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Planthropology
Planthropology
120. Godfather Figs, Coastal Ecology, and Really Old Rocks w/ Phil D'Angelis
What happens when scientific curiosity meets ancestral connection? Phil DeAngelis, founder of Phil's Figs and coastal geologist, takes us on a journey that weaves together seemingly unrelated passions into a life of purpose and discovery.
Phil's story begins in Pennsylvania, where gardening was simply part of life in his Italian-American and German-American household. Following the expected corporate path after college, he worked in marketing for Zipcar while an undercurrent of scientific curiosity continued to pull at him. A transformative trip to Italy not only connected him with his heritage but introduced him to fresh figs for the first time—awakening memories of his great-grandfather's cherished fig tree that had been ceremoniously wrapped each winter to survive Philadelphia's cold.
The podcast explores how Phil's mounting fascination with figs coincided with his decision to leave corporate life and pursue graduate studies in geoscience. With remarkable candor, he describes the humbling experience of returning to school, the challenges of scientific writing, and the painstaking research of collecting foraminifera from deep ocean sediments to study climate change events.
We delve into the fascinating geology of East Coast barrier islands—remnants of ancient Appalachian Mountains—and how Phil's work with coastal plant species helps determine environmental boundaries within inches of elevation. The conversation shifts to the extraordinary world of figs, their ancient relationship with humanity dating back to Mesopotamia, and their unique reproductive cycle involving specialized wasps.
Whether you're a science enthusiast, plant lover, or simply someone wondering about different career paths, Phil's story reminds us that curiosity is the greatest guide. As he says, "Play the long game and just keep going on something that truly interests you. If you don't know, go out and start trying stuff."
Ready to experience the incomparable taste of a fresh fig or learn why coastal plants matter? This episode will inspire you to let your passions—however diverse—lead the way.
Phil's Links
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Planthropology is written, hosted, and produced by Vikram Baliga. Our theme song is "If You Want to Love Me, Babe, by the talented and award-winning composer, Nick Scout. Midroll tunes are by Rooey.
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What is up? Plant people it's time once more for the Plantthropology podcast, the show where we dive into the lives and careers of some very cool plant people to figure out why they do what they do and what keeps them coming back for more. I'm Vikram Baliga, your host and your humble guide in this journey through the green sciences and, as always, my friends, I am so excited to be with you today. Y'all, I have to say, I do a lot of these and I have done so many of these and I nerd out on every episode to some extent, but for some reason, there is just something about my guest today, phil DeAngelis, that I nerded out so hard on this. We talked about everything from science and graduate school and what those experiences are like to having different paths in life, graduate school and what those experiences are like to having different paths in life. We talked about coastal ecology and barrier islands and rocks and soft rock and hard rock geologists which I didn't know was a thing and I'm glad that I do and we spent a lot of time talking about figs and the history of figs and his business, phil's Figs, and how he talks about figs online. All figs all the time. It's figs all the way down Y'all. This is such a good episode. It's so much fun.
Speaker 1:Phil is genuinely one of the kindest, nicest, coolest guys I know. He's one of the co-hosts on the Garden Party podcast, which I'm actually on tonight as I record this, and yesterday as you're listening to this. If you listen to it, the day drops. But I've gotten to talk to him a ton times and it was just such a cool experience getting to learn about his history and his past and all of the things he's gotten to do because he's gotten to do so much. So, whether you're into surfing or rocks, or figs or wasps or a little bit of all of that, you're going to love this episode. So grab a cup of coffee and a fig and you'll understand why later and settle yourself right in for episode 120 of the Plantthropology Podcast with my friend, phil DeAngelis man Phil. So first off, thanks for jumping in last minute for today's episode. I'm so excited to talk to you.
Speaker 2:I'm stoked to be chatting on a podcast with you again, man, it's such a privilege to have us together on the Garden Party. I was having such FOMO when you were out at Smithtown with all the Garden Party people and alumni I should say. And so, yeah, when you invited me on, I was like great, I get to nerd out even more on plants.
Speaker 1:Let's do it, yeah, no. So we like we were definitely missing you there, and so, for the listeners that have been around for a while, our last episode was actually Destin Nowak, and so Texas garden guy and I and gardening with Des and Michael from Smith's Garden Town all hung out. It was hot and sweaty out there, man, like I tell you what.
Speaker 2:That's how you know you won is when you left the place hot and sweaty.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think by the end of the day we're all just like, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. That's awesome, and you didn't get any damages from wiping out on the cart that I saw.
Speaker 1:I think I still have a little bruise and I'll link that video for anyone who hasn't seen it.
Speaker 2:But yeah, destin and I had what we thought was a really good idea for writing.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, greenhouse, of course those are the only ideas you have and at some point he let the intrusive thoughts win and it was like what if I rode the car too and physics said no physician or physics lets you know what you were capable of. Yes, yes, right, our limitations. Like it was fun though.
Speaker 2:Oh man, it looked like so much fun Nice man. All good.
Speaker 1:Well, again, thanks for being on. So introduce yourself. You have you know an interesting diversity of things that you do, but tell us about where you grew up, what you liked and enjoyed growing up, how you got into plants, all that kind of stuff oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:I grew up so I was born in Philadelphia and when I was about four I moved out to Lancaster, pennsylvania, and if any of you guys know or don't know, it's Amish country, central of Pennsylvania and it's in the Susquehanna Valley and it's so funny. I was just used to seeing farmland but I was also used to being close to all the major cities, so like, yeah, I had cornfields but I could hop on a train and be in downtown Manhattan in two hours and and I just I grew up that typical suburban life.
Speaker 2:But it was like a development that was converted from a farm and next door horses and I also had three you know all the bikes on the driveways of all my friends' houses. So that was kind of my growing up. I played a lot of sports. I was a very high energy kid. My dad's side is very Italian, all Philadelphia. My mom's side is she's a daughter of the revolution all the way back central Pennsylvania, from the first Germans that came over in the late 1600s. So both sides gardened, which is really cool. So gardening was just kind of something that was like of course you had a tomato plant, of course you had herbs, of course you had you know all the things. And my grandmother was a person that said you know, go outside and I'll hose you down afterwards. And so I grew up at my grandparents' like that. I grew up in my parents' house like that, and that was really good for a high energy kid who liked to climb trees and stuff. But I was also I was definitely raised from a garden point of view and a nature point of view that I knew where food came from and I didn't realize that people didn't know until I got older and when I started living in cities and things so like, I ended up finishing high school I went to Skidmore College for undergrad and I studied management and business and I studied geoscience and that's where I really got into the earth sciences and climatology specifically, and so in sediment records how we could see indications of climate change and even whether it was in tree rings through dendrochronology or if it was literally air bubbles in glacial ice to look at oxygen and carbon dioxide fluctuations.
Speaker 2:And I also studied management, business, because I was quite the extrovert too and I followed a lot of shoulds in life. So, like you should do this, you should go into a city and get that office. And I worked in sales and marketing for Zipcar for like three, four or five years. Oh, wow, yeah, I started as inside sales for Zipcar, doing business to business. Before that, I did hire a year of environmental hazardous waste and I hated it and I was like everyone's running from the acid that spilled and I had to put on the Tyvek suit and go in and clean it up and I was like this is not for me. I get it, I'll end up going back to science and using hydrochloric acid a lot, but it's not one of the heavy acids you know and. But I moved away from that and there was a really cool inflection point when I discovered farmer's markets as a young adult in Cambridge, massachusetts, where I was living at the time and all of a sudden they're like here's.
Speaker 2:I grew up eating Swiss chard and broccoli rabe with beans and potatoes that my dad made and called it beans and greens, and he's like this is the healthiest thing you can eat. You'll be healthier your whole life if you eat it, and it costs you four bucks. And I was like that's amazing. And so I started going to farm with Mark. It's like oh, I have these things. And I moved into a really sweet apartment with my now wife Grace. We've been together for almost 20 years but we met in college and she and I had a garden space out back and I saw someone planting. I was like I want to garden. This sounds amazing. And I was into homebrewing beer at the time. So the first thing I planted were hops oh, wow. And every spring you can buy rhizomes of hops and I bought Cascade and Chinook, which are great for IPA varieties, and there's so many more variants out there now in the brewing world, but they grow great in the New England because they love like a Germanic climate, and so that started me and I was like, well, if I have all this other space, then I'm going to start growing all these other plants.
Speaker 2:And then during that first year I was doing the business stuff and I had missed science. I was still missing science for years and years. But when I was, I traveled Europe and I did my Italian genealogy. So I knew where my great grandparents were from in Pennsylvania. But I decided to go with my buddy, john, who also has an Italian side. We went to Italy and I found out where my family was from in Italy and we can talk about that, I guess in the second half of why I started Bill's Figs.
Speaker 2:But it's a huge inflection point when I went out there and I had fresh figs for the first time and I grew up with stories that my dad and my uncles and my aunts told me about my great-grandfather's fig tree that he ceremoniously wrapped every year in Philadelphia because it was a little too cold, it wouldn't survive winter. So they wrapped it. It was a cutting that they brought over from Italy and it had this whole big, almost religious aspect to this fig tree that was coveted and I was like I've never had a fig. I didn't eat my first fresh fig till I'm 38 now, so I was 25. And as soon as I ate it, I was like that's a fig. And then my friend's dad's third cousin, aurelia, was like yeah, that's a fig. Haven't you had a fig before? And I was like no. And he's like, oh well, they're everywhere here. And I was like I can see that. So, um, when I came back, I'm like I'm going to find a fig tree.
Speaker 2:And then I found a place in Boston Roslindale it's now closed called figtreesnet, and to Morlaix I got my first two fig trees. And if anyone knows me and all my friends know me that I can't just do something casually, I have to go all in. And all of a sudden I was like, well, wait, can't you propagate figs? My dad told me I could. Okay, so I'm going to look down. Oh, there's a forum, oh, there's two forums, there's three forums. Oh, there's a place that sells scions. You could order directly from UC Davis's fig repository as well, back in the day I don't know if they still do it, but or there's like a third party. Then I got these cuttings. We shall try again. And this was about 2012, 2012. And I just had these two fig trees I wanted to show off to my dad. I was like dad, I got him one. We got these fun little varieties.
Speaker 2:And when I was living in Boston, I got engaged to my wife, took a promotion as an account executive for Zipcar in their DC office, lived there eight months, had a garden in this sweet apartment there, saw fig trees growing in DC. I was like they can grow in the ground here. That's amazing. Slowly met more and more people in the fig world. I was becoming this like enthusiast, if you will, this collector.
Speaker 2:And by 2015, I looked at my wife and I was getting stressed at work because I was a county executive for Zipcar for business, and I looked at all these people starting their businesses and working in different avenues and I go, I want to do something that I really like to do and I had always thought about I was hitting this. I was about 29. I was giving myself a lot of grief of pursuing. Do I want to go the business route or science? And I said you know what F? This Screw, this. I am pulling the ripcord and I'm going back to school for science. And I got just gotten married to my wife. Two months later I said I'm quitting my job and we're moving in with my new in-laws for a year while I take prerequisites, and everyone just was like sorry, what? And I said you're doing what now? Yeah, we're doing this now. And I had a shot in the dark right, and I had been out of undergrad long enough that I needed to take prereqs over again. And they weren't.
Speaker 2:Geology is an interdisciplinary hard science, so you use physics, you use chemistry, you use calculus for rate of change over time and things like that, and physics is important too in different aspects. And so I had to take a year of each of those and apply for grad schools, find professors, find parts that I liked and was interested in, and I had to drink the whole grad school process out of a fire hose for a year and I got it done. I ended up really enjoying physics. I ended up enjoying and here's the thing Professors can make or break courses for you. So anyone out there still finds a genuine interest in this. You may have just not clicked, and I was fortunate enough to click at a branch community college campus outside Pittsburgh, pennsylvania, where I sat in the parking lot and I said what the heck am I doing out here. I just quit my job making good money in the city, like with my wife, and I'm here living in their basement studying and I'm going to this branch campus and I was like we're just going to do this one day at a time. If it doesn't work out in a year we'll reassess.
Speaker 2:And eight months went by. I had some good conversations with some professors at a few universities. Some of them weren't taking on new students, which is tough because I like their research. Some of them were taking on and some just weren't clicking. But I matched with Professor Sharon Hoffman at UNC Wilmington and she did paleoceanography and she did deep ocean sediment and I liked that.
Speaker 2:And deep ocean sediment because it was associated with changes in ocean currents during abrupt climate change events, in ocean currents during abrupt climate change events, and so how abrupt climate change can actually offset things like the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic current and kind of shut them down.
Speaker 2:And I focused a lot on this current called or it's a mechanism called the AMOC or Atlantic Meridional Overt circulation, and that is where surface cold waters fall and descend due to density and due to cold temperatures and salinity and they become deep water currents that run across the ocean bottom, and so I collected sortable silt to determine the rate of those currents. And I also looked at foraminifera different species, whether they're pelagic or benthic Pelagic meaning they're in the water column, versus benthic on the seafloor. And I collected those for half of my grad school experience under a microscope and then for the last 10 days I ground them all up and I threw them through a mass spectrometer and I looked at the isotopes of oxygen and carbon and those isotopes determine the type of water that was floating in at that time, whether they came out of iceberg discharge or not, and that is.
Speaker 1:Can I just tell you that? No, no, no. I just have to tell you, like, that experience and the way you describe it is like I spent all this time sampling and I looked at them under a microscope and then I spent days grinding samples, Like that is such a science. It's so science, Masters. It's almost like a rite of passage where it's like here's this incredibly tedious thing.
Speaker 2:You have to do this month and a year, year of doing that and being like and you know what.
Speaker 2:It could have all just been a flop and I would have been like had to start all over again and I wouldn't have gotten the results that I was looking for all the research I had done going into it. That and my advisor being like, keep doing this way. Right method sections are so important for consistency and I listen, I got destroyed in scientific writing. Grad school taught me how to write through hell or high water. I'm a math person, so reading and writing in the science community is a practice and I can say that on the other side of it, it just is a very humbling experience. There are times I had papers that had more red ink than black ink on them and looking back it was all okay, but at the time it was like a five-engine fire alarm, you know. But you come out the other end and all your professors are hugging you and like what just happened, but you feel so empowered. So I'm very humbled by graduate school and I had some really key professors that were very supportive in the process and so that ties back into that. But looking back, I loved what I did and I actually got being at UNC Wilmington we had a huge coastal program.
Speaker 2:Center for Marine Science was a really great facility for me because it also introduced me to I did offshore deep ocean currents, where there's a lot of barrier island geomorphological mechanisms that are happening just on our coastline.
Speaker 2:That I find extremely fascinating and when I graduated I actually got in with a coastal engineering firm that literally did beach island monitoring with is a unique mechanism that we have on the East Coast of the United States that only exists in a few parts of the world, which is a barrier island system, and all these barrier islands are all sediment runoff from the old Appalachian Mountains and this kind of breakdown of the whole East Coast Because once upon a time the Appalachians were as tall as the Himalayas or the Andes, right, but on a geologic timescale it's hard to conceptualize that because of tectonic plate shifting over time and so everything's kind of eroded over time and you have these big watersheds that have helped carry all this sediment out and it has fluctuated up and down during sea level rise and fall for eons, right, and so we have this great, huge collection of sediment that runs from basically New Jersey to Miami, or I should say Long Island to Miami, and only places like Italy.
Speaker 2:You have that kind of discharge, like the barrier islands around Venice, on the Adriatic parts of Bangladesh and a few other places. But doing deep ocean sediment research. I truly fell in love with the coastline, especially in North.
Speaker 1:Carolina. This is just an aside, but I was in Maine recently for just a couple of days. Oh cool, I wanted to spend weeks there because it's gorgeous and it was 100 degrees here and like 60 there, so that you know. But I was. You know, I'm used to Gulf of Mexico beaches. You know where they're sandy. It's usually a fine sand. We've got some rocky beaches, but they're sort of few and far between. And then flying into Maine, you know, over the coast, I was like, oh, these are giant rocks, granite outcroppings.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a huge part of the East Coast and what you see where the rocks stop and the sand barrier islands begin, is the furthest extent of glaciation on the United States. So from glacial maximum goes all the way out and you can see it. So you see Maine, new Hampshire, cape Cod these are all like scoured geological formations from iceberg advances. And then you see it around Nantucket, martha's Vineyard, come down the coast and then you hit the tip of Long Island right there at Montauk and those are all rock outcroppings and it travels down across Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2:Actually, I learned from my glaciology professor once. He told me that Southern Pennsylvania and Maryland is great farmland because you get all that discharge from the maximum glacial extent. So all that runoff, all those minerals, all that stuff got deposited there on top and Pennsylvania has actually got a really rich geologic history. I like the coastline but other people can speak to it sometime. I hope you find some or I can try to nerd out with you. But yeah, glaciation stop there and that's when you get to all the barrier island stuff that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:And you know once those things that you think about it. You're like, oh yeah, that that makes sense, like I get it Right, but it doesn't. Like you wouldn't just like realize that, right, you wouldn't just think of that, but like knowing that, yeah, that's where the glaciers were.
Speaker 2:And it's like proving that, like it's this the scientific method, hundreds of years, to prove that, with research all the way down, people just like, hey, this looks right. You can't just say that in science no, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:Right and that's a good point too, but like but you know what so much good science starts with? That observation of like, this feels right, but I have to make sure that it is right.
Speaker 1:And so, like we see these things, that observationally we find like this glacier would fit here, these continents would fit together all this stuff and then we work the process and I think, like so much of good science is that curiosity and that wonder, yeah, that I feel like sometimes gets lost in the process of science. Both are necessary, yeah, right, we have to do both. We have to publish, we have to do all that stuff. But I think the best scientists I know and the best science educators I know are just curious at heart, right, they're inquisitive at heart.
Speaker 2:When you let the curiosity flow and you let the ego go when people challenge you, because you're realizing it's just because everybody wants to find the closest, most accurate answer. It helps a lot and the curiosity piece is beautiful and there's so many aspects of science that you can find your little gem to jump into if anyone's curious about being in science. And it's so true, like letting your curiosity flow, like literally just like looking at a landscape, touching the sand, being like how did this get like this?
Speaker 1:Taking a step back, you're absolutely right, man, weird, like I don't even know what to call it smattering of things that are true and really interesting in between all of this like incredible nonsense. Right, like there's all of this stuff out there. So, from a geological perspective, like living in that part of the world or the country and studying it, you know, you hear all these things like the Appalachian Mountains are older than like anything. Like they're one of the oldest like geological formations, definitely in North America, but like maybe in the world. Like is that true? Like how old are these mountains?
Speaker 2:There are oh man, there's a few, that kind of reach. So everyone talks about Pangea being the supercontinent that wasn't the first supercontinent it had before that there were. Tectonic plate movement is such a huge factor in and it's such a huge factor for creating, sequestering carbon, creating greenhouse gases, like it has a lot of mechanisms that people will debate like, oh, that's why global warm is not anthropogenic and I'm like, yeah, I don't know about that. That's the whole debate is that these things are anthropogenic. But like that's when I tell people jokingly, like majority of our lifetime or majority of the Earth's existence has been without ice caps, but on a human timescale we've only known it with ice caps for our existence. But circling back and I may have tangible flighted too soon there, oh, that's fine. There are some billion-year-old formations and I don't remember the plate because I'm more of a soft rock guy and there's definitely some hard rock guys and that's the huge split. We call them soft. You're a soft rock which is like sediment, and then you have hard rock which is like all the way back to the beginning of time or like igneous, all those guys.
Speaker 2:I had a professor that was also a sedimentologist but he also studied um impact events like the Punta de Event in the Jurassic period. So you have to and I'm going to have to talk again because there's so many aspects of geology, which is why I love it, and I also love the fact that it's so tangible, which is also probably why you like your field of study as well, because you can see the science right there. It's just not on a sheet of paper and I really like like geology was great for me. If anyone has ADHD, I have it. It's great. It's tough at times but, man, it's great Because once you start to love yourself more about it, because geology allowed me to get out there, see it, feel it, absorb it and kind of of run with it, and so there's so many aspects of science that cater to those, our types of brains. But I hope I wrapped, I was able to wrap that all together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's really interesting. Like I just think that I have never like formally studied geology, but I've always been fascinated by it. Fascinated because like it is so fundamental to one. Our existence on this planet, yes, Like the everything that exists, and I tell my students this, that like we owe our entire existence to this. Like you know, if you were to look at the earth, like a beach ball, this, like microns thick layer of soil.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and rock that supports everything that we do and it's fascinating, and rock that supports everything that we do. And it's fascinating and, like you know, I live on this weird geological formation. We call it the Caprock Escarpment or the Llano Estacado, so this big flat mesa up here. Okay, so we sit about a thousand meters above sea level where I am and this formation runs some 250 miles north to south and then 120, 150 east to west, and we have a pretty much a uniform 1% slope over the whole thing. Oh my gosh, it is about as flat as you can imagine, like a super mesa. Yeah, it's huge, super Mesa. Yeah, it's huge. And you know the Permian Basin, the inland sea that used to fill the Permian Basin and has deposited all this oil and all of this stuff. I think we were like kind of on the coast.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, I'm sure I mean you got to think there's, during the Cretaceous too, there's a huge sea that went right through, like what we know is like Utah and like Moab, and those lakes, those salt lakes, are like remnants of it, right? So if you start to look, you start to see everything. And that's what's really cool about geology and the number. The first law of geology is the law of superposition and that is older things are below and younger things are above. And we actually were able the geologic record used fossils to help determine timelines. Use, there's different techniques now, like you use a lead dating and argon dating in, like zircon crystals, and that can be accurate. Result uh, you can do carbon dating, but it's not very old people like carbon data doesn't work. I'm like, yeah, it doesn't work after 26 000, but that is so young on a um, on a geologic scale.
Speaker 2:Right, I used I with my soft rock, my climatology. Like I think ice cores only go back 400,000 years and the Vostok core goes back maybe 800,000 and that's still a blip, you know? Yeah, I think if you think that the dinosaurs went out at 64 million and the Permian-Triassic boundary was 275 million, that's nothing. And yeah, I find it so beautiful because you can see it right there. A lot of my field trips were on the sides of highways and you pull out and you're like there's a frozen reef with trolobytes and corals and sponges and it's all stored there. If you know where to look, and even in soft rock systems like what I study Bayer Islands you can see the migration of the islands themselves over time from ocean currents, that pure raw energy, which is really cool.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting. Pure raw energy, which is really cool. That's really interesting. So you were mentioning before we started recording that you worked too with different plant species, looking at sea levels and things. Is that correct, I do?
Speaker 2:So I worked in coastal engineering for about four years after graduate school and it was fascinating. I got to write monitoring reports on how sand migrated and we built dune systems and first of all, dune systems are really. They're successful because of the endoskeleton created by rhizomes and roots of plants right and the matrix of various species. We'll tie back to that. When I left coastal engineering because I was traveling too much, I wanted to be home with my kids, I had the opportunity to join in with the state of North Carolina at the Department of Environmental Quality and I work for the Division of Coastal Management and we are responsible for anything within 75 feet of the coastal zone, or that is the coastal zone of normal high water and that is our AEC. We determine the coastal wetland line. We also determine the normal high water line using plant species and we have 10 designated plant species that we use to determine those two elevations. And you can hire surveyors and come out and do mean high water and we can do our normal high water with our plant species Spartina alterniflora and you're probably falling within a few inches of each other. So it's kind of amazing how and you can see speciation change within six half a foot six inches or more of probably five different species before you're actually exiting that flood zone, because if you look at tidal zones, they average about four feet. But that is not the case. You have neap tides, you have king tides that can go five, six feet, neap tides two, three feet, but the normal tidal cycle. There are plants that like to get hit twice, which is a semi-diurnal cycle.
Speaker 2:That we do here on the East Coast, and Alterniflora will mark that line. The second you leave that line, other species will start to appear. So then you have your Black Needle Rush, you'll have your Scurpus Bull Rush, you'll have Sea Lavender, salicornia, what are some of our other species, and it'll increase in elevation all the way until you get to Spartina, patens. And Patens doesn't want to be touched by saltwater, it just want to be touched by saltwater, it just wants to like be misted by it, and so that's generally our first indication line of where that saltwater intrusion stops. And so you can go out and you can map coastal areas just using plant species, and it's kind of, and it's so distinct in some areas it's incredible.
Speaker 1:That's fascinating and it makes sense, like from a botanical perspective, from like a plant science perspective. It makes total sense because so many of these plants have such narrow sort of survival ranges and especially like you're talking about, in coastal dune ecosystems. I think people don't understand how delicate some of these dunes are.
Speaker 2:Oh my God the dunes and oh sorry and the estuarine systems is where we do a lot of those speciations too. So I jumped sorry, I jumped from the coastal side over to the speciation of the water side, which is on the, on our backwaters, creeks, people, places where people want to build piers and docks and marinas and they want to get rid of them. Here's the thing you need them for the safety, for the infrastructure of the island or the land you're building on along the coast. Those plants are going to protect you from hurricanes, storms, erosion, all of it, and so our job with coastal management is to educate and create options that help both the homeowners or the businesses and the marinas and the plant species themselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, and that, yeah, fascinating and, like you know, there's some cool videos out there talking about, like a hurricane, surge protection and what you get from, like mangroves and different things in different parts of the world. Right, these coastal these and they're not aquatic plants but plants that like wet feet that can go and hold everything together and looking at the differences between, like, what a storm surge will do with these intact ecosystems that have evolved to tolerate that. Oh yeah, and the amount of damage we see when they don't exist.
Speaker 2:And the ability to rebound and rebuild places after a storm has gone through. It's amazing, and if you let the natural system handle it itself, it'll bounce back in just a few years. It's kind of incredible, but it's a beautiful thing to see them do their job and be where they want to be in such an acute elevation or environment that can change Like you can move five feet and all of a sudden it's a totally different environment. I read this. I don't know if you ever read the Sixth Extinction, but they were talking about different microclimates.
Speaker 1:I haven't, but it's on my list. You know, for when I need to be a little sadder, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yes, you need to be accepting of being a little sad when you read it, but it talks about in rainforests, where you can move up you know however many feet in elevation and the species are completely different and they don't want to cross. But they talk about that acute speciation as a flourishment of different species and abundance of them as a good thing. And when you have a lot of hybridization, that is actually a sign of an extinction event because they can't survive in these changing environments. Only hybridization can.
Speaker 1:You know, I never have thought about it in those terms, but that's fascinating and that also makes a lot of sense because you know we think about like.
Speaker 1:So I live in a prairie ecosystem, right yeah, which are also surprisingly delicate ecosystems and diverse and like absolutely complex ecosystems and you see, when we look at species loss and the takeover of, like, certain grass species or things like that, or hybridized grass species, like a lot of times we'll say, okay, now we've got this like bluegrass, this specific bluegrass, is that happening at all with grasses? Oh yeah, oh yes, wow, absolutely, and we'll see that, like you know, these very specific species that have close evolutionary relationships with insects and animals and other plants are gone and they're being taken over by either hybrid species or specific, like opportunistic species and things like that. But that makes so much sense, just at different levels, I don't know striations in a aquatic ecosystem or a beach ecosystem, a dune ecosystem or whatever. That's really fascinating and scary.
