Hello from Austria!

[Jakob]

Hello everyone!

My name is Jakob and I’m from a small village in Upper Austria.

I grew up in a family where gardening was simply part of life. My father planted figs, two persimmons, a few apples, one pawpaw, and several mulberries in our garden. I always enjoyed the fruit and helped out, but back then I never really took the time to dive deeper into fruit trees or fig varieties.

My father especially loved figs. In 2020 we travelled together to Puglia in Italy and visited Paolo Belloni and his incredible fig collection. It was a wonderful experience, although at the time I honestly thought that Paolo and my dad were just two friendly, slightly eccentric fig nerds. Sadly, my father passed away only a few months later. That trip has become one of my most treasured memories.

Some time afterwards, I started looking through his old posts in the fig group on Facebook. I became more and more interested in the varieties he had planted — and that’s really where everything began.

Now, almost six years later, I’m growing around 100 fig varieties from all over the world. Most of them are still small, but they’re growing well. I’m fascinated by anything edible, and I’m trying to fill our 4000 m² garden with as many fruit trees as possible. We now have kiwi, persimmons, grapes, pomegranates, mulberries, pears, Asian pears, hawthorns, cornelian cherries, walnuts, hazelnuts, serviceberries, service trees, nanking cherries, apples, and many others.

A big part of my motivation is simple:
I don’t want to look back in ten years and regret not planting a tree I could have planted today. Cutting one down is easy — but growing one takes time, patience, and a bit of courage. So I’d rather plant now and let the future decide which trees will stay.

Over time I also started visiting other collectors and growers. Meeting people who share the same passion — seeing their trees, their successes, their mistakes — has been one of the most inspiring parts of this whole journey. And sometimes I’m simply curious about the people behind the Facebook posts.

Along the way I learned grafting, and I have several projects I want to work on:

- getting the fig wasp

- breeding parthenocarpic figs

- creating a graft chimera with two fig varieties

- finding the real Fico Fetifero (probably impossible, but I think all of us are treasure hunters at heart, haha)

- testing different fig varieties in Uganda

I’m looking forward to learning more — and I’m happy to be part of this forum!

[Rob]

Well Jakob, that is a very nice account of where you are in your life today, and from what I see, there should not be anything to hold you back on achieving everything in your list, given a bit of time, and patience.

Others may disagree, but I honestly believe that with the right management, fig wasps could exist in many more areas than is currently thought. It is only by testing many ideas that we can learn better methods of doing everything. Now that we understand how wasps live, breed, the temperatures they can survive in, there should be nothing stopping us from altering our micro climate to accommodate their needs, keeping them warmer or cooler, as it needs to be. With you in the northern hemisphere, and us in the southern, we can test much more and share information, it has to be a huge plus, and this is not just for our group here, for everyone interested.