Dealing with fig leaf rust

General Fruit Growing
#21

Let them grow some before you start feeding them. You don’t want to risk
burning the delicate roots. If you have some collected rain water that has algae
growth in it, I would start off with that. Once they start to achieve some size,
I would switch to diluted urine.

#22

I have a fig ‘tree’ that is new to me…just a few months old, and it came from a nursery in SW Portland, OR, known for quality plants, with fairly severe rust that started presenting very soon after I put it in the ground. The fig that was new last year, had quite a bit of rust, and died to the ground in the Winter, has come back rust-free. Maybe this one will too, next year.

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Fig leave problem
#23

I had forgotten all about this thread. Just for reference, once I manually removed the rusted leaves on those very young tiny plants they all put out new leaves that were rust free. And over a year later they are all growing well and healthy.

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#24

Thanks for the follow up. It has been my experience that rust is not that hard to defeat. I don’t even worry about it. Leaves left on did not spread the disease, as mentioned it was more , much more dependent on weather conditions. I think though it best to remove infected leaves, I usually do, but with so many plants, a few leaves remained I didn’t see and it didn’t seem to matter, the rust went bye bye.

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#25

I am in western Oregon; it rains plenty here. This year we had a Spring that was quite warm, mixed with some serious rain. I plan to see if there is a way to cover a few of my trees (they’re all still small) well before bud break, to see if the rain-dependent diseases can be somewhat controlled by not letting the trees get wet for a while during some crucial times. I probably won’t be able to do this for more than a year or two but it might be a worthwhile experiment. I knew this was an old post but this new info was very helpful to me.

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#26

Hi, I was interested in your statement of figs in SoCal. I am in San Diego more inland, and my trees lost leaves end of July, the figs stayed on. I think this must be also some fungus. Will you know?