The customary fig leaf

We were in Shropshire last week for a family wedding. We stayed in Shrewsbury for most of the time. I think the last time I was in Shrewsbury was 47 years ago when I went to hunt for trilobites on Wenlock Edge. Shrewsbury looked rather nice with lots of fashionable, at least for we Spanish country bumpkins, shops and eateries. Maggie pointed out an organic veg shop offering two figs for a pound, £1 that is. She noticed them because we have three fig trees in our garden. One is a small tree with green figs and the other two are larger trees that produce the earlier higos and the later brevas. Just as mares and stallions, geldings and fillies are all horses to me then all the things that grow on the three trees are figs.

Now I like figs alright. Often, when we lived in the UK, I'd eat as many as a dozen over the summer. Here, when the fruit is ripe, the birds feast on the ones at the top of the tree and leave us the rest. I think I've eaten three this year. Sometimes other people come and gather a couple of carrier bags full for jams and chutneys but, even then, most of them just fall to the ground. As I'm weeding around and underneath the fig trees the fallen fruit stick tenaciously to the soles of my boots until I have no option but to acknowledge their existence. That means raking them up and carting them away to dump. Maggie joins in this too as she finds the squished fruit on the paths annoying and often brushes them off. I've just been trying to work out how many individual fruits the trees produce. Google provided lots of different estimates of the size of wheelbarrows and the density of the loads they carry. Eventually, though, I decided that a standard load is about 60 kilos. Figs seem to weigh about 50g each so, if Miss Bushell's multiplication and division lessons haven't failed me, that's about 1,200 figs per full barrow. That just about fits with the estimates of fruit production per tree. Since they started to fall I reckon I've dumped about five barrow loads or around 6,000 figs. That's quite a lot of raking and carting.

It's been windy today in Culebrón. It often is. Several of the gusts have been well over 65km/h. When the wind blows it blows lots of the things off their perches but, more than anything, it sets up eddies and dumps seemingly never ending quantities of leaves at strategic points against the house and around the garden. The fig trees are one of the main producers of leaves though the pomegranates, olives, almonds, peaches, apples, quince, nisperos and everything else do their bit too. There were lots of fig leaves today.

As I brushed and raked and estimated how much painful pruning all the trees will need this year I thought vaguely of axes and chain saws but also of the value of the fig crop if I could just get it to Shrewsbury.

I couldn't give a

I quite like figs. Not that they are likely to replace plums or cherries in my affections but, from time to time, as something a bit different, they're nice. They were the sort of fruit that I would buy, every now and again, in a pack of three or four, when I was in Waitrose.

We have two black fig trees in our garden and one of the smaller trees that gives green figs. They produce thousands and thousands of fruits. Being a bit lazy I'd not raked up the fallen fruit this season and the smell of rotting figs was becoming quite pungent. So yesterday I spent the better part of two hours raking up all the fallen stuff. It's not a pleasant job because the sap from the leaves and what not is a skin irritant and in grovelling around under the fig trees I always bump my head or back against one of the sturdy branches a couple of times. And scraping squashed figs from the soles of your shoes afterwards is quite time consuming and sticky too.

Nonetheless, when I'd finished and wheeled away three barrow loads of fallen fruit it looked nice and tidy. There was a bit of a breeze yesterday afternoon and when I went to re-inspect my handiwork this morning there was quite a lot of fresh fallen fruit. It took about half an hour to rake them up.

You can't really tell from the photo but that capazo thing, the rubber bucket, is about 30cms tall and about 30cms across and it just about holds the fresh fall from the two black fig trees.