Fig Tree Synonyms & Genetic Testing

Alright fig lovers, it's Ross the Fig Boss. Welcome back to another long form video. I really appreciate you guys joining me here today. Do me a favor right now, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button. We're going to very soon, by the way, have fig trees for sale that are somewhat dormant. We have the potential for frost coming in. It is actually early October here and we might get some frost here that's enough to start to set these trees into dormancy certainly we'll have more of the one and two gallon size trees for sale they're they're rusted so bad now at this point because we've just had constant moisture but if any of you guys are interested in these trees they're extremely healthy they have a huge root system to them and that's really what matters. The leaves are going to come off anyway, regardless of the rust or not that's been going on the last month. So very soon, if we get that frost, or maybe even if I just take off some of these leaves, the trees no longer have them, and I can ship them in like a semi-dormant state. So keep an eye on the website for that, figboss.com. Also, we just introduced YouTube memberships would really appreciate it if anybody is interested you just want to support what i'm doing here there's two different tiers one actually gives you a pretty big discount on the trees and cuttings that i sell the other one is just two dollars a month just for you guys to be able to say you know you can support my work but also these videos if you sign up for either tier you get to watch these videos ahead of time i've actually already scheduled, um, two videos ahead of time. So one is actually coming out next year in March. The other one is the, uh, talk that we talked about at the Alt House Arboretum at the Pennsylvania Fig Fest. We talked about protecting your fig trees and pruning your fig trees and the importance of that in colder climates. So if you want to watch either one of those videos, just sign up for one of the tiers there and you can get access to them and watch them today it's kind of like you know i don't know Netflix or something anyway so i'd appreciate it i appreciate all you guys out there and also today's video is going to be about fig genetics genetic testing that was done recently i was on the pro fig podcast we talked about with my friend brian and someone brian's been working about, uh, working with, excuse me, named Chris. The two of them got together for the last like three years or so. They've been, uh, getting samples from different varieties that Brian has, or even that Chris may have, and actually doing a full genome sequencing of these varieties. Now that's a really expensive testing. We talked a lot about it on the podcast, by the way, shout out to Chris and his website where you could see a lot of the results, um, persistent fig.com also the podcast and the talk that we we talked about check that out on brian's podcast and his channel pro fig you can just type in youtube the pro fig podcast i'll put the links in the description for you guys um so i wanted to kind of you know expand on that um they invited me as kind of a third party and i think it's a really important topic you know i've been somebody of somewhat of a champion of what variety is similar to another variety. I've been very vocal about that from the beginning, the last decade or so of me growing and trialing hundreds of different fig varieties. I've wasted a lot of time, money, and effort to figure out what variety is similar to another variety. And I've published the results. I've been very transparent to you guys. I've ruffled some feathers a little bit, especially in the beginning. A lot of people don't like when their fig variety that's going for a high price is identical to another fig variety or nearly identical and so uh some people got really upset by it but you would not believe how many people i get you know asking me in the last 10 years it's countless um how many people are wondering what variety is similar to another fig variety they want to know is there any genetic testing that's done there's actually about three really good studies that have been done i'll put links to those in the description as well i've also written a little bit of an article on all three of those studies i ran them through ai and kind of helped parse through some of the data and make it easier to explain and i'll put a link to that also in the description but there there is some good solid genetic testing that's been done out there the problem is it's very expensive and that's kind of the main thing that's been stopping a lot of growers i think uh from doing something like this you know it'd be great if we could test every single variety i have in my collection at this moment um i have like 200 trees in the ground between two different properties there's you know at least uh 300 trees in these larger pots and a lot of them are different varieties so yeah it would be great if i could figure that out i think it would ruin the fun of it i enjoy the fun of the fun of it of growing these varieties to figure out well which one is similar to another and which one has really special traits um like which one's rain resistant which one tastes really good which one ripens early which one ripens faster which one's hardy you know this is a giant thing that i've been doing for the last decade what what is my mission what have i been doing why do i have a sea of fig trees it's for that main reason right there It's that's the mission of what I've been doing and what I've been on and that's if you're gonna support me in my membership That's what you're doing. You're supporting that mission to help keep that going And for me to be as transparent as possible. This information has always been free So I enjoy it if