My Beloved Great Fig!

This big fig tree supriced us this year. It gave thousands of fruit, but the fruiting season was very short, only two weeks or so from when they started to ripen. Then all of them had fallen on the gound, or eaten by birds.

The tree gave us the most fabulous opportunities to bird watching. The most beautiful Gambian birds visited it, eating figs. Next year I will take a good camera with me, and hope the spectacle will appear again.

I collected figs (with my sister Pirkko who is in the pictures), but they were not particularly tasty. I  cooked jam with sugar, and it was better.

Half of the ripe fruit were full of insects so I had to throw them away. Close up of the funny long tailed flies (or ants, or something in between ;-)) comes first! I laughed... it was like cleaning mushrooms, sometimes half of them are full of insects as well. Even the texture of the fruit flesh reminded me of familiar Swedish mushrooms (Boletus Edulis).