Tree fruit
Fig
Ficus carica
Timings for your region
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Never sown — container-grown plants go straight into the bed.
The harvest times are for an established plant — the first crop comes after 1–2 years.
Plantingearly April – late May
Harvestmid August – early October
Practical tip
The garden varieties need no fig wasp — ‘Bayernfeige Violetta’ or ‘Ronde de Bordeaux’ set fruit without any pollination at all. In a tub it overwinters light or dark but frost-free and cold at 0 to 8 degrees; kept warm indoors it shoots in January and is finished by spring.
Origin & history
The fig is among the very oldest crops of all — charred fruit of a seedless form found in the Jordan valley is around 11,000 years old. It travelled north through Greece and Rome, and old trees still stand against house walls along the Moselle and the Upper Rhine, where the masonry hands the day’s heat back at night. What made it a common German garden plant, though, is the run of parthenocarpic selections of the last few decades: the fig wasp that does the pollinating around the Mediterranean cannot survive north of the Alps.
Varieties
Only parthenocarpic varieties are worth considering here. “Bayernfeige Violetta” is the frost-hardy standard for cold spots, small-fruited and dark purple; “Ronde de Bordeaux” ripens earliest and is the safest choice where summers are short; “Brown Turkey” grows larger and crops heavily but wants a warm wall or a tub. If in doubt, buy a named variety from a nursery rather than an unnamed seedling off a market stall: seedlings raised from holiday figs often depend on the wasp and will never ripen a fruit here. You cannot tell by looking, because the flowers sit inside the fruit.
Care
Water is where most tub figs fail: on a hot July day a 40-litre pot in full leaf empties daily, and one thorough drying out costs you half the crop. Feed every two weeks from April to the end of July and then stop — late feeding pushes soft wood that dies back over winter. Prune in spring as the buds move: take out old, crowded and inward-growing shoots and leave the rest alone. If yours stands in open ground, heap leaves and brushwood 30 cm deep over the root collar in November.
What can go wrong
After a cold winter the normal outcome is not death but a setback: the wood freezes back, often to ground level, and the plant shoots strongly from the base again in May. That new growth simply fruits late, and the embryo figs on last year’s wood are gone — which is why a sheltered spot on a south wall is worth more than any choice of variety. Fruit that stays green and hard into autumn started too late: pea-sized figlets overwinter, anything bigger drops. Split fruit follows rain after a dry spell, and ripe figs left unnetted belong to the blackbirds.
Harvest, storage & kitchen
Figs do not ripen any further once picked. A fruit is ready when the stalk softens and the fig hangs down, the skin shows fine cracks and a bead of nectar sits at the eye — then it comes away with a small twist. In the fridge it holds two or three days before turning sour; for a store, halve the fruit and dry it in the oven at 50 °C, or cook it down with lemon and very little sugar. The milky sap from stalks and shoots reacts on skin in combination with sunlight, so wear gloves when you pick a larger quantity.
All timings are guide values for the given climate, not a guarantee. Weather, aspect and variety all have a say.