I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't do it and I think if all the answers existed I probably wouldn't do it either Because if I could take all my leaf samples right now Now, maybe 10 years in the future, when this testing becomes really inexpensive and AI is like a superpower, it might be really easy to just send in the leaf samples of all my trees or even like everybody's trees in the community at some point. If you really wanted to test your fig variety, you could send it in somewhere and it could spit it out and tell you exactly what it is and what the real name of it is. And if it's any different than any other variety, I think that'd be great. would save a lot of people time money and effort i enjoy it i i think that would be something that would ruin the fun of this a little bit um but it is very insightful which is a lot of the things we talked about in that podcast there were a lot of good insights now that we've gathered some of this information and have some better knowledge um for example um a variety like Bordasot Negra Ramada is genetically very similar to black madeira now i had no idea because i had never grown Bordasot Negra Ramada i actually stay away from most of the ramada figs if you look at my website i don't really sell a lot of Panache i don't really sell Martinique Ramada um Popone is another one regatta del salento and the reason for that is because they they revert fairly easily And it just creates an inconsistent product that, you know, someone's expecting stripes, expecting their fig to be a Ramada, and then they get it, and it's just not, that's not the case. So, I've also just not really been interested in the stripes. It doesn't, it's just a visual thing. It's not that important. But it is really cool to now know that if I want an amazing fig, like Black Madeira, there is a variation of it that is striped. Now there's obviously a great place for Black Madeira. It's one of the best tasting figs on the planet to have really ever existed. I also have one here. This one's been ripening. I planted this, um, from like a three gallon pot this spring, and this has been ripening, um, some figs this year. It's pretty amazing actually. Uh, no frost hit this tree, but this fig is, uh, it's called Chipola and it ripens black Madeira figs that are bigger and also wider they're much more flat and so far from what i can tell that seems to be consistent that might change but because there's a little variation there maybe there's a little bit of a mutation that's occurred a sport of some sort. Well, that is a really good one to grow and grow alongside Black Madeira. I'm doing this exact thing with so many other figs. By the way, here is my black Madeira that's planted in the ground. You can see it's got fruit on it and hopefully very soon this will start to actually ripen some figs there. They are looking like they want to swell any day here. You can also notice the leaf pattern some of them have five lobes that leaf there has five lobes to it and some people will get really freaked out when they see a Black Madeira with only with five lobes they expect the tri lobes or single lobe leaves but the truth is if your tree is really healthy and also somewhat vigorous the hormones really dictate the leaf pattern if your tree is very healthy, you actually can get five lobe leaves. So, um, it is, uh, it is obviously, um, in my opinion, uh, an incredible fig and both of them together, Chipola and Black Madeira seem like they're worth growing side by side, which brings me to another point of something we talked about in that podcast was that, Hey, you know, um, and this is really the main, the main message. I think that Some people, unfortunately, didn't get, you know, no matter what you say, no matter what you do, people are going to disagree. And that's fine. People are going to have their own opinions. I don't care. But the point the point is, is that some people got the wrong impression, I think, which is different than someone disagreeing with you. If they disagree with you because they think you said something you didn't really say or they're interpreting the results in a very different way than I then we wanted to come across. then i think that's worth clearing up you know um so the way that i interpreted all the results the way that i was thinking about uh chris's work and what i was trying to get across on this podcast was that even though these varieties at the moment are showing that some varieties are identical right like Bordas Negra Ramada is supposed to be identical in in some sense to Black Madeira, right? The point is they came from the same seed, right? That's what the results are saying. Now, obviously, if you look at them, you'll notice the Bodegas Negra Ramada is definitely not the same as Black Madeira. Why is that? Because one is striped and has a chimera mutation and the other one doesn't. Now, the entire genome of these varieties were tested, but it does not account at this moment for things like sports or mutations so even though we had results that were saying Col de Dame Blanc, Gris, Noir and Gigantina were all the same they're clearly not the same right Col de Dame Blanc is a white fig, Col de Dame Gris means gray the skin is gray, Col de Dame Noir is black the skin is black so there's a difference there in the skin color and people have been saying this including myself for years there really is no difference between the three varieties maybe you can make a slight argument for like one growing trait or descriptor is slightly different than the others but in truth it's it's just the main difference there is the skin color and at the moment the genetic testing and i guess with current technology or whoever Chris is doing it on his website Persistent Fig we can't account for the sports so what i think Chris was trying to get across specifically as he