Speaker 2:I don't know some of both. It's scary, I mean, for the geologic, timescobar islands are very young and very dynamic. Unfortunately, unfortunately, we built these static towns on top of these moving islands and so now it's like a bandana on a bullet hole to do a lot of these dredge projects and try to do a lot of plantings to try to recover, when a lot of these islands want to roll and move and the species move with it. But sea level rise is inevitable too, right, so that's happening. But I think the adaptability of these dynamic islands is seen in the plant species, which is pretty cool, and I'm glad I could talk about other plants with you that I do for work. Yeah, no, that's fascinating to me.
Speaker 1:I could talk, I mean, honestly, we could do a whole episode on just this and we might sometime, if you're willing to come back and like really deep dive some of this stuff. Yeah, because I again, I think it's fascinating and I think it's important that people understand some of these things, even if, like, it's not every detail. Like you know, the decisions we make, from where we put a town to I don't know, you've probably seen these videos of like people on the beach and there's like an inland little I don't know river or pond or lake or whatever, and then the ocean and they go and they dig a trench from like it's cool to watch, but I'm thinking from like an ecological standpoint. I'm like, no, don't do that, stop doing that. Like, like that's supposed to watch. But I'm thinking from like an ecological standpoint. I'm like, no, stop, don't do that, stop doing that. Like, like that's supposed to be there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure things happen hurricanes.
Speaker 2:We're in a hurricane like tell you what? Barrier islands are great buffers for hurricanes, but not when you necessarily build on them, which is kind of tough because everyone's beachfront. I get it that there there are so many impacts where you could dig a small trench and have a runoff like that that you could have one storm event and the quanta, the quantity of energy that the ocean can produce is insane, even on the east coast, where we don't get the same swell you do for all you surfers in california. I'm a big surfer, so that's why I love the coastline too, but you could have one big nor'easter storm that can wash that whole trench away, no problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But at the same time you don't want to uproot anything that's been in place there that helps sustain that infrastructure building. Yeah, that's really fascinating. Again, I'm watching the time because I think I've got about a million more questions, but I want to be conscious of your time, so let's, I think that's actually a good sort of pin to put in that for now. Again, I may have more questions here in a minute or we'll do a follow-up, but let's take a break real quick and when we come back, I want to talk about your fig business Phil's Figs yeah, man, and how you got into that side of it and sort of married the business part of your brain with the science part of your brain, and then about some of the content creation you do, because you do some really cool stuff. Thank you, we'll take a quick break and we'll come right back. Perfect, well, hey there, welcome to the mid roll. So happy to have you here Y'all. As much as we talked about rocks and sand and sediment and stuff in the first half of this episode, we talked just as much or more in the second half about figs and I. I cannot explain to you how much fun it is. So just just get ready. A couple of things if my voice sounds weird and if it sounded weird on the recording it's because I've been sick and that's just how it is. I usually don't get a summer cold, but I've been traveling anyway. Thanks so much for listening to planthropology and being a part of what we do here. Thanks for supporting the show. If you want to find more ways to support the show, head over to planthropologypodcastcom and check out old episodes. Find the link to merch, score some cool swag. New designs are coming this summer. If you're listening to this in the summer that it comes out. If you're listening to it at some point in the unknowable future, hopefully the new designs are already out and I didn't just lie to everyone again about new designs coming out.
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Speaker 1:Also, follow plantropology all the places and follow me, the plant prof, all over social media on Instagram and Twitter and TikTok and YouTube and Facebook and wherever else you can think of. I'm probably there. I have a sub stack that will be linked in the show notes. Also, as the plant prof, the substack is called office hours and I answer your questions and stuff like that. But mostly, just just keep listening and send me an email at plant apology pod at gmailcom if you have any comments. Okay, let's talk figs. All right, you mentioned in the first part of the episode about your love for figs and honestly, I hadn't realized you'd been into it and doing it, as long as you mentioned that you had.
Speaker 2:But let's talk about.
Speaker 1:Phil's figs. You know you talked a little bit about how that came to be, but tell us all about it.
Speaker 2:I so, ok, I had been collecting figs and gardening for what? 10,? Okay, I had been collecting figs and gardening for what? 10, 11, 12 years, watching people on YouTube.
Speaker 2:And when I left my job to take time off to be with my family because it was a travel heavy job I was like I'm going to do a case study.
Speaker 2:I am for all you business people out there. I am going to see what it's like to start an LLC. I'm going to see what it's like to do like a business tax thing. I am going to put things out that I had, that I really wanted to see how a business would operate, and I did it from a place of. I have to make it so simple that I can obsess over it and be like the product is very straightforward, and that was Fig Trees, because I was already out here propagating and it also gave me an excuse to tell my wife that I was going to buy a greenhouse and that was pretty cool, and I actually, yeah, and I, a few months later, after starting it all I actually this is only two and a half years ago, a little over that I decided like, okay, after all these years of growing figs and making this little food forest in my backyard, um, that I am going to start a business with just these fig trees.
Speaker 2:And I was fortunate enough that the fig community has other people that have done it. So I could be like, well, hey, why don't I just try doing this? And then, if I want to start my own business, well, I need some sales channels or sales funnel. So I wanted to create content. And then the content got to be educational, which I like to talk to people, and I got to kind of describe from the purest form possible you guys are getting pure fill, maybe, like I'm editing stuff, but it's still me like saying things to a camera and I kept it small and acute, like just fix and uncomfortable speaking to a camera, getting comfortable writing about something, getting comfortable with myself, just about something that I thought was probably one of the nerdiest things of all time.
Speaker 2:But I'm excited too and just putting myself out there and seeing if I could create a business and get a profit stream and at the same time, engage with everybody. And it took off way faster and way better than I could have ever imagined, and I think it's just because I'm coming from A an organic place, and B a selfless place, like it's just me and I'm just going to have fun with it, and I don't know the most about figs out of anybody, but I know enough that I could talk about it and that's okay with me.
Speaker 1:And I learn as I go. Yeah, you know a lot more about figs than I do and I haven't well, no, but it's the truth. Like we've done the garden party, you know, on and off I've, I you're a consistent, you know, host and I come on when I can't. I think I'm on tomorrow actually.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you are as we record this. I might not make it because I'm going to be traveling back to North Carolina.
Speaker 1:You can say Well, I'll try to talk about things for you. Thank you. But like every time we're on and you start talking about, I'm like I didn't know that and like I learned a lot and that that, for me, is so much fun. Like there's a reason I have gotten back in education. I ran a landscape company for a couple of years and I could have kept doing that, but like one, it was hot, I was tired, but like there's something about just being in this educational world that I love learning stuff. I get so excited about learning new things and so like I enjoy getting to learn about things.
Speaker 2:I just want to do like a quick intro on why figs, if you're cool with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, please, figs, if you're cool with that. Yeah, oh yeah, please, figs have. They're basically the gateway fruit tree to backyard orchards or patio fruit. I think because of their they are. They have a hint of mediterranean climate vibes to them because they need to be taken care of a little bit in colder climates, but they will produce in the first few years of life. You can propagate them quite easily. They have a complex breeding system set up and we can talk we'll talk about that. But they also have an amazing history with humanity in agriculture One of the first things ever cultivated, probably for its propagation abilities, that you could just stick a stick in the ground and have it work.
