Who gives a fig, anyway?

After three days of fighting with my huge White Genoa fig tree, trying to slip on its lacey white summer robe in between downpours, I came close to throwing the towel. In my case a 50 sq m bird net that I rigged up from four very large individual pieces, using my old netting skills and a roll of thin but tough and slippery builders' levelling line.

Luckily I had found my net-making gear, last used during my nights on the subs'desk of a large metropolitan newspaper for making shopping bags for my female colleagues, and cargo barriers for our old Kombi. These were the days when Rupert M. had flown in a Briton to steer the somewhat independent-minded paper around to favour installation of a Liberal government. 'All's well that ends Rothwell', I quoth, famously. And to the hyphenated foundling of a night editor, who made snide remarks about 'Mrs Stringbag' whenever he passed me on his rounds, I happily retorted that I was practising my skills in making safety nets, 'in these dangerous times'... Needless to say, with friends like these Fraser was duly elected.

The big fig tree had started laying on a feast of fruit - growing two, or even three figs in each leaf axil - during a dry start to summer, and a few days ago the first began to ripen.

Of course the green parrots where lying in wait all around our selection, and began hacking into the figs with gusto, early in the mornings and at dusk. The day shift was made up from male and female butcherbirds, and assorted fig birds and smaller honey-eaters. These normally contented themselves with drinking the nectar from our bird-of-paradise flowers or kangaroo paws - and more lately, to Bianca's annoyance, hanging from her Grosse Lisse tomatoes and neatly perforating their navels...

I wouldn't have minded sharing the harvest with the birds, as my patient partner suggested, but the repeat offenders only gorged themselves on whatever fruit was at the best ripening stage, yet only consumed part of each fig.

And although I still had some figs in semillon, with raisins and our own pecan nuts (yummy over creme brulee) and pickled figs (nice with cold pork) from last year's bounty, I decided to act to preserve the current crop on the tree. Hence the netting effort, a mad rush between recurrent showers on each of the past few days, which not only allowed the winged wastrels almost unhindered access to the tree but also served to spoil lots of the ripening fruit. Even the chickens decided fermenting figs in the quantities we were able to provide were too much of a good thing...

Too much of a good thing?

Not on your nellie, said Bianca, and while I was completing the protective netting she was already up in the tree, collecting enough in good condition to make huge cauldrons of fig jam. I am hoping for some DRY weather to ripen part of the crop in good condition for fig preserves, semillon or not, and for the odd friend who'd chance by and might enjoy plucking some fresh ripe figs from the tree. Cristina has already put in an advance order for fig preserve when she comes up from Sydney for her nephew's first birthday. (She even suggested we make a little home business out of our harvest; little does she know what work and care is involved before you put away a single jar!)

This morning, as I struggled, squinting in the oblique morning sun, to complete the protective net over the big White Genoa, I noticed a flutter in the small Black Genoa that Bianca transplanted in winter to just outside my 'office'. It shot up in the new location, with branches growing up to 1.10 m in this season alone! Beautiful figs grow, singly, in its leaf axils - but alas, the first and biggest was already hacked to pieces by the time I walked over... So, another net needs to be fashioned, pronto, if I want black figs this year.

The birds had another revenge ready: seeing I had banished them from the big fig tree, they swooped, surreptitiously and silently, on my Tsu Li nashi pear tree with its abundant ripening
crop. When I passed the tree this morning, three more fruits were neatly halved and crenellated by beak marks. Another net, please... (My two 20th Century nashi pear trees grow brilliantly
high, but have so far not set fruit - which is just as well!)

I don't know how the Italians do it, but their fig harvests appear to proceed unmolested. Why else would they look down on this luscious fruit, to the point of expressing disinterest with the saying "no dar' un figo secco" (not giving a dry fig about something). But then, maybe they've eaten all the birds?

Just deserts

Bianca and I just ate a slice of a kind of Linzer Torte she made with two kinds of home-made jam, one of them the new fig jam - absolutely delish! This was partly to recompense me for all the good work I'd done in the past week: I rescued a brand-new Athlon 64-based machine which even WinXP_SP2 couldn't revive, set up a network with Internet Connection Sharing on a 'protected' gateway, brewed the last of three lotys of beer (36 bottles of Coopers Real Ale) and ferried the lovely little Grolsch bottles into our wine cellar - this should last us two years, as far as beer goes (I think we still have some 350 bottles of wine stashed away, modest drinkers that we both are!)

NB: You should just have heard my scream when I stepped outside for a minute and found two more crenellated nashis on the Tsu Li, already teeming with ants!

Ci vediamo!