128 



HOME FRUIT GROWER 



preserves and jelly. Though of a peculiar, and to some people strong, 

 flavor, the fruit and its prepared products are highly nutritive and 

 generally greatly relished after a few trials. In my estimation they 

 are far pleasanter than Black Currants, which they faintly suggest. 

 As the berries are deficient in pectins they are better adapted to making 

 thick syrups than jellies, but this lack may be supplied and better 

 jellies made by cooking Crab Apples, immature Grapes or tart 

 Apples with them. 



FIG 



While the Fig may be' made to grow out-of-doors as far North 

 as Southern Michigan and the lower Hudson Valley, the amount of 



fussing and coddling is too 

 great and the quality of the 

 fruit too poor to warrant the 

 trouble. As a home orchard 

 fruit it is popular from North 

 Carolina (Fig. 89) southward 

 along the coast to Florida, 

 westward to California, where 

 its range is over the warmer 

 parts of the State. 



In the Southeast the plants 

 are scarcely more than large 

 bushes; in California they be- 

 come trees, some of which ex- 

 ceed nine feet in girth, reach 

 more than 80 feet in height, 

 cover a circle of ground over 

 200 feet and bear a ton or 

 more of fruit annually. 



North of Baltimore the 



plants are dug up with large balls of earth, potted in late Fall and 

 stored in a rather dry cellar until Spring, when they are replanted out- 

 of-doors. From Norfolk, Va., southward to the Carolinas they are often 

 trained low so as to be bent to the ground in the Fall and covered during 

 Winter with straw and boards, though near the sea and from Georgia 

 to Texas they need no such protection. 



Propagation is by means of well-ripened wood cuttings four or 

 five inches long, cut through the nodes and during late Winter or early 

 Spring set in the ground with their upper ends level with the surface. 

 Plants started thus and well managed should begin to yield in three 

 or four years, sometimes in two. Southern and California nurseries 

 offer plants of leading varieties briefly described on page 129. 



Fig. 89. Figs are borne in the axils of the leaves 



