What The Fig?

I have a big ass fig tree in my yard. I don’t know much about fig trees (I don’t even like figs), but people who do know about fig trees have seen mine and have told me it’s the biggest figging one they’ve seen in New York. They want to know my secret. How did my tree get so big and healthy in this climate? How does it produce so many figs? Here’s what I do…

Nothing!

I’ve heard that little old Italian men grow fig trees in the northeast and they’re small and fragile (the trees are – and maybe the little old men too) and they lovingly wrap them to protect them from the wind and cold of winter and then hope that they survive and then actually bear fruit in the spring.

My tree gets no blanket. No warm milk. No bedtime story. My tree is on its own. My tree is a bad ass. It scoffs at winter. It looks the cold square in the eye and gives it the middle branch. It thrives amidst adversity. In the winter, it looks like this: