Caprifigs: the fig you don't eat

The caprifig is the fig in its wild state, and the half of the partnership nobody puts in a fruit bowl. People call it the "male" fig, which is close enough: it carries the pollen. But it also carries a second kind of flower, short-styled and female, whose only purpose is to be a nursery for fig wasp larvae. It's less a male tree than a maternity ward with a pollen shop at the door.

Three crops a year, each with a name

• Mamme — the winter crop. Small figs that hang on through the cold with wasp larvae developing inside. This is how the wasp survives winter, and why it can only live where caprifigs won't freeze.
• Profichi — the spring crop, ripening in June. This is the one that matters. The wasps emerge from the profichi carrying pollen, and the profichi is what growers pick and carry to their orchards.
• Mammoni — the late-summer crop, which the wasps from the profichi fly into and lay eggs in, keeping the population going until the mamme form again.

Caprification: matchmaking by the bagful

A Smyrna orchard needs pollen, and the pollen is in the caprifigs. So every June, when the profichi are just about to release their wasps, growers pick them and hang them in the Smyrna trees — in paper bags, mesh baskets or old nylon stockings, a few per tree, refreshed every few days as the wasps come out. The wasps fly to the nearest young Smyrna fig, squeeze in, pollinate, and die. The practice is called caprification, it's been done for at least two thousand years, and it still happens across the Central Valley every summer.

Should you grow one?

Only if you're growing a Smyrna or San Pedro variety and the wasp lives near you — check the map. Otherwise a caprifig is a handsome tree that produces bags of fruit you'll throw away. Every variety in our catalog is a common fig that needs neither.