Caprifigs forming
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@Richard, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think that you made a mistake in the title of this thread: there ain’t nothing MICRO about your repository!
From your pictures it looks like a very inviting place to spend an afternoon.
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@Audi_o_phile
Well perhaps. The plant repositories I’m familiar with cover acres. Mine uses less than 1/2 of my 1/4 acre property. But if you want to measure by quantity …
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All set for our irrigation expansion this Spring. In the photo are Stuewe 915R tree pots, MT38 mini-treepots and the trays to hold them, steel screen for the pot bottoms, plus irrigation manifolds with hosing, spot spitters, and spare parts. Some of this is leftover from the last installation but the cases are new.
@Richard, seeing those white HDPE buckets that you’ve got, I hope that you and everyone else is already aware that you can get them for free from most fast food restaurants that serve any sort of sandwich with a sliced pickle on it. They usually just get tossed into the garbage when empty, and store managers have been very accommodating with asking their employees to just set them beside the dumpster for me to pick up on a weekly basis.
The situation is different in California where HDPE is recycled. Recyclers will pay pennies on the pound for it. There are at least two companies in my county that process HDPE for remanufacturing. A major manufacturer (Argee) of buckets is located here as well. I buy those buckets by the case or pallet for a small fraction of what big box stores charge for them.
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I am glad that California is actually processing their recycling locally. I suspect that a goodly portion of what we here in Georgia set aside for recycling ends up being combined with the waste stream once everything has been collected, and I wish that I had confidence that it is not actually the case.
When I was knee high to a grasshopper there was a big push to educate everyone on the 3 R’s. I don’t know how many of y’all are old enough to recollect any of this, but there is a word which corresponds to each part of the recycling triangle.
It seems like everyone has forgotten the Reduce and the Reuse, and just focuses on the Recycle aspect, but I try my best to do all three.
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I feel like I hijacked this thread, please don’t follow me down this tangent by responding.
3/15 figlets. Something might be amiss with the pots marked Smyrna. Taxonomists state that Smyrna only bear a single caducous crop in mid-summer. If these prove to be caducous breba then the Smyrna classification deserves division, in the same way Common has been divided into main-only (Uncommon) and breba+main (Common) persistent female figs.
Zumwalt, with figlets and shriveled Mamme
GM-171
Oakleigh #1
Ohra Tabahanosika
Yesterday I received a large box of fresh fig tree cuttings and set them up for rooting today. This year I decided to use sand for a rooting medium.
I started off by labeling nursery trays with the names of the cultivars and placing clear 18oz “Solo” cups into the trays, adjusting the quantities to the number of each cultivar received. Into each cup I placed 2 Tbsp of water. The water had been treated with Kocide 3000 and Rally WSP fungicides at the rate of 1/16 tsp per gallon.
Next I placed cuttings into the cups, first dipping the bottom ~inch in 0.3% IBA gel, and then immediately following with ~2 cups of sand. I used a pyrex measuring cup as a scoop for sturdiness.
To avoid compaction, I did not press down on the sand afterwards but did level it out below the rim of each cup, sometimes removing excess. Also – being inherently lazy, I did not wrap the cuttings with parafilm but instead wrapped the entire ensemble of cuttings and trays with overlapping rows of Costco cellophane.
Although the trays are on tables underneath plant lights, I have switched the lights off for now until a significant amount of rooting is detected.
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Ten days have gone by, so this evening I cut the cellophane off widthwise. A few of them are starting to show little green buds. I gave them all 1/4 cup of water doped with fertilizer. I used water soluble 21-7-7 + Jump Start at the rate of 1 Tbsp / gallon.
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Major mission drift seems like an understatement… Not that I don’t do the same…
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4/11. Today they all received another 1/4 cup of water from a bucket containing ~4 gallons plus 1 Tbsp of 21-7-7.
Is that Peter’s Professional Acid Special?
Nope, its from a 25-lb bag of Grow More “standard” 21-7-7.
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Here we are 24 days out from start of the fig rooting attempt. 3 cuttings of the same cultivar have visible roots and leaf buds. One other cutting from a different cultivar has visible roots. A couple other cuttings are visibly shriveling. The vast majority appear to be in a suspended state. This is the worst performance I’ve ever had rooting anything.
I took the cuttings with roots and transplanted them into 3" x 8" treepots with soil. The others I bundled up by cultivar, brushed about halfway up with rooting hormone, and placed them in buckets with very lightly damp ground sphagnum moss, lids on. They’re now in “time out” under the propagation tables. 
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So far 8 of these have developed significant roots. A few others have swelling leaf/fig buds. Last week I discovered hairy white mold growing on the upper part of some of the cuttings and sprayed them from a mixture of 1 quart water and 1/4 tsp Kocide 3000. This week I found white, green, and black molds near the tops, so I added a 1/4 tsp of Abound to the mix and sprayed again. Historically I had a large, enclosed mist propagation table outdoors with thermostat controlled bottom heating and lukewarm water supply. I really miss it.
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@Richard, do you happen to have any pictures of this arrangement? I would be interested in trying my hand at creating one of my own if it was as useful as you make it sound.
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