water is the ONLY imperative thing.. and you have to insure.. not just some misting of the soil surface.. but MOISTURE.. at depth thru the root zone .. if you water deeply.. and mulch properly.. there is most likely no reason you have to do that job more than once a week.. or just about every second week.. in fall .. i dont have time to do the whole tutorial.. others will if you ask them to elaborate on such ... it basically involves digging a small whole.. say 3 to 5 inches down.. TO FIND OUT .. if you are actually getting sufficient water at depth otherwise.. you just wait until next year.. to see how it rebounds.. but you cant make excuses for the watering ... it really is the ONLY important thing ... ken

From what I'm seeing, the variety has to be able to ripen in that particular area. Some figs will ripen with taste in cool temperatures - others will not. I've got figs ripening, that is they are swelling and softening, that just will not develop taste because our temperatures are too low as they "ripen". I tried oiling and got the same result as Cecil - no taste. That's not to say your figs are not going to ripen kadasuki. Your season is longer than mine, and I'd bet you're a good deal hotter. It probably depends on what variety you are growing, what stage they are at now and how warm your area is. I hope you get to enjoy them. But if they don't get quite there, next year you could try to tweak conditions. Heat traps in the area of the fig, and perhaps cut down on the number of figs ripening by pinching or removing the figs near the tips of branches. You could probably do that now - these small "newer" figs have the least chance of ripening. Taking them off might give the others more of a chance. Good luck.

On the local TV news the other night, they were reporting that many farmers in southern Oklahoma and northern Texas have lost 100% of their crops to excessive moisture in the form of rainfall/constantly wet soil/floodwaters. So, I was thinking to myself that a lot of us may be getting less of a veggie harvest, but at least we haven't lost 100%, right? Ilene, I have talked to lots of 'old farmers/old ranchers' who live in our area (many of them, sadly, have passed away in recent years ) and many of them have told me over and over that all they had to eat in their early years in Oklahoma were whatever crops they could raise or find via foraging/hunting/gathering and whatever game they could shoot. They said that it was a constant struggle to survive, and of course, none of them had any problems with weight gain or obesity. They also said that if one family or another suffered a crop failure, the other local families tried to share what they had so the family would survive. How very spoiled we are by comparison! My dad was one of 11 children. His family was, by his own description, 'poor, white sharecroppers' in the Spanish Fort (Montague County, Texas) area in the 1920s/30s. He said they pretty much lived on whatever crops survived. They usually had a good crop of pinto beans and corn, which they dried and stored for winter. He said they often ate corn meal mush for breakfast, cornbread and whatever else was available for lunch, and cornbread and pinto beans for dinner, day after day after day. How many of us would do that and be glad to have even that food? He did say that they often had good veggies from their own gardens all summer and fall, plus whatever they could put up for winter, and meat was more of a 'treat' or a 'condiment' with veggies and bread being the main portion of the meal, and only small portions of meat available. During the good years that they made a good crop, they would have enough cash to buy salt, flour, baking powder, etc. During bad times they had beans and corn. They usually had their own milk and butter from their own cow, but usually the babies and youngest children got all the milk. Once a year they each got one orange to eat--at Christmas--and that plus a couple of nuts and one or two pieces of Christmas candy was their Christmas gift. Local folks here who are slightly younger than my dad remember a similar lifestyle up to World War II, which gave many young men a chance to get off the farm and earn some badly needed money to send home to 'the folks'. They say that growing a big garden that produced a lot of food for the family was considered a HUGE mark of achievement, and that the local families were quite competitive with one another to see who could feed their family best with what they raised. Frankly, I don't know how they did it. I raise a lot of fruit and veggies, and have great success most years, but if we had to live ONLY off what I could grow or find by foraging (wild berries, fruit, etc.), my family would all be stick-thin! Thankfully we don't have to raise all our own food nowadays! PURPLE CHEROKEE--now that is a great tomato and one of my all time favorites. We just love them. This year they have been HUGE, about twice the size I usually get, and fairly tasty--their flavor isn't quite as good as it is most years, but it is still not as watered-down as many other tomatoes are this year. Black Krim is still our favorite. Brandywine would be our favorite based on flavor alone, but their low productivity keeps them from being our #1 tomato. I am going to (hopefully--and if the weather works with me and not against me) yank out a lot of the spring-planted tomatoes this week, and replace them with new plants for fall tomatoes. I don't usually take out the cherry, grape or currant types as they produce well all summer anyway. The tomatoes that are removed are sort of removed in the order in which they began fruiting--so those that produced ripe fruit beginning in very late April are already gone, those that produced ripe fruit in May/June will soon be gone, and those late ones that are just now producing ripe fruit will get to live until they stop producing, or until the July-planted tomatoes start producing. Sagenscotties, My paste tomatoes have only been so-so this year too. In general, paste tomatoes are more prone to both blossom-end rot and foliar disease when it is excessively wet. However, I am getting tons of big 'uns so I have been using a mixture of big 'uns to make spaghetti sauce and other tomato-based meals like chicken-tortilla soup or taco soup. The larger tomatoes take longer to boil down, of course, since they have a higher water content--especially this year--but they make tasty cooked tomatoes. I'm probably not even going to plant the paste tomatoes I have raised from seed for fall unless we have a sudden drying trend here. I don't see any point in expending the energy to plant them if they aren't going to do any better than the spring-planted paste tomatoes did. There are a couple of exceptions--Orange Banana has produced quite well, and so has Bisignano #2. Dawn

So do you remove the first fruits to set right after they appear? How many do you remove? **** I can't speak for anyone else but heck no, I don't remove the first fruits to set. I've waited how many months of cold, snowy bitter weather to taste those first fruits so no way am I going to delete/discard/demolish or otherwise get rid of them. And with few exceptions I gave up growing earlies many years ago. I'm not one to look for those first fruits at all, especially on earlies, I wait until some of my early mid-season ones start ripening fruits. And unlike some above who find that first fruits don't always taste the best, that's not been my experience with most varieties and I really do think it might be related to where someone, in a geographic sense, is growing their tomatoes as well as weather conditions, and the way folks grow their tomatoes. And no, lets not take this long thread into ways of growing tomatoes for there are at least 20 K threads here about that already. LOL Carolyn