Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
group of botanists in Korea found more than 140 persimmon varieties.) Furthermore, the
astringent acorn-shaped Hachiya group can be broken down into two subgroups - varieties
that will sweeten on their own and those that must be pollinated first. There is a native
American persimmon that is unrelated.
The two families of Asian persimmons came to the United States at different times and
from different places. The Hachiyas were brought over by Japanese immigrants at the turn
of the twentieth century. The Fuyus got their big push in the 1970s and 1980s, when a new
wave of immigrants arrived from Southeast Asia, where they are the preferred variety.
Persimmons may be perplexing, but figs are downright kinky. Most of the fruits we
eat are formed from the swollen fertilized bases of flowers. Reproduction follows a fairly
standard plan: a brightly colored flower opens; pollinating insects (or birds, or even
breezes) are drawn to the colors and alight on the pistils, spreading pollen; the fertilized
fruit forms at the base of the flower; the flower drops away, leaving the fruit behind. Sex is
not so conventional for the fig. The fruit that we eat is actually the flower - or, to be more
accurate, cluster of flowers - turned inside out. To fertilize it, a special breed of bug - a
tiny two-millimeter-long wasp - has to crawl up inside the fig, entering through a tiny hole
at the base. It deposits its pollen on the thousands of tiny flowers that line the fig. (Those
delicate little pops you feel when you eat a fig are actually hundreds of tiny seeds.) You
don't find wasps or eggs in fresh figs at the market because the stems of the tiny flowers
are long enough to prevent the females from laying their eggs, and any wasps that loiter
too long are dissolved by a protein-digesting enzyme called ficin that is produced by figs.
So how's that for kinky?
As you might expect, this complicated path to reproduction is littered with hazards.
Chief among them in the United States is the fact that figs are a nonnative plant, and so
that special wasp isn't native either. When immigrants from the Mediterranean brought
their fig trees to California in the 1800s, they were puzzled as to why the trees never bore
fruit. It wasn't until the latter part of the century that the mystery was solved. In the Old
World, growers traditionally hung dried-out figs called "caprifigs" in their orchards every
spring. Botanists put this down as a peasant superstition - until it was discovered that
those caprifigs housed the wasps. It wasn't until a Fresno, California, farmer named Ge-
orge Roeding established the first colony of wasps in 1889 that commercial fig cultivation
could begin on a grand scale in the United States. Today, when you drive up the Central
Valley during the spring, you'll see fig trees hung with paper bags. These contain colonies
of wasps, and this so-called caprification is the modern equivalent of the old tradition of
hanging fig boughs.
