coming out between the leaf-stem and the twig, just where buds appear on other trees in late sum mer. These fat little buds never open; they just grow until they reach the size of a hen's egg, then soften and turn brown or reddish, or the green merely fades out.
To find the fig blossoms, one must cut open the green body of the fruit. There they are, hundreds of tiny flowers that stand close as the disk flowers on a head of sunflower or dandelion. Draw together the edges of a sunflower disk, and you make a bag, with the flowers lining it. The fig is like that: the fleshy receptacle forms the wall of the sac. One little opening leads from the outside world. A small dimple in the end opposite the stem shows you this door. It is important that you see it.
Under each little flower is a seed. Break open a ripe fig, and the seeds are thick, under the pointed remnants of the many flowers. Mul berries and figs are closely related. The mulberry in flower has its receptacle covered with crowded, tiny flowers, each of which produces a soft berry, that is one of the many crowded together in a single mulberry fruit an inch long. If we can imagine a mulberry with its tiny berries on the inside it would be made like a fig. A fig turned inside out would be changed to the mulberry pattern. The likeness of the two is in having many flowers attached to the surface of a fleshy base. No matter what shape this base takes in growing. It is the part that is sweet and edible.
Now, the setting of seed depends upon the pollenating of the flowers. Some are self-pollen ated. Some require cross-pollenating by wind or by insect assistance. The Smyrna fig is one that cannot set fruit by itself. That is why the little fruits fall. No use to form fruits with no seeds in them. So the imported trees seem to think.
In the orchards of Turkey, wild figs, the Capri species, with plenty of pollen, but worthless fruit, are planted. So the investigators from America sent the wild species over to plant in California fig orchards, thinking that this would solve the difficulty. They also sent word that the Smyrna growers cut off the wild figs and hung them in the trees of the cultivated sorts, to make the setting of fruit sure. This was done in America. But the small figs kept on dropping.