It’s so beautiful outside, a perfect fall day in Belas Portugal. The sun is shining and the sky is blue and the breeze is pleasantly cool and chiming the wind chimes. Around the property the roosters are calling and calling. Yesterday I gave Alberto a big bowl of figs for Rosa - her favorite, he says. He says he’ll dry some. Oh like you did last Christmas I asked and he was pleased I remembered, I said I ate them ALL, I couldn’t STOP and he laughed and told me he’d dry any figs for me if I wanted and so today I picked another huge bowl of figs. So far I have picked only from the very front of the fig tree that grows near the pool and towers up and over the chicken coop and part of the coop courtyard.
There is an art to picking a fig. If they are perfectly ripe you can pinch the stem off of the branch. Twisting doesn’t work, you always end up with a split skin and when they are super ripe, that’s just a mess. I give those to the roosters, though it happens less and less often now.
I can almost tell by looking at a fig if it’s ready to pick. I say almost because green figs never look ripe, you can figure it out only by the shape - a ripe fig has a full bottom, that’s right when it comes to detecting ripeness in a green fig it’s all about that bass. Scientifically there are seven stages in a fig’s life:
Not ready
Ha Forget About It
Haha Fooled Ya Again
Almost…
Not Quite!
Yes!
Haha Too Late
(oh by the way fellow Substacker Kristen Fellows posted about the Arabic origins of green figs in Portugal, you can read it here.)
Figs are great but the fig tree itself, even without figs, is pretty marvelous all on its own. We have two other fig trees on the property that I for sure know of, but there are maybe three or four. I had a chat with Alberto over our post-lunch cafe, he showed me what size and ripeness to look for that is perfect for drying. He says collect up all I can and he’ll dry them on the bed of his work truck which sits shaded under an awning all day. Guess what I will be doing this afternoon.
Fig trees look sort of ancient and mystical the way banyan trees do and like the banyan, they grow relatively quickly. Back in 2023 when we arrived here Tiago our contractor cut down a fig tree that was growing over a building that will someday house the h’s workshop. We were sad because it was a good -sized tree and in those early days it was just one thing after another to prune, cut back, throw out, burn up as everything had been neglected so long. Tiago said he tried to save it but the brambles had gotten tangled in it too bad and we needed to start over, and hacked it all the way down to a three inch stump sticking out of the ground.
Nothing in nature is evil I guess but when I was running a burn barrel for the first week we occupied the property, I burned dead palm leaves and bamboo and tree limbs and leaves and English Ivy and brambles - so much English ivy and brambles - and I learned that the more invasive the species is, the noisier it is when it burns. It’s true. The dead palms crackled politely, like applause; the bamboo sounded like newspapers being wadded up en masse. But the ivy oh boy, the English Ivy made sounds that would be right at home in the soundtrack for “The Evil Dead”. The burning brambles sounded like some of the noises that little girl Regan made in the middle third of The Exorcist.
The fig tree had the last laugh though, even though the brambles ended up getting the fig tree cut down, now eighteen months later the tree has regrown itself and is not only taller and fuller but with a little pruning guidance is charmingly shading a little stepping stones staircase that leads from the lower Garden house garden to the campo (which has been re-dubbed Container Flats in celebration of the arrival of all of our stuff).
That little staircase under a lattice of fig branches is a nice place to sit and chat on the phone, it’s shady and quiet unless the Eastern flock comes trooping along, then it gets quiet noisy as there are eleven roosters. Come to think of it I am sure the natural fertilization and soil aeration the frangos are bringing to the base of the fig trees has a lot to do with the crazy growth.
The h had to cut down about half of the fig tree that grows up from the hillside next to the pool and over/into the chicken coop courtyard. When we arrived, the tree had several long heavy branches growing right across the coopyard calcadas, like the grasping arms of a sprawling giant. The tree has since regrown many many limbs in place of the pruned branches, and fig production quintupled from one year to the next.
The roosters adore this tree, it is their sleepy daytime perch and their shady dustbath sauna destination, a true Finlandia de Frangos.
We have five count ‘em five hens each sitting on one egg. Penny Lane was on Day 20ish with her egg, we were expecting a pintainho and what happens but she keeps sitting and now there is another egg. We’re like wait, what. But she seems content in there so I’m just leaving her to it for now. As she sat on her eggs these past weeks I have brought her special snacks and she allows me to pet her, a big deal as she is one of Sierra’s flock, and all of them happily coop up at night but are just like their mama, testy of temperament and not in the least domesticated.
