Garden Q&A: Do fig trees grow and bear fruit in Ireland?
The fig tree and its fruit. File picture
I have just bought my first fig tree. I didn’t even know fig trees could grow in Ireland. Can you give me any tips on growing them successfully?
Figs are surprisingly easy to grow and can be grown very successfully in our climate. Provide them with well-drained soil and as much sunshine as possible — ideally in front of a south-facing wall — and you will have a festival of figs in late summer and autumn each year, so prolific are they.
Bear in mind their eventual size and the fact that wasps do like fig trees.
The trees can reach anything from three to ten metres metres in height with a similar spread and their pliant and flexible stems make them well-suited to training to grow along a wall.
If you need to keep the trees in check, you can prune fig trees in spring before the new growth has started.
When the trees are in fruit, be careful picking the figs, particularly if the skin has broken, for you may well end up grabbing a feeding wasp.
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