Figs, figs, everywhere!

What happens Rob is in the winter when you can’t do much you end up rooting a bunch of cuttings. The next thing you now you have twenty fig trees! They do grow good, The thing I don’t like is having thirty pots in my garage over winter. I planted most of mine in the ground this spring. I’m thinking I can always take cuttings and root new ones to put in the ground next year to save space. I found they grow more figs in the ground too, or maybe they were ready to? My Panache fig that was growing in a pot last year with disease is doing much better in the ground. Growing big full dark green leaves with figs forming now.

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I have one small Brown Turkey in a pot and at last count it had 40 figs on it. But maybe fig growing isn’t for me. Those fig photos of the sliced open figs are really creeping me out. :- / sorry.

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Still not sure how i overwinter this thing. Its grown even more. Garage, in ground (cover/bury?)…

I have lots of tropicals to overwinter this year so i’m going to have to do some babying.

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And now for the first bounty of my hard work in a piece of land where i recovered some abandoned fig trees.
The full story was posted a couple of years ago in figs4fun - Fig Safari and Rescue

The younger tree by the Moscatel branco strain had kept me curious for the last 2 years. It seemed like a tree that grew spontaneously. I have never been able to sample a single fig from the main crop and at one time i even considered the possibility of it being a caprifig.

But the Breba crop always seemed impressive. The problem was, i have never sampled a single fig. Last year i had high hopes for what i saw.

Big brebas were forming and i protected them with plastic hard nets.

When i got there, not one had survived. The nets were all broken by birds and not a single fig survived. Very disappointing.

The small trees i had rescued from the base of the mother tree (post 6) were still too small to give me any figs so i had to wait.

This spring the pruned mother tree was again full of brebas. Unfortunately i was not able to protect them and when i returned to the site, one month after taking the next photos, they were all gone.


A huge disappointment, but we have to live with them so i let it go.

It was only a couple of weeks ago, when watering my fig trees in pots that i spotted a ripe “Da Vinha Velha (Unk)” breba, almost fully mature.
Although it’s an unknow, i gave it the name the piece of land is known for - “Vinha Velha” - so “Da Vinha Velha (Unk)”

I guarded it like a hawk and this weekend i was able to sample it.

I had a couple of other very good brebas first (Cuello de Paloma and Lampa Preta, i will post on them later) and i was ready for a disappointment, taste wise.
First fig of a small unknow tree, probably bland from being watered one time a week to full pot capacity, so the trees can survive all week.

All i could say, tasting one fig half was Whow!!


Now i understand why the birds don’t leave any figs on the tree and break through plastic nets to get to them. Wonderful tasting fig. And this one was half the size of the ones i saw on the mother tree in early June.

I gave the other half to my wife and i couldn’t avoid a grin of pleasure when i saw the reaction to the fig taste on her expression. She also was very impressed with the taste, especially considering it’s a breba. She even compared it to my Preto de Torres Novas, the fig she likes the best (and that’s a main crop fig).

This small fig has already payed in pleasure all the hard work i invested on the site.

A few more photos, including the mother tree (to see the leaves and the main crop forming)

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Nice you were able to enjoy one fig.

That bird netting you had in your first picture looks quite sturdy. Was it damaged? I wonder what kind of bird could damage such sturdy netting.

On the other hand I would suspect some animal/rodent either slipping under the ‘bird’ netting, OR, certainly having the teeth to destroy the netting. Here we have several such animals including squirrels, raccoons and opossums which can be quite destructive.

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Yes, it could be a rodent. Rats often climb trees, over here , to feast on the fruits. But the probable culprit was this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_jay

It’s quite common around here and with their beak they can break that plastic net in no time.

I have seen them do it to reach my peaches and plums:

I should have placed my Bird Scarer on the site, but when i tough of that it was too late.