Unlike I Dream of Jeannie’s flock who all love to be held and to perch on my arms and shoulders and lap. While Penny and I are friends, Sierra’s other daughter Demi Moore is quite snappish as she sits on her egg. She is snappish because she can’t admit she doesn’t know what she’s doing. The last time she sat for two weeks in this same box there was nothing under her, I only knew because she got up, went to another nesting box, laid an egg, then returned to the eggless nesting box and resumed broodily sitting. I assume she’s sitting on an egg-shaped nothing again, but I bring her snacks too, and pet her even though she pecks me a bit, it’s not hard just crabby.
Cake is in a nesting box too, if she’s sitting on anything it’s likely only one egg, as I’m pretty sure she has not yet laid an egg for the cause - we get about 12-14 eggs a week now, even though our most mature layers Betty and Sierra have been laying down on the laying job.
Joining the hens-on-eggs gang is I Dream of Jeannie, who currently is a house hen living in a little wool cathouse shaped like a cat’s head, and where Jeannie sits on her egg, emerging once every morning at 7:15a sharp in super dramatic fashion. First, she makes sounds until one of us pulls back the “blackout” curtain (i.e. my black “Read Horror Books” t-shirt); she may even thrust her naked pink head around the side of it. We remove the curtain and she stands and then flies out in a straight line like a fighter jet. Making a sound that sounds like “Incoming!”, she lands in the central room and runs straight to her food bowl, which is an orange ramekin sitting inside Jake’s metal food dish, and containing sunflower seeds, chopped cucumbers and grapes and strawberry tops. She makes mmmrf and mmmph sounds while she eats, her beak making dainty ting! ting! sounds against the metal of the bowl.
After eating she takes a stroll about, chats with us, bristles at the image of herself in the mirror, then does a couple of big poops. The h or I will rub aquaphor on her little naked head, which makes her shake her head but then close her eyes as you rub it in the sides. Then she hops back into the cat house and pulls her egg underneath her, and makes a little sound like “Ack” which means, Pull the curtain please, and then we drop the blackout curtain over the entrance.
Things are much quieter up in the coop nowadays, as we have given away one hen and one roo, culled three of those Haskell rascals, and Sierra and Jeannie have relocated. Now the coop flock is 15 strong, evenly divided - Han’s mini flock roosts on the left side, and Jeannie’s babies still hang together on the right side, with Snowman emerging as the head roo. Fuzzy is the most distinctive roo of the bunch - his frizzled feathers make him look as if he were painted with water colors, everything smeared around while it was still wet. Little Falcon with his long yellow knee socks has emerged as my favorite though - every day he chases me and pecks me, sometimes grabbing my pants leg in his beak and pulling. It took me awhile to realize he is asking to be picked up. He loves cuddles and will leap up onto your lap before you’ve fairly sat down. Still I make sure not to let him get too close to my eye, just seems prudent.
Lately Tiny Little Tina, one of the two frizzle hens (and the littlest hen of the entire flock, with a little pink furry frizzle breast that makes everyone go squee! when they see it) has been sneaking off when everyone else troops into the coop for the night. I suspect she is sitting on eggs - or likely egg, singular, it seems to be the “in” thing to do around here this fall if you’re a hen. She reappears three or four times a week looking cranky, yells when I pick her up and kiss her, kicking her legs to get down and get something to eat and drink. I don’t know where she’s slipping away to but I’m almost positive it is under the fig tree somewhere because lately she always smells like flowers.
The figs make me nostalgic as we do not currently have unfettered access to a fig tree. We used to be able to get our fill and enough for many others, but I baked those (sorry, not sorry, not giving away all those glorious fresh figs) with honey and cinnamon and ate them with vanilla ice cream all winter.
Figs were woven all through my childhood. My grandmother’s fig tree was the first and most important, but there were fig trees everywhere. Everyone knew about chasing the birds away and picking the figs and eating so many then “putting up” the rest.
Now people have cleared them from their yards—too big and messy—and they have lost something so nourishing to body and soul.
Thank you so much for the beautiful updates. I am extremely jealous of your fresh fig supply and the story of the fig trees resurrection from a stump is magical. Those trees do seem to have a certain otherworldlyness to them, like you could walk under its branches.
It’s odd all your hens are opting for small families this autumn. Still all new chicks are welcome I guess. I’m temporarily financially embarrassed but I will get your hens and roos some feed once I get paid again. They bring me such joy.