Speaker 2:But also like that they were good enough, they were healthy enough that the Roman army could feed off of them because of their fiber and their vitamin nutrients and that they you could bring them all over the world. They won't necessarily just take over everything as an invasive space, but they will grow for you and produce for you very prolifically and I think a lot of. And they're not even actually a fruit, they're like it's a really interesting food. So that's why I love figs, because they just have a history about them and every fig tree has a story.
Speaker 1:So how long have they been cultivated?
Speaker 2:Oh, go back to the Sumerians. They're in Mesopotamia, one of the earliest records of agriculture. They are there and they are actually in store. They found pieces of them stored away and if you go through any scripture, any historical record, figs have always been present and that is amazing, kind of really started in that Central Asia area to begin with, which is a lot of where civilization kind of got established as well. That's fascinating.
Speaker 1:And the fact that they are so adaptable. You know it's hard to grow I'm not going to say that just as a period but it can be challenging to grow things. Here where I live, it's hot and dry.
Speaker 2:You have a tough one. I didn't realize it until you were telling me about your yo-yo weather. I thought I had yo-yo weather in the winter. No, you got yo-yo weather.
Speaker 1:No, it's crazy. We're very cold in the summer and very hot, I'm sorry, the way around. Very cold in the winter and very summer and it's dry, it's windy. You know we had three forage hail blow through a couple of days ago and tornadoes and all kinds of stuff. But like figs are so tough, they're so tough, and my parents have a couple in their backyards. I think they have a Celeste and a brown turkey and I don't remember what the third one is and every now and then they'll freeze back to the ground Again. We do get pretty cold, but then the next year they're back Right and they're fine Right and even, and they sleep Like it's incredible, you know.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to think of, like another fruit tree, that if I froze it back to the ground. One, that it would come back at all, but two, that I wouldn't have to wait six years to get a fruity kitten.
Speaker 2:Right and you could do that like and you're not going to like people have grafted before, but you don't necessarily need to graft a fig tree onto a rootstock of sorts. So if it does die down to the ground, you're getting true to type in a lot of scenarios.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and so that's one question people ask me is like how cold tolerant are they?
Speaker 2:There are a few species that really and this is kind of why Celeste and brown turkeys are so popular in hardy Chicago is because they are easy, some of the easiest ones to propagate, and they are also one of the cold hardiest. But what I tell people is that all figs are good. Some things are great, and so like anything.
Speaker 2:The tastiest ones sometimes are a little more of a diva to grow, but not as much as you would think. You just get a few bases set up and I think I always recommend a hearty Chicago type, which Bill from Off the Beat and Path Nurseries. He kind of really helped me along on my fig journey back about 10 years ago and kind of just, we always shoot messages every once in a while. Really, I learned from him to call them a Mount Etna fig, because there are different varieties that aren't just called Hardy Chicago. It was just so happened that this one survived in Chicago, getting down to the ground every winter and coming back up, and he calls them like the greater Mount Etna figs because there's some like Marseille Black has these club-like leaves that are very indicative of these Hardy Chicago types.
Speaker 2:In fact, the Hardy I have was brought over to Brooklyn. It was called Brooklyn Park JD and it wasn't until I did side-by-sides and comparisons like oh, it's a hardy Chicago fig, but there's different sources of this and that's pretty cool. They all have nuances in and of themselves, but I feel like just getting started with a hardy variety. It's the first three years that are tough to take care of, and then after that it's like kind of like good luck killing them after that, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know we've had a little bit of success for keeping them dying back to the ground, like what we've done a couple of times is wrapped them in like hog panel, yeah, or you know some flexible wire and shielded with straw or something Perfect, just to give them a little more inflation. And it seems to work pretty well most of the time.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. They're deciduous trees, so they will. When they are dormant they will be relatively good. I see dieback in two scenarios when it gets really cold and that is when it gets well. Three scenarios when it gets below into the single digits, you're really putting them at risk, or low teens. But also if you prune them before the colder months they have a harder time retaining any sort of heat and moisture, so you'll see more vulnerable to die back then, which is a problem for me as I sell cuttings all winter but I'm in a warm enough place that sometimes that's okay. And then the other one is they are used to a penetrating climate. That's a little more consistent.
Speaker 2:So yo-yo temperatures can stress them out. In the spring they think, oh, it's spring and I'm going. No, it's not spring, stop doing that. And I'm like, okay, we just got to. Fingers crossed, we're not going to get a late. My last freeze date is April 1st in zone 8B, wilmington here, and so sometimes they'll wake up the first week of March, second week of March, because we'll get a bunch of 80 degree, 70, 80 degrees days in a row and I'm kind of freaking out. So those scenarios can stress them out. So if you have them in a place where it gets warm early in the year, but they can have a late freeze that can hurt them a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's like we're like a 7B Depends on the year, almost between a 7B and an 8A, but kind of right in there there you go, and our average freeze is around tax day, you know, april 10th, april 15th there you go. So, yeah, it's those, but then, yeah, we'll have a week in February when it's 80 degrees and it's just like oh no, like oh no.
Speaker 2:Everything's going to get hit.
Speaker 1:But yeah, please stop, because we get cool early enough that most of our like fruit trees will fill their chill requirement, and so they're ready to go that first warm week right, even when I'm like one of those things also sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say like and it's another reminder that 8b wilmington, north carolina, isn't the same as like 8b Vancouver, british Columbia, or 8b, because things still like to get hot in the summer and have some warm weather, which is probably why they do well for you and recover well for you where you are.
Speaker 1:Well, and we get really sweet things right. The, that heat really builds up the sugar content in. Yes. Yes, I was going to say free. It's not exactly a free. Let's talk about that because that's such a weird thing it's, it's amazing, such. So let's talk about the reproductive cycle of things, because one well, okay, I don't want to, I don't want to, like, give away the punchline here. Okay, but people kind of freak out about it i'm'm going to be real honest.
Speaker 1:When I tell people about how that works, sometimes they're like I'm sorry, what now? So take us through the reproductive cycle of the fig.
Speaker 2:So any figs that a lot of us grow are generally common figs. There are a few other types. There are the San Pedro figs and there are Smyrna figs. San Pedro and Smyrna figs require caprification. There is a fourth variety of fig that is called a caprific. That is the male fig. So the other three I mentioned were female figs. The common figs will sell fruit. They're not self-fertile, they're parthenocarpic, but they will at least ripen for you and use figs. San Pedro's have two crops they have the Braba and some common figs have two crops as well, which form on last year's wood and then the new growth of the year. They'll push out fruit on the green growth and as it lignifies it'll sit there and have fruit set, eventually ripen in the fall. Now it's summerna.
Speaker 2:Figs and the main crop of sampagios require a parasitic wasp, the fig wasp, which is like blastophagia I don't know the full name. That is an acute relationship with the fig tree, and they create colonies in the male figs, the male caprifigs, and these are tiny wasps. If you see a wasp on your fig, it's probably not it. If you see tiny little dots swarming you and you're in the state of California or swarming the figs, that might be it. Okay, they are living in colonies, in the male caprifigs, the profiki, which is the first crop in the spring, and when they are in those figs they have male and female wasps.
