I posted a couple pics of these last year, my tree put out a bunch. This year only a couple, here is the first. I picked it a day early as I saw a couple beak marks on it. Taste was just ok, a little watery, probably due to the rain yesterday.

I have two Petite Negri in my yard.  They're about 25 feet tall and about 10 feet wide, and are about 20 years old with zero effort at care.  This area only has limited amounts of sun, so it just rockets up to compete for all it can get, even when we prune it.  The fruiting has become fairly consistent now, and if I make the effort to regularly harvest the figs, I don't have problems with varmints or ants.  Lots of hawks and cats in the area as well.

I do love this fig very much, and prefer it over the traditional varieties seen in Cobb County.  The main crop is pretty intense-flavored and very tart to balance the sweet.  I have trouble really even thinking in terms of what it tastes like, it hits the buds so hard and jammy.

Since early June, I have been collecting my first serious breba crop.  I usually don't care about the breba because PN really, really demands heat to ripen right.  Rain doesn't spit them, but it does weaken the flavor and stop proper coloration.  This year, the spring has been very early (last frost was in late Feb), and mostly very warm.  So the taste was pretty good.  Not intense like the later crop will be, but good, and I can generally get a sense of what it tastes like--more like a kind of wine sensibility rather than the berries that people typically used to describe VdB.  I do think this is closest to Vista rather than VdB or Negronne.  The size of the fruit was quite remarkable.  Many of the fruits measured 2.2 inches in diameter at the base of a roundish fruit (and not super elongated like the pics above).  There were plenty over 2.5 inches, and properly ripe tasted rather figgy with berry/wine overtones, and about as sweet as an average fig's main crop.

I was motivated to post because it seems I have one of the older non-standard varietal figs in the ground, especially as far north as I am in the north metro Atlanta area.  This was part of an edible landscaping spree that includes things like loquat (which also fruits on occasion, and is very good for a seedling), citrange, hardy lemons, peaches, plums, apples, pears, and the works.  I also have a collection of potted tropicals, but the only thing I manage to get fruit from is the Lorver Suriname Cherry.

Well I'm glad you're a fan of this variety too. Mine is in a fairly large pot and is pretty productive every year. I think it compares very well with VDB and I'll see soon about Vista as my Vista is setting fruit now. Main crop certainly is much better I agree, but getting brebas early is pretty cool when it happens.

Got my first cherries this year. I have 2 miniature trees called Carmine Jewel and a couple Nanking Cherries. All produced this year for the first time     

I harvested two more figs (varmints have definitely started their own harvests, but plenty to share).  One was pecked and a bit shriveled, and I picked a ginormous one that was still firm, but whole.  When I cut them open length-wise, it was salmon colored with a greenish tint.  The small one had a thin skin and the big one had thicker skin and much more white flesh at the bottom.  There were lots of crunchy seeds, and a rather mucilaginous, non-juicy texture.  The smaller one was about the size of what the main crop is like, and weighs in a 34.4g.  The big one weighed in at 85g.  Neither tasted very good, like what the earlier figs were like, relatively bland, fig-ish, with an aromatic taste from the skin that was kinda nice, in a vegetal way.

Breba that is not fully ripe is gonna taste pretty bad. Maybe you should net the tree or part of it. 

Well, actually, I did fall for temptation and looked for more fruit.  I found one pecked one that was about as good as before and another 65g fruit that was a bit better than bland.  Also, in the early spree at the beginning of june, I was deliberately picking not the ripest of fruit and still getting firm and sweet fruit.  I'm still not exactly losing very many fruit to animals, though, went from none to 10%?  The stuff is addictive, even when it's not as good as it could be.  I'm mostly having fun trying to compare this fruit with others.  It's not likely that I'd ever be permitted to put in any more figs in the yard, tho' I'd love to add a couple more, like Smith and another boutique **slow** growing black fig.  Not kidding about the shock at the whole non-dwarfness, and the prejudice against any more giant fig trees.

