dividends

A few years ago, while driving up from Brisbane to Toowoomba for Christmas, Lee and I stopped in at the Big Orange to buy fruit. This is a fairly common occurrence, but on this occasion we were charged with buying mum a fig tree which they had on special. At least, I think it was a fig tree; I have a dim memory of buying what was requested and also something that wasn't, but I can't recall what those might have been. Anyway, we bought a fig tree, and gave it to mum for Christmas.

The fig tree had a bit of a rough time of it at times in the garden. In one storm in particular it was knocked over, and it was touch and go as to whether or not it would recover. However, these days it is in rude health, and this weekend past, Mum brought down a crop of 10 fresh figs for me. As an investment, that tree has well and truly paid itself off now in fruit, not to mention what it adds to the garden as a tree.

I neglected to take a photo of the whole box, but after two meals, these four were left. Of course, today, they aren't - I was under strict instructions to make sure I got through them quickly, and I was not about to disobey.

Shocking form to post pictures of food, but at least they're not instagrammed, I suppose.

I also enjoyed reading up a little about figs online. I suspect that the variety I've just been eating is the brown turkey fig. The other interesting thing I found was that many species of fig have a symbiotic relationship with a certain type of wasp, whereby the wasps can only reproduce by injecting their eggs into the fig, and the fig tree can only reproduce by the wasp carrying pollen between male and female trees (although I believe the figs here don't play this game).