Growing Figs in Scotland: An Experimental Orchard

Scott, thank you for joining me on the Fig Culture podcast.

My pleasure.

My pleasure.

I'm very excited about today because we're traveling to Scotland, to Eastern Scotland.

And so I think even before we get into your growing conditions, we just have to talk about, well, how did you end up with a fig orchard in Eastern Scotland? There's got to be a little bit of a story there.

Well, it's a little bit by accident, really.

And basically, it was a holiday.

I went to visit some family on the island of Elba.

And where my relatives live is very rural.

And there's a lot of fig trees growing.

And I found myself just simply wandering up to the fig trees and tasting the fruit.

And a tree-ripened fig is something else entirely.

Had never tasted a tree-ripened fig before and it blew my mind, simply put.

Returned home and realized that I couldn't buy a tree-ripened fig.

And at that moment, I thought again, well, how do you get a fig? And simply put, you just have to start thinking, well, how do I grow, propagate fig trees? And how does it happen? You know, how do I go about it? When I got back, you think, right, I live in Fife.

It's not known for figs, Scotland, particularly.

It's known for a lot of things, but not figs.

Found myself going to the local nursery, had a look about.

There was brown turkeys.

There was a few things that you could see, really.

None of them had figs on them.

But I started to watch and read as much as I could about fig trees, essentially, and realized that you did need heat.

I mean, it was obvious.

If you've been to Italy, you know the kind of temperatures you can get in Tuscany.

And I started to realize that what I probably needed was some type of indoor environment.