Fig – Avellino Red Unk.

Description

Tasting a perfectly ripened fig is awesome treat. It’s unlikely you’ll experience the depth of flavor figs have to offer from the grocery store because they are highly perishable and do not continue to ripen after picking.

A locally grown tree allows many to taste the diverse flavors figs have to offer; some varieties can taste like a cherry, or raspberry, or honey, or jam. This has hooked many into collecting hundreds of varieties. For others, it’s nice to just have one good tree nearby.

Figs can be grown in cold climates, are very forgiving, and can be as simple to grow as a houseplant. They make a great gateway fruit tree.

Mother Tree History:
At least 60 years ago, our family brought over two fig trees from Avellino, Italy to the Bronx, NY as cuttings by plane. Our family has moved many times in the Bronx and these trees have always been dug up and moved from house to house. They have been lovingly taken care of all of these years and we’re happy to now share them both with you on our website.

Variety:
At it’s size, our Avellino Red – Unknown (click here to see our family’s other tree) produces hundreds of delicious figs each year. As you can imagine, they’re especially delicious if the figs darken color in direct sun and dry out a bit before it rains or the neighbors get to them.

It grows vigorously as we have inground cuttings that grew 5ft last year and it almost delivered figs in time.

We’ve reached out to the online fig community about this variety and it’s said to be similar to the fig family with Columbaro Nero, Sicilian Red, Palermo Red, Brooklyn Dark, and many other names. We’re working on grafting some comparisons and will update buyers with the results.

Hardiness:
We have seen this variety perform well planted inground for USDA Hardniess zones 11 – 7.  In our zone 7 many years ago we’ve had a handful of arctic blasts which have killed all wood to the ground, but it has always returned to produce figs that same year. In zone 6 it may perform well planted in ground with good technique.

Zones 4-7 may prefer to keep this variety in a pot to bring inside a structure during the winter time.

Why call it Unknown?
It is not possible to ID a fig tree with 100% certainty, so the fig community labels unknown trees as ‘some descriptor + Unknown’. This helps avoid confusion when incorrectly ID’d trees are shared around or the same variety is introduced multiple times under different names.