Fig leaves are edible, and they taste delicious. Or at least, they do to me: They taste very floral, and I love floral flavors.
When harvested in summer, the leaves have a bitter aftertaste, but the bitterness fades and the floral part lingers for a long while. When harvested in spring, there’s no bitterness, but the plant really needs those leaves in order to grow. When harvested in fall, there’s also no bitterness, and the plant is about to drop those leaves for the winter anyway.
So I harvest all my fig leaves in fall.
I try to harvest all my fig leaves. Occasionally I miss some, but not very many.
Here’s what I do.
I wait until right after the first hard freeze. After that, the leaves will wilt and be ready to drop for the winter. I go outside and collect them all before the plants can drop them. If some have already dropped on the ground, I collect those, too: I mulch my trees deeply in wood chips, so leaves that land on those wood chips aren’t dirty.
I pick them up gently, because the leaves are already crispy and dry by that point. I bring them inside.
If they’re not fully dry, I leave them on the counter for a few days to dry. (If you live in a climate that has high humidity, you might want a dehydrator.) Then they can be crumbled by hand to make small flakes, or I can toss them into a blender to make a fine powder. I usually crumble them by hand and then powder them in a blender, because the blender does its job much faster that way.
You could probably use them to make herbal tea with – I assume so, but I can’t be bothered, because herbal teas don’t really enthuse me. Instead, I use that delicious powder to make fig leaf cake! 
What’s the recipe, you may ask? Uhhh, just make a regular cake and add fig leaf powder until the batter tastes perfect to your taste. For me, that usually means a rather large quantity of fig leaf powder, because I like the floral aftertaste to be strong. Others might prefer to have only a small pinch for subtle flavoring. I’m not big into subtlety.
Most of the leaves I collect are in fall, but there are two other times when I also grab leaves. The first is right after transplanting an actively growing fig: they usually ditch all their leaves, so they can be nabbed without causing any harm the plant. The second is drought stress. Figs are very drought tolerant, so I don’t see that often, but occasionally it will get way too hot and dry for even a fig tree and the leaves will turn crispy. I will harvest those leaves and then, um, get my lazy rear in gear and give them some water.
I haven’t yet gotten any fruits out of my fig trees yet (pout), but the fact that I can get delicious leaves to flavor cakes every year means I’m being very patient. I definitely want those fruits, very much, but the trees are already pulling their weight with giving me tasty food now. And because I only harvest the leaves when the plants decide they’re done with them, I’m not slowing their growth down at all by harvesting them.
As a side note, feijoa leaves have the same bubblegum flavor as the petals, but a bitter aftertaste, so they’d be suitable for herbal tea or as a flavoring for baked goods, too . . . but feijoas are evergreen, so there’s no really good time to gather those leaves without harming the plant.
Here’s to tasty fig leaves, which give me something to eat while I’m waiting the years for the trees to start fruiting!
it’s similar to moringa in its flexibility adding to recipes but milder with out the mustardy edge moringa can get.
I might have to start looking up uses for all my trees!
)