really mentioned to me i asked Brian and Chris before the podcast even started i said hey guys look what do you want to talk about you have a list of questions what do you really want to focus on and Chris immediately said i want to talk about the difference between the horticultural differences that people are seeing and the genetic differences the scientific differences that people are seeing and there's clearly uh a difference because if you have a variety like you know any of the ones i just mentioned um you might see a observable horticultural difference that isn't yet accounted for in the actual genome or in the results of the testing right and you have to think about it there's got to be a different Blanc Noir Colden on Blanc Noir and Greece all came from the same seed one of two of them mutated from one of them whether the original one was Blanc or the original one was Greece whatever the case is there's probably some kind of mutation that has occurred that's changing one of the genes how is it changing that well guys i'm not a biologist but i can tell you that's how we should be thinking about this and that's how i have been thinking about this for many many years this is not new none of the none of the stuff in that study was really new to me and it really shouldn't be that surprise of a new surprise to people that are i've been doing this for a long time like myself you know if you're new to that this whole thing you don't know all the synonyms just yet you're not familiar with all the names of the different varieties yeah this is probably some interesting um stuff but none of the results really were all that uh unusual there actually there was two which i have talked to chris about he's going to retest them i think at some point but Colden on Roja is not the same as Panache and Martinenko Ramada should not be the same as Black Madeira so they're going to do the testing on those two again and they're probably i would guess they're going to get different results so um that was interesting um but you know when it comes to varieties like Sesac and smith uh it's the same thing you can apply the same exact um principles that we just mentioned when you when you compare Chipola to Black Madeira or any of the other Black Madeira figs that was mentioned in the study. Maybe there is an observable difference that you might see and hats off to you for that. In fact, I'm doing the same exact thing with Smith and Texas BA1. Now I have been growing Cessa for a few years now. I haven't seen a whole lot of difference really in the fruit quality. I do think it is possible that Cessa is a little bit more syrupy and a little bit less berry flavor it's it may be a little bit more sweet and mild um but smith what i've learned about smith for growing it for almost 10 years is that it is very variable year to year but also fig to fig on the same tree the weather changes it dramatically i mean i have a smith back here that's like dark red purple you just don't get them like this all the time so every smith fig i've ever eaten that's one of the coolest things about it has been different it's been different like every every time you eat it some of them are really cakey some of them have a lot more acidity sharp berry flavor some of them are a little bit more mild um you know it's just a very variable fig and a lot of figs are quite variable in how they taste perform they look uh there's a lot of different things that goes into that. We've mentioned a lot about hormones in these videos and hormones can make a huge difference in how a fig performs in the observable horticultural differences that someone might be seeing. And they don't have necessarily the knowledge base just yet, which is why I talk about hormones in literally every video we've done of these long form videos because i know it controls everything it changes so many things about our figs it's so so important um i promise you guys this this is this is really when you understand that a huge light bulb goes off in your head and it just really clicks from that moment so for me i'm uh you know i'm trying to get um some information year after year that can potentially justify one variety being different than another variety um you know if they're so similar like Smith and Texas BA1 I've noted that on my website that's part of this whole transparency thing right i've from the beginning actually had a spreadsheet in the description some of you guys know what the spreadsheet is i'm referring to you've been watching me long enough shout out to you guys for even knowing what spreadsheet i'm talking about and in that spreadsheet it had a list of synonyms A lot of the main common varieties you'll find, there's about 15 really common ones that you'll find in the United States. Varieties like Dalmatian, Hardy Chicago, Celeste, Smith, White Adriatic, Black Mission, Brown Turkey, different types of Brown Turkey, California Brown Turkey, English Brown Turkey. so you need to know those 15 varieties or whatever it is because if you don't know what those are and you have a new fig variety or one that you got at the flea market or one that you found down the street and you give it a name but you didn't really know the 15 really most common varieties you're gonna they're gonna it's gonna accumulate lots of names which it has like Hardy Chicago has 100 plus names so i've listed those in my spreadsheet then the sprite the spreadsheet got migrated to my website figboss.com all you got to do i'll put a link in the description but if you want at any time go to my website type in the word synonym in the search bar and it's going to come up and you'll see all the different lists of synonyms there that by the way most of these are already in the study that the study published on persistent fig and it's been out for i mean i've been talking about synonyms for 10 