Fig piggery in the potager

Excuse me while I reach over and eat yet another fig. What a cornucopia of delights on the kitchen table this week.

My fig tree in the potager planted up against the stone back wall has gone berserk.

[I had to look that up. Bezurk looked so much better, but no.]

And in my mind, it was, ‘why I only planted this tree a few years ago as a twig, and look at it now.’

And then I thought. That feels a bit fluid as a memory. Gardening often does that. You plant a tree and it romps away. Having forgotten that it spent ten years doing very little.

Or just getting on with the growing.

And in my case, growing wild. I tried to train it, honest. There are even wires and some lateral branches against the stone wall. But everything seems to have gone as wild as my current curly-haired haircut. ‘Needs work.’

And that was as far as I wrote a few days ago. Instead I wasted / enjoyed a delve into the archives. Because I was plagued with the ‘when on earth did I plant this tree?’ thing.

The answer? Rummage, sort, go back yet another year in the archives…

2008.

One year after we moved here. How about that for a foreshortening of the memory cells. Eleven years ago.

And naturally that delve into the archives brought up this little timeline of events in the life of the fig against the potager wall.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

And the whole potager itself.

I need to go and stand in the same spot and snap the 12 years on shot. Hang on a mo.

You can’t see much. Let me step up onto the little low wall and point at the fig.

It doesn’t even look jungly and out of control in that shot.

Believe me. It’s a mess. But the little hedgehog in the garden is enjoying the low lying fruit.

And I can reach the middle figs. And the hornets and wasps are having a wonderful time on the upper ones I can’t reach. Results all round. (But note to self, prune better this winter.)

And stop wasting time looking at these old memories…

I do miss that beast.