Speaker 2:The males will always hatch first and they will go around and they will impregnate the females and then they will start to burrow out of the fig this is the male caper fig only and they will not make it, they will get just to the hole in the knife.
Speaker 2:The female fig wasps will wake up, crawl out that hole and set out on a flight to go create another colony, since they're already pregnant, and they will go and try to find other male figs or caprifigs to create the colony for this next phase again. And the problem is that they will unfortunately go into female figs and they will crawl in before the fig is ripe. The eye is really small, so small that when the fig wasps penetrate and they have really narrow heads, it's a very acute speciation. Go in, their wings will get ripped off in the process. They will try to lay eggs but they can't. They'll get absorbed by the enzymes that are in the fruit before it's ripened and it'll dissolve the fig wasp, the pollen that it brought along with it from the male fig will caprify that fig and it can ripen.
Speaker 1:Fascinating so yeah no, I think it's so cool. And so what is the chemical in there? That enzyme, fison or something like that?
Speaker 2:I do not know. I may have known at one point and forgotten it, but I'll have. I'll look that up. I have young kid dad brain right now, so oh, listen.
Speaker 1:I get it. No, that's yeah, but there's like an enzyme in there that again dissolves and completely like completely dissolves and reabsorbs this female wasp Correct, the fruit Correct. So what freaks people out is when they eat a fig and there's crunchy bits in it and I try to tell them those are not little wasp bits, like that wasp is gone.
Speaker 2:Thing's gone. I dare you to find that wasp, but you won't find it.
Speaker 1:It's tiny to begin with, and then it's totally dissolved and absorbed back into the plant, and so it's seeds or it's other extra floral parts that are in there that are crunchy Like it's fine, You're fine.
Speaker 2:Totally fine. In fact you're probably doing great because you're eating a fresh fig and it's really healthy for you, unless you're allergic to latex. So cause, they do have sap flow that's like a latex flow that can be an irritant, but when a fig is fully ripe that sap will retract from the fig itself as the starches convert to sugars. Hold that space and then when you cut one open man, it is just it's hard to compare because it doesn't have the same acidic bite that a lot of fruits have. In fact, they prefer to grow in a neutral to alkaline soil too, and they just taste so syrupy good. It's such a cool experience to eat a fig.
Speaker 1:They're very different, very different and like, I think, a lot of people's experiences with, like a fig Newton and I try to tell people that is not the same thing, like you're not, oh, I don't like fig Newtons. I'm like, okay, fine, it's fine. But like the experience and the flavors, like it's such a complex, rich flavor and you're right, there are very sweet, but not like I don't want to describe it. They're not like cloyingly sweet, right, right, it's a pleasant experience. It's not like you're drinking maple syrup, it's different it's different.
Speaker 2:It lingers in your mouth in a beautiful way, like I think. That's why I say like. People are like what do you do with your figs? Truthfully, like, I grow figs because ripe figs don't have a good shelf life. If you're buying grocery figs, they're not going to taste the same. They're going to be okay, they're going to taste good sometimes, but a truly ripe fig off the tree doesn't last that long and it tastes incredible. And I'll just eat them fresh. And that's why so many people grow figs is just because they know how good a fresh fig tastes. And you don't have to cook it, you don't have to do anything to it, and I eat it with coffee and it's like the perfect coffee sweetener.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, but so you mentioned the common figs, so are most like market figs, most of the ones you would buy in the store are figs.
Speaker 2:Most of the ones you would buy in the store. Are they common Parthenocarpic figs? A lot of them are, but you'd be surprised. The commercial industry in California does use Smyrna figs for production, but I've heard that the Codota fig, I believe, is the fig Newton fig. That is a common fig and a lot of the ones like you go to stores they will say like the variety of fig it is and it's generally a common fig, which is really cool. Caprified figs in California can taste pretty incredible though I'm not going to lie and they get robust. You know, this is another one of those like California, like ag things, where it's like, of course, everything grows perfectly in California. Kind of unfair.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and so like, for most people, like, where I am, like, those wasps don't live here. No, and so like, if you're growing a fig and you're eating a fig off your plant, one, it's going to be a common thing, right, for the most part, right. And two, like you know, you're not going to eat a wasp because those wasps are not here.
Speaker 2:They're not here. They're actually brought over by Spanish missionaries when they brought over figs to California, hence the Black Mission. Fig, yeah, and they weren't sure why it worked at the time they brought them over. According to this one book that I read I think it's just titled Figs like a history of figs. They will not be in your figs, guys, go ahead, enjoy them. It's a seed crunch, it's fantastic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, and I think even the caprified ones, I think there's almost a bigger. So when I talk to my students about this, because we talk about different types of fruits, we talk about, you know, how some of them are formed and how some of them, like a fig or a strawberry or a few others, are like these accessory fruits, like they're extra floral parts that we typically, you know, theoretically eat. You know theoretically eat, but like everything has been something else, and I think that is such an interesting picture when we look at a fig of because of the specific life cycle of this insect, now, like you said, it's a really acute, really narrow evolutionary relationship. Yeah, like it's absorbed by the plant and yeah, it's. You know, maybe for us it has a weird like feel in our brain, but you know, pollination is that way, life is that way. It's complicated and everything feeds into something else and like everything feeds into something else no, it's philosophical and we figs.
Speaker 2:But it's metaphysical. Here I think there's a huge big picture. It's like I don't want to say somebody who eats salads regularly hasn't ingested some small piece of a creature by accident, just never noticed, you know. But or like we, just I think people get weirded out by the fact they don't want to get if there were any sort of disease risks or something like that. I think maybe that ties to it. But in reality, no, like nature, it's okay. You can have dirt on your carrot, you can have a fig wasp fly to a fig before it's ripe, it's okay and yeah. But that's how I feel about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I agree. Oh, one thing here that's really interesting Talk about the godfather fig, because this is such a cool story.
Speaker 2:This is provenance in its best form. We're one of the best right. The ultimate best is someone's family lineage. Like I brought this from Israel, from my great-grandfather, brought from Israel over here, and we had this tree. I'm like that is such a fantastic story it was worth bringing all this way just to have this, the Godfather fig. This is also the beauty of propagations and selling cuttings from mother trees and having genetically identical branches that turn into the road. And so the movie the Godfather if you've ever watched it, there is a scene where the original Godfather himself is out in the garden with his grandson and this is where he has a heart attack and passes away.
Speaker 2:On that set there were two fig trees. One was gifted to a guy that worked on set, took it back to his home on Long Island, had it there forever. His kids took over, realized the story. A friend of the kids was like well, tell me about this tree. They said no, this was on the set of the Godfather. He's like get out of town. And you know, I'm in an Italian-American family. Like having elements of the godfather in life is very symbolic in a lot of ways too. But I found out. I was like, of course I have to have this fig cutting. So he started propagating the fig cuttings and then it made circulation and it's amazing. So now I have one that is a direct branch from that tree on set, and that is the beauty of propagation that is so cool.