years i've had like a list of a list of most of them. Also on my website, when I sell Texas BA1 and Smith or a lot of varieties like this, I will have as an example, like if I'm selling Texas BA1, the title and the listing says Smith in parentheses, Texas BA1 for sale or like fig trees or cuttings, whatever it is. If it's an Adriatic fig, I have Adriatic, then in parentheses, White Madeira No. 1, J.H. Adriatic, Blanche de Saison, Mom's Jam, whatever it is, I have them in parentheses so that people know, hey, you're buying an Adriatic fig. If you have an Adriatic fig already, you don't need another one. Now, if you're going to do something like what I'm doing, and that's your thing, more power to you. That's awesome. And if you can find some observable difference between a variety like Texas BA1 and Smith, that's great. What have I found so far between Texas BA1 and Smith? Well, you can kind of see it. Texas BA1, the history of it is that Edema Landscaping in Virginia said in their nursery catalog that Texas BA1 is actually hardy to zone 7b when protected from the wind. So I thought, wow, maybe what I know about Texas BA1 is that it's very similar to smith so i grew it out wanted to see for myself is it actually similar to smith is it actually hardy and you'll see over here i'm looking at these trees this here is Diandrameros one of the tallest trees in the whole yard right next to it is smith and there's a bunch of shoots in here they're they every year if they get killed back by the cold which they have every single year i did manage to protect a shoot on my smith this year and i have also in the past but they grow like you know at least 12 feet every single year so my Texas BA1 on the other side of the house which we can look at is at this moment half the size it's actually in a better spot there's more sunlight the west side of the house the fig trees have done much better here on the west side than they have in the south side yet the tree is half the size what's going on there well the truth is is that Texas BA1 is a slower grower and it lignifies better another example which we really talked about in the podcast that the study published the results of on chris's website is the difference between Col de Dame Gigantina and Col de Dame Blanc so So Col de Dame Blanc or Gigantina, what we know from Pons' book, Fig Trees of the Balearic Islands, Gigantina was named because it was very similar to Col de Dame Blanc, but it was producing consistently larger figs. So it produces white figs that taste identical to Col de Dame Blanc, but they're bigger. So Pons gave it the name, or somebody in Spain gave it the name, Col de Dame Gigantina. What does Gigantina mean? It just means giant or bigger, right? so if you grow the trees side by side what do you notice well Col de Blanc actually is kind of dwarf it's a really slow grower but Gigantina is a really fast grower or at least a normal growth rate for a normal fig tree so the difference there in the growth rate means you have bigger leaves wider node spacing more photosynthesis more photosynthesis on a tree like Gigantina because it grows faster leads to you got it larger figs so what's the difference there right the difference there is some kind of mutation of some kind that's making it so that Gigantina is just larger and consistently larger um so that hasn't yet been shown like i said in Chris's results so if you see an observable difference which is what we've been we've been doing i've been doing for many years testing not just Smith and Texas BA1 or Black Madeira different different Black Madeira types what about the Giant Celeste trial i did right now i'm also doing a Black Mission trial and continuously i'll probably always test um Adriatic figs also been doing a little bit of Violette de Bordeaux testing this is a Violette de Bordeaux called Fayumi i'm gonna be giving this to uh selling this tree to a local friend of mine uh that owns a cidery we've made good friends with them but point is is that um we're testing all these figs for a reason there's a purpose to it if it wasn't um like i said if it wasn't interesting i wouldn't do it if there wasn't any good results that came out of it also wouldn't do it i did a big Celeste trial just to update you guys on what happened with all that um i tested about 15 different and still i'm testing some of them 15 different sources of Celeste by far and away black Celeste is unbelievably different it is a totally different variety the majority of them majority of them were identical and i didn't see a single difference between them if i would have studied them for years grew them side by side for years maybe I would have seen something so far stallion seems to have more of a red pulp and a more more of a berry flavor one of my other trees I have Texas peach that's in the ground actually got some figs on it right now it's pretty much identical to Celeste the whole Texas peach name is kind of a marketing gimmick shout out to Wills because he's the one who did that anyway um yeah it's uh it's just Celeste there's nothing really any different about it blue Celeste is another one i've been trialing blue Celeste is not any different actually here's a Celeste right here i believe so this is the one versus Texas peach blue Celeste i figured would actually have bluer skin right hence the name but it's the same color as these now maybe next year if it gets a one more year on its under its belt and the figs are a little bit bluer okay i'll change my mind on that but for right now it's not any different um the one seems to have a shorter hang time than the other celeste figs but last year i didn't really notice that this year i'm kind of seeing it a little bit um it's not a huge difference and i would say so far you know i've kept becknell celeste and i've kept the one um the other one that is really