Fig Culture

CANNING FACTORIES

Everyone likes canned figs. The taste does not have to be educated, as is often the case with the fresh fruit. The factories at Biloxi, Miss., and at New Orleans, La., appreciate this fact, and for several years have been putting increasing quantities of the canned product on the market. Up to the panic of 1893 the demand for these goods was very active, and the canners paid as high as 4 cents per pound for the fresh figs and could not get enough to fill their orders. Since then the demand for all luxuries has fallen off and factories have curtailed their packing, but have not materially reduced the price of the product, which has always been very high. There seems to be no reason, aside from the larger quantity of sugar required, why figs should not be grown and canned as cheaply as peaches. If this were done the demand would soon be very large. It is in this direction, if at all, that there seems to be an opening for the building up of the fig industry in the South.

The processes used by the factories in canning figs differ somewhat from household methods. They also differ among themselves. Each factory has worked out a plan of its own, the details of which are regarded to some extent as trade secrets. In one factory, whose product has been much admired, the process consists in boiling the fruit at first in a very light sirup, allowing it to cool, and then transferring it with successive heatings and coolings to sirups of gradually increasing density. The whole process requires nearly two days. In the finished product the fig, while holding its shape perfectly, has become partially transparent, and as the final sirup is clear and free from sediment the fruit is very attractive.

1

South Carolina Experiment Station, Annual Report, 1889, pp. 105, 106. The list is as follows: Allorhina nitida (L.), Ptychodes trilineatus, Lybithea bachmanni (Kirth), Apatura celtidis (Bd. Sec.), Grapta interrogationis (F.), Pyrameis atalanta (L.).

2

G. F. Atkinson, “A preliminary report upon the life history and metamorphoses of a root-gall nematode (Heterodera radicola (Greeff) Müll.) and the injuries caused by it upon roots of various plants.” – Alabama Agr. Exp. Sta. Bul. No. 9.

3

J. C. Neal, in an account of the root-knot disease (Dept. Agr., Div. Ent., Bul. No. 20) gives a list of over 60 species of plants known to be infested by it.

4

Farlow and Seymour, A Provisional Host-Index of the Fungi of the United States, Part 3, p. 183.

5

The canning factories greatly prefer the Celeste, paying one-fourth more for them than for larger, coarser kinds.