Speaker 1:What variety is it? I don't even know.
Speaker 2:Oh really, yeah, I don't even know if it's in the Hardy Chicago family. It might be its own thing. And this is. I have to say this because if you get a pollinated fig, the caprified fig, the seeds are viable. You are not going to get genetically identical children. You are going to get a grab bag of DNA and you don't know what you're going to get. There's a chance you will get a similar one. I talked to my buddy, anthony, the millennial gardener, and he's gotten a lot of ones that are very similar in lineage to the parents. But you can have a grab bag of all kinds of figs and not to mention, there are still bud sports that can mutate on the fig tree itself.
Speaker 1:Really interesting. So as far as like, if people want figs for their home, what does that process look like? How do people get them from you, because I know you ship and you do all this kind of stuff I ship I.
Speaker 2:You know anyone who lives in Wilmington, north Carolina area. Reach out to me, phil, at philsfigscom, and we can set up an on-site appointment. But I have figs for sale. It's philsfigscom, you can go check it out.
Speaker 2:I have long form YouTube content where I just try to educate and share my knowledge on how to care for figs and find the figs that grow best for every climate and all the different fig flavors. Mind you, some figs taste like agave nectar and other ones taste like raspberry jam and they have different growing patterns and things like that. So, reaching out, it's kind of unfair to say if I could have one fig, what would I have? I'm like, nope, toss that question away. You need three, you know, and people are fine with one. But I think having lights and darks is always nice and I have a few varieties left.
Speaker 2:Business has been going well and it's been really cool, because my goal is not to sell fig trees, it's to help you grow a fig, to experience what I experienced that first bite in Italy when I had fresh figs, you know. And so it's so cool to see people being like it's like in cast. I always say it's like in Castaway. When he makes fire. He's like I've made fire. He's like I've had a fresh fig higher. He's like I've had a fresh fig and you're like I've had a fresh fig. You're like holy cow, I'm like I know Right, and you're like I get it. I'm like thank you we get it.
Speaker 1:That's really cool, that's really cool.
Speaker 2:So you have some left still, cause I know that's more of a like you cut them what early winter and then, yeah, I cut extra days to really kick it into gear. So it's healthy enough to ship, because I've encountered that before where I've just shipped them too soon and they're just not happy enough and so I have to hedge myself a little more. But I do get a lot of requests so I try to grant them and if anything happens during shipping I try to either refund immediately or try to resend out another one, or both for that matter. But usually every spring I have a big spring sale and they're usually in four by nine tree pots or one gallon containers and you can, I ship them via usps around the country and I'm with my nursery license. I can do it around the country. Cool, continental us, sorry, sorry.
Speaker 1:Alaska and hawaii yeah I feel like figs in al Alaska might be tough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you never. If there's a will, there's a way for sure. Do a little greenhouse or something. I used to live in Massachusetts. He has them in a greenhouse all the time. He just leaves them in the greenhouse.
Speaker 1:That's impressive actually Gotta be cold up there. So you say you don't have a favorite fig, so I'll cross that off my list of questions for you. I have a few. Well, okay, so give us those.
Speaker 2:But then also, do you have a favorite fig recipe? Oh my gosh, Outside of figs and coffee, I love figs on pizza, I think it is a great flavor profile.
Speaker 2:Figs cross the boundary between sweet and savory. They are the liaison piece there, and when you cook figs you caramelize them a lot. They can really get that nice caramelization If they're a little underripe. You can actually get that like animalization, a little bit like the starches and the sugars. This is why a lot of store-bought ones are cooked too and you can eat them like candy or you can eat them with balsamic and cheese and that's why they're just so versatile. But you take a prosciutto fig pizza and then get back to me Maybe, sprinkle some fresh basil on top and you're good, I'm going to have to make a pizza now, because that sounds really good.
Speaker 2:And here's the thing People can slice them long ways, but you slice them like pepperonis, like little sideways, like this little discs. They will cook beautifully for you. My brother has really gotten into pizza making, so shout out to Uni Pizza Ovens because he loves his when he's got it dialed. And fig pizza has been an awesome seasonal favorite.
Speaker 1:You know you were talking about using your business as an excuse to buy a greenhouse. This may be a good excuse for me to buy a pizza oven. You're like honey. We have this.
Speaker 2:We need a pizza oven to work through that like honey, we have this, we need a pizza oven and yeah, it makes total sense to me well, man, I this has been so fascinating.
Speaker 1:Like I said, I have about a million more questions for you, so you're gonna have to come back again oh, thanks so much, man, so that I can bother you more with all of my nerdy questions.
Speaker 1:So one thing I ask all of my guests you know every episode I've done. Ask all of my guests, you know every episode I've done a hundred and whatever episodes and I've got some of the coolest, like most interesting answers for this. But if you had a piece of advice, just something you'd like to leave the listeners with, that could be about growing figs, that could be just about life in general, what would that be? What would you like people to take home with them?
Speaker 2:no-transcript personality type. Now I am where I had a lot of self doubt in my twenties and trying to figure out life and now that I'm in my later thirties, like play the long game and just keep going on something that truly interests you and finding passions. If you don't know, go out and start trying stuff. And one of the things is gardening. For me that really took off and propagating figs and the meditation process of that allows me to keep going. But who I've met along the way? And you realize that life is not an end point at any given place. It's a fourth dimensional long journey, reinforces just to get started and I hope that makes sense. So just get out there and get started.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, yes, Fantastic, that's great advice. Well, phil, this has been so much fun. Where can people find you? Where can we get your videos and everything else?
Speaker 2:YouTube, it's Phil's Figs. Facebook. I need to post more, but I usually put out my pictures and communication there at Phil's Figs. And Instagram is my other platform I dedicate stuff to at Phil's Figs and at philsfigscom, where I still have some fig trees left. So reach out, contact me personally. I'm here to help you grow a fig tree.
Speaker 1:Very cool, Phil. This has been so much fun.
Speaker 2:So much fun, do it again.
Speaker 1:We will chat soon on the garden party, I'm sure. But man, just an inspiration. I've learned a lot. Just wonderful to talk to you.
Speaker 2:You're the best to talk to man. It's fun hanging out.
Speaker 1:I hope, whatever it is that you're passionate about, you are passionate about it enough to just start, to just give it a try and just to follow Phil's sage advice. Thanks so much, phil, for being on the show and for all your cool geology and coastal ecology and fig facts. I learned a lot and I can't wait to talk to you again on Planthropology. Thanks to you so much for listening. You know I do this for you and you know that I love you. Planthropology is edited, hosted, produced all the things by yours truly, vikram Baliga. Our opening and closing music is by the award-winning composer, nick Scout, and the mid-roll music is by my buddy, rui, and I hope you'll go find and enjoy his really cool lo-fi dad jazz. Thanks for listening, thanks for being a part of it. Keep being kind to one another. If you have not to date been kind to one another, it's probably a really, really, really really good time to start. Be kind, be good, be safe, and I will talk to you next time. Thank you.