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Jaime,
Have you ever tried commercial grade woven netting? It’s what I use,
and I’ve never had a bird get through it. We have Blue Jays here, which
is the sane bird, but in blue and black. Here, birds are particular. Mocking
Birds feast on figs, while Cardinals and Thrushes go for apples, and Finches
go for plums and pluots. Here, Blue Jays leave fruit trees alone and feed
primarily on insects. Other people may have different experiences, but in my orchard, my birds have become specialists.

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Beautiful bird…i’ll give it that.

Good looking fig. I look forward to trying my own some day.

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Hi, Ray.

A couple of years ago, in my 60 year old Preto de Torres Novas tree, i used the net you mentioned and there were no problems. The birds can’t get through it. But i only had two, 10 m nets (it’s a big tree), and they are expensive. I had lots of the blue plastic one laying around, so i used it (i don’t use it no more, because it’s not effective).
Even Blackbirds and European Starlings could break that plastic net.
Blackbirds will eat any piece of fruit in my orchard (they start with loquat, then go to strawberries, plums, cherries, nectarines, apricots, peaches, blackberries, pears, nashi, grapes and they end with apples) and they peck every single one, for taste, ruining them all in the process. And i can’t place a bird scarer in every tree in my orchard, nor cover them all with nets.

The Sartlings are our biggest problem tough. Because they come in flocks of hundreds of individuals, if they stop at a fig tree with hundreds of figs, they can wipe it out of all the mature figs in a matter of minutes. Not a pretty sight.

So, as warmwxrules, says, i wouldn’t mind sharing a few fruits with a beautiful bird, but this is war!! :wink:

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Jaime,
This is a hoop house that I constructed with pvc pipe and commercial netting.
I originally built it for blueberries, but it now contains 11 fig trees. It’s about
60 ft, by 10 ft.by 10 ft. I have plans to build two larger ones to accommodate bigger trees. This particular netting is 30x30 and is pieced together. I also have two other individual nets 30x30 that I place on individual trees. My trees ripen in succession, which allows me to rotate the nets from tree to tree, as the fruit ripens. We have starlings too, and robins that come in flocks, but luckily, they come when the trees are bare.

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This looks a lot like Desert King.

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My Desert King looks different. Skin is a different shade of green and turns yellowish when ripe. Breba’s pulp is honey-colored and main crop’s pulp looks like dark strawberry. Also, my fruit is more elongated, with a long neck, while the ones in the picture are more oblate with a short neck.

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Good infos on Fig Basic.

Tony

http://figs4fun.com/basics.html

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A video of the since-closed Belleclaire Nursery, from where the first Malta Black fig trees were disseminated in America. The gentleman interviewed is since deceased, but what a beautiful legacy they’ve left for growing figs in the Easterm U.S. A great video… if you can put up with watching Martha Stewart:

http://www.marthastewart.com/907952/fabulous-figs

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Sorry but no Martha for me please. Convicted hypocrite are not my cup of tea.

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Yeah she should have ran for Congress they are exempt from insider trading. Talk about hypocrisy what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Although I get it now, witch hunts are in vogue.

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Back on topic people…

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I was despairing of my VdB producing any figs this year as we are starting to get later in the season. I purchased it Feb 2016, so I wasn’t too worried. But the other day, I saw figs! I probably have a dozen or so very small figs.

I also decided to try my hand at air layering. Here’s the results of my first attempt, I used a Chinese take-out soup container, seemed to work very nicely.

And all potted up. I didn’t remove any leaves and the newly potted tree dehydrated quite a bit. I eventually removed the dying leaves, plus a few others. It’s doing nicely now.


And two more airlayers that I just started. One is an unwanted sucker. The higher one is one of four main branches coming up (you can see them in the picture - the 4th one here is a bamboo stick), it’s actually the original trunk, but it’s growth has been massively overtaken by the other 3 branches. Three of these are growing pretty closely together, so one has to go.

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These main crops figs are looking good.

Tony

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Brebas from my in ground Flatbush white or dark I’m not sure :smiley:

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