different to any degree is actually um violet marseille that one comes from france and it has a wider neck uh my friend dan callahan found a a fig in baltimore in the baltimore area and that one also resembles celeste very closely but also has a little bit of a different neck and also a different stem so there's some clear differences here it's not like they're all 100 identical you're gonna get mutations it's a fact of life uh when you grow fig trees you propagate them every time you propagate them you increase the chances of some kind of mutation happening you know it's just kind of how biology works there's another thing i can't remember i was trying to think of uh this other reason but you know if you have a fig just basically that's very popular it's widely grown you're gonna get mutations of it you know there is actually a chimera of a ramada version of hardy chicago it's about time you know there's a ramada version of Col de Dama Ramada version of Black Madeira, a Ramada version of a lot of different varieties so it's like they're mutating and you can see them very easily with the stripes and you know it's a mutation some of these other mutations are not so obvious to most people so that's the beauty of it i'm doing this i'm growing all these different varieties i don't think you're gonna end up getting the the results perhaps that you might want um oh by the way all the Pastillier figs i think they're all identical i don't think there's a difference in the strain the source whatever it is it drops figs because you'd underwatered it it's that simple i've got a couple trees here i've given away i might have sold some trees to my friend Anthony in the area he sells fig trees in Philadelphia and he came over gave me two of the trees that he propagated maybe three of the trees, three of the Pastillier trees so now my goal because he can't get his to fruit is to get is to get those to fruit and to kind of prove to him that hey look they fruit it's just you got to be really careful with the water he really knows what he's doing so we'll see what happens with that but um you know Pastillier is one of them figs that you know people thought oh well it has a lot of differences and there's these weird little things um that maybe could make it drop and not drop and and a lot of it ended up just being nonsense one of the figs i really have noticed this year is this one this is called uh fico san fico lungo de portugal this one comes from mario's collection in uh connecticut i had this in his at his property in connecticut i visited him it was unbelievable it was dried up on the tree it tasted so good i couldn't believe it but really any fig that was that well ripened is going to taste amazing. And, but I got cuttings of it and, um, I really, you know, he just graciously offered me cuttings of this tree. It is very, very similar to long to, you know, later, later on, obviously I kind of realized that. And, but now after growing it for many years, it's not the same as long to it's a slight variation of it. In fact, I think maybe even Mario's Pellegrino might be a slight variation of it. I think it's possible Randino is a slight variation of it. And a fig that actually was highly recommended to me by somebody, my friend Mattia at Ometzli Nursery in northern Italy told me that he really likes Torbillet. He said, Ross, this is one of the most rain resistant figs I have. he showed me a video of his whole orchard after the rainstorm everything is wet some of the best fig varieties are split fermenting all kinds of nasty craps going on and here is one of the one of the figs he's recommending is a variation of long de ute called tourbillet so it just goes to show you you know there's some interesting stuff out there i'm not we're not i'm not wasting my time the results are um are actually pretty cool i'm a huge fan of doing this like i said it's i think it's very interesting i think there's always going to be something left to learn here's an Adriatic fig called Blanche de douce saison squirrels maybe finally left me uh let me eat some fruit for a while there it seemed like they uh were just getting everything i wonder what else we have so that's you know that's my point about all this is that there are differences and if somebody were to show me results genetically that you know x variety is the same 100% identical to another fig variety well then i i don't have to you know think about it and i don't have to put the time money and effort in and that could save me like i said you know all that and that's great but if i know in my heart that something is probably different than another variety well you know who cares who really cares um but for the average person they they are going to care and that's the main thing that we're doing here we're not um this this information in that podcast wasn't for people like me this was for the people who don't know what's going on and this is going to save them all that time money and effort that's why i created the spreadsheet that's why i created the article on my website that's why i list the figs the way i list them and uh you can take the information for what it is i don't i don't care the world's gonna do whatever they want to do regardless i learned that a long time ago um so i thank you guys here for watching this i'm gonna look through some of my trees today and see what the deal is with some of these fruits Got a big sucker back here, looks like we got another Verdino Valcesia Ooh, not exactly ripe, but this is definitely different than White Adriatic Even though it has the name Verdino Let's just open it up here 嗯 Yeah, this is a good fig. So thanks guys. We'll see you for the next one Hit the like button, hit the subscribe button. Do me a favor, check out the memberships trees on the website We'll see you for the next one. All right. Take care