Growing and Sharing Figs in a Community Fig Orchard

🍋 Lemon Camp: September 17 and 24Grow a healthy, productive lemon tree in a pot. In these two live online sessions, Steven Biggs covers watering, feeding, pruning, repotting, pests, flowers and fruit—and how to get a lemon tree through the winter.Recordings are included, so you can watch afterwards if you can’t attend live.Learn more and register for Lemon Camp- - - We chat with Jack Spruill in North Carolina about the community fig orchard on his family farm and about his work developing a conservation project to protect the farm from future development.Spruill explains that the farm grows very good figs. They were an important crop for his grandparents, who bought the farm in 1914. But by the time his father took over the farm, things were starting to change. The figs still grew well…but they were no longer a money-making crop. So his father started to let people come to pick figs for free. Along with fresh eating, there is a local tradition of making fresh figs into fig conserve.The fig orchard was a community fig orchard even before he started to call it such. Spruill says that these days, some people come to pick a few figs for fresh eating—and some still come for figs to make fig conserve.