I think your best bet for size control is regular pruning. Some varieties do stay a little smaller, some grow fast and big. VDB is reputed to remain a bit smaller, but is very close in taste and appearance to Petite negra in my opinion. Maybe a search of this site will help. As for eating, always best to wait until they are really ripe even if it means losing a few to critters 

These trees just poles straight back up within a season.  They're already due a little pruning after this year, but there is no confidence that it would take the hint, and we'd probably be too lazy to prune more than in the fall or winter.  We're too lazy, period, not being fig enthusiasts in particular.  Not fussy either.  The brebas in general have been very good, compared to main season figs (of BT and garden variety Celestes), and they mostly are ready when colored and soft.  Over-ripened brebas do not tend to have that incredible fermented vineous taste.  The skin just gets tougher, and the flesh gets sweeter, a little, before souring.  If I pick juuuuuuuust right, I can get very slight wine notes.  I don't find the taste to be very berry-like in any sense other than it's very acid for a fig (which we all LOVE about this fig).

I just find reading this forum kinda fun because it's got all the mysteries and hijinks and history and all the other crap that makes hobbies like puerh tea fun.  I also like to think about fig genetics.  In a sense, virtually all of the most dominant fig varieties in terms of taste are a hundred or more years old, older than many heirloom apples.  Mission NL is still da man, despite future years of breeding efforts.  The vast majority of apple varieties that were around when Mission figs were introduced into Califonia, let alone bred, are archaic and long superceded.  Cox Orange Pippin, for example, was bred in 1825.  Older, not very useful delicious apples like Ashmead's Kernel were developed in the late 18th century.  Great pears like Comice or D'Anjou were found in the mid 19th century.  Yet Violette de Bordeaux is from 1680!  Still relevant today because, for all of it's age, because this, and closely associated figs have only about 15-20 potentially better non-caprified figs, out of hundreds, including the product of some modern breeding programs.  Pomegranates have been around just as long, but there are actual superior tasting modern varieties besides Wonderful!  What's the best newer fig?  Some flavor of Celeste?

For all of that, we still have trouble identifying varieties because figs can be so different in growth and fruit, depending on the circumstances.  I spent alot of my time estimating the differences between my PN and RdB, Vista, VdB, BIschia.  RdB grows like what my plant does and fruits about the same time.  Vista has the size and shape of the fruit right.  BIschia also kinda looks similar, interior pulp-wise.  So forth and on.  If PN did not have utterly distinctive blend of leaves, I would be tempted to think EL had made an error somewheres way back when.  Thus, I wonder just how much figs truly diverge from one another--maybe most figs have a narrow genetic profile, like housecats or humans, and there's only so much that can change.  Or maybe figs use more genes or are more plastic in genetic expression, and each branch only has an "idea" of what it means to be "Mission" or "Kathleen Black", and each land a cutting settles in, pushes forth a new coctail of genes, slightly different from the parents, so if a cutting was made from Kathleen Black mother tree in Maryland, and planted in Valdosta, from which a cutting and made and sent to Memphis, from which a cutting is made and sent to Houston, from which a cutting is made and sent to a pot in Denver, from which a cutting is made and sent to Los Vegas, and finally, a cutting arives in the hands of Pitangadiego's grandkids, having spent ten years growing at each previous home.  Is that cutting growing in San Diego still Kathleen Black?  This is fun, in a window-shopping way. 

And obviously, the furry creatures have discovered the rest, and finished all the rest of the brebas.  Oh well.  I certainly had plenty.  Gotta remember to bag a few of 'em main croppers.  Probably likely those guys will remember this year and eat everything as soon as there's any purple at all.  I remember when I picked one or two loquats, and decided to wait for further ripening, and the next day, every single last of them were gone.

Sorry to hear you lost the rest of your figs to the critters, but it is a reality growing figs. We all lose some to the critters, furry and feathered. 

Been doing some google-fu, and it occurred to me that I left a detail out...


