I got this brown turkey last year and it just hasn’t done much for me. It grows vigorously especially from the base but doesn’t produce figs. Last year all I got was two very late main crop that didn’t have time to ripen, and then no breba crop this spring. We did have a late frost that hit it, maybe that could have affected its breba. From what I read this variety should produce late summer. Should I be pinching the tops of the growth for it to focus on figs?
You should pinch tips to stop the vegetative top growth. You do not want to grow a large fig tree as ornamental.
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Just the top growth? Should I allow It to bush out on the sides?
You need to have serious clean-up. A lot of the short branches in the shade should be removed. You need to prune the tree to have some kind of structure, either single trunk or several trunks. The most important is to decide on how many fruiting branches you want to keep.
If you want to prune to a “tree” form with a single main trunk, then 4-5 scaffolds, and 4-5 fruiting branches on each scaffolds, then that is about 20 or so fruiting branches. If you can get 5 figs from each branch, that is about 100 figs. Just give you some ideas what to expect. I do not know the size of your tree and the container.
You seem have multiple trees and I see other leaf shape.
After the pruning, if you still do not see any figlets, then you can try to pinch the tips of the fruiting branches to force some figlets.
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Thank you that was extremely informative. I think I will go for a tree structure. I already tipped the top so it’ll stop growing upward. Tomorrow I will remove a lot of excess growth. Yeah there are some smaller pots below it . They are growing much better with figs on them.
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@757Will … you might also try pulling your shoots out from the center to open it up some… more sun on those nodes.
They will all grow up in a fairly tight wad unless you steak and pull those shoots out more horizontal initially.
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Brebas form on last year’s wood. Was there any? Everything with leaves is current year growth. I don’t see the branches on which you hoped to get brebas.
Main crop figs form on current year wood. It looks like you had swelling fig buds before you pinched. That’s good, but the pinching may have been superfluous. At any rate, the key question is whether your Brown Turkey will be able to ripen much before the season ends. European Brown Turkeys are quite late to ripen.
Your best strategy might be to take out the BT and replace it with an earlier ripening variety. Meanwhile, I agree with the suggestions for pruning to create structure and admit sun.
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I have many varieties that ripen earlier, and I dont plan to get rid of brown turkey. I just wanted to taste some of the figs from brown turkey as I got nothing last year.
Here is my Celeste tree:
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Thanks! It got really dense really fast.
It is hard to say if those buds are fig buds until we can see what they are. But you are in zone 8, much earlier than mine.
Fig actually is extremely easy to grow. If it is not producing as you expected, it does not hurt anything to experiment with it. If you get figs, great. If not, no big deal. You get nothing to lose.
If those are fig buds, then you should have no problem to ripen those BT in your zone 8.
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They sure look like they are! I did a lot of pruning as suggested.
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