The brebas on the oldest wood were the biggest and tastiest.  They formed similarly to brussel sprouts, and the fruits were shaped very similarly to Barnisotte.  The brebas forming up closer to the tip ripened later, some after the rain, and they were more likely to have a pyriform shape.  Very few of these figs will actually be as drooping as shown in the original post.

Now, some results from wading through all that information...First, if the main crop, of typical quality, has anything like the kind of size shown by the brebas this year, it would seem to be a very favorably commercial fig.  Not super-productive (about 50-75 figs/tree, many of them too high to reach), but...

I think the label petite aubique came from two factors.  First, the French  sometimes will label a fig that can be pot-cultured, petite.  For example, there is some talk about this wrt to pot-cultured Barnisotte.  Thus, it doesn't have to do with the actual natural size of the tree...Negronne and VdB are naturally smaller trees than PN.  Second, PN has the same advantages as Abicou in terms of a super-early and higher quality breba crop, and it *does* seem to mainly originate from Provence rather than Bordeaux.

I think some areas of Georgia, slightly further south than I am, think Columbus or Macon, probably should investigate the idea of growing Barnisotte.  It's grown in relatively inland areas of Provence that's not all that different from Piedmont area of Ga, except we're a touch north.  Barnisotte is *the* first-rate commercial fig, from what I understand.  It's just a matter of making it deep into Oct without serious cold.

I don't grow Barnisotte, so can't really comment on it. As for PN, yes it does seem to produce breba and main crop a bit earlier than my other trees and the breba is pretty good. 

How is the eye on your PN? I have one I rooted thid year and will be planting out soon.

How is the eye on Barnisotte?

eye is very small on PN, closed, I guess...Will check for sure this year...

Barnisotte has bigger eye, from the pictures, however, the biggest problem is definitely drops and figs that explode open.  Basically, with Barnisotte...it's
1)  Do you have the space?
2)  Do you have the fall heat?
3)  Do you have a nematode problem?
4)  Do you have a humidity problem?
5)  How about leaf chompers?  This is an ancient variety with ancient enemies.

Barnisotte is for people who don't want super-sweet, but balanced and rich figs.  Petite Negri has a fairly similar tendency to be fairly sweet, but more about being rich, with bright acidity, which was why I was interested in comparing with Barnisotte.  Barnisotte is one of *the* commercial varieties, along with Noire de Caromb in France, because it has good size and robust, attractive skins good for transportation.  It almost completely dominates home gardens in much of the warmer places of Europe, even apparently in Slovenia.  So far, it doesn't seem like some of the other famous non-Italian figs beloved here, like Black Madeira are really all that prominent outside of home gardens in Spain.  CdD apparently are typically too small for commercial use or something.  However, I've just got started cruising spanish fig sites, so...

Man, hopefully, I can trade a bit of the fruit I have with other people's figs.  I'd really like to try some of the other notable figs! 

I think we all want to try just about every fig that we hear about, I would welcome that task. Yes Charles the eye on my PN is also small. I like it very much, it compares well with VDB

From my cuttings this year the PN has never missed a beat. I feel real good that it will make to inground planting. In second place is a JH Adriatic closely followed by two Ronde Bordeaux and two Green Ischias. Not a bad lot to add for 2012.

I suspect part of the success is about the extensive windbreaks around the trees.  House to the northwest, tall hemlocks to the east, slope with huge tulip and oak trees to the south, and shrubs and small trees like dogwoods to the southwest.  PN is quite hardy, especially when established, and I think the experience of Dan_la definitely has to do with wind issues.

Not familiar with Dan la's experience, but I do know he is in a very different climate.   

Wind break not based on Dan_la but FMD's experience, but I see he lost that beautiful tree he managed to get going still died.  Hrrrrrmmm, my trees were always ridiculously healthy if very unproductive in its first decade.

FMD, if you're reading this, how many grams did your figs weigh, do you know?  They do look about the size of my bigger brebas or even bigger...