I ordered willow cuttings to expand the number of different kinds of willows I’ll be growing for basket-making (yes, not fruit, but still plants!). This will up the different varieties from 25 to 30. I’m still experimenting to see which ones grow best here.
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Willow makes great baskets. But sounds like you know that all ready 
. Our 10 yr old “wicker” laundry basket was worse for the wear and was falling apart. I grabbed a few meters of weeping Willow from this big old tree I walk past with my dog a lot. I am amazed at how well it repaired and dried firmly all the flaws in our dying wicker laundry basket. I bet we will get 10 more years out of it before it becomes compost.
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i bet Japanese willow would make a nice reddish colored basket. the one i have in the yard puts on about 6ft. of growth in a season.
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Happy New Year! I started 22 fig cuttings in my basement and transitioned some house plants into leca.
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Yes, this was all we got with a quick effort, but it still looks like plenty. He’s got some digging to do in order to plant them. Last winter I spent a lot longer digging up jujube for transplant, even using the hose to wash them out of the dirt, rather than digging.
3 days to germinate is pretty quick. The jujube seeds I’ve been planting have ranged from 10 to 24 days.
Started 8 cuttings on 11/30 and have been potting them up as I see roots. 2 on 12/22, 2 on 12/31, and 2 today. I’m not sure the last 2 will make any roots- just leaves…
A couple of them didn’t root down below, where I expected, but instead sent the roots out near the top, close to the leaves.
This is what I normally expect:
These are all Bryant Dark figs. It’s my new favorite, as I had one plant survive last winter with little dieback (all my figs are unprotected) and both it and another Bryant Dark made large delicious figs (mostly in October). Most of my other figs failed to ripen last year, or only ripened a few iffy figs. I still like Reservoir fig, as it has been good in most years. But this year it fell to 2nd place…
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Trimming our olive trees. They bore fruit for the first time this year.
Turning compost.
Deadwooding apples and pears.
Obtaining scion!
Organize seed…and buy more.
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Isn’t that funny? You never know with fig cuttings. But eventually most of them seem to do okay despite strange rooting tendencies. I have rooted cuttings upside down that are now strong little trees. I looked up the figs you describe on Our Figs. They sound like great figs. From your post it looks like Bryant Dark is late fruiting? I read that Reservoir was found growing in Connecticut unprotected?
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Where are you located that these figs are unprotected? Mine are all in containers and go in an unheated garage in Michigan zone 6b.
Beware of fig stories.
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I have 27 new fig cultivars as cuttings in my unheated garage that I ordered from off the beaten path (along with 15 in grow bags from last year). I’m not ready to begin trying to root them yet. Likely I will get to them in late February along side my earliest veggie seeds.
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In absolute terms, Bryant Dark was very late this year. It was just earlier than all the others…(similar to a famous Churchill quote on democracy). Not only did my figs all dieback to the ground (all except one Bryant Dark), but they didn’t grow very fast because of the cloudy rainy year we had. So, everything took a long time to produce fruit this year. Some of the others gave me a few figs as soon or a bit sooner than BD. I think I got a few Reservoir, RDB, and Black Bethlehem. But BD were the only ones that I thought were good this year.
This was the first year I had any Bryant Dark from in-ground figs. In the past I had a few from potted figs and I was impressed with them, enough that I planted a couple in-ground to see if they would be productive. If anything, I think the in-ground ones were even better. Or at least larger fruit, with similar quality. Though in the past, the potted ones ripened in August.
Reservoir fig was growing at a rental property I purchased 5+ years ago. The father of the previous owner had brought it from Italy 30+ years earlier. He would often, though not always protect it in the winter. I tried (poorly) to protect it the first winter, at which point I gave up entirely on protecting figs. In the years since, it sometimes dies back to the ground, and other times has only partial dieback. One year (when our low was around +12F) it didn’t have much dieback at all and I got a nice breba crop at the end of July. In the years where it died to the ground, I normally got a good sized crop in the 2nd-3rd week of September. At least until this year when it only ripened a few fruit.
I’ve got at least 25 in-ground figs at 7+ locations in SW CT. Generally 1-5 miles from the shore. It used to be a mix of 6b and 7a, but with the recent zone reclassification, all of them are in 7a, Of those 25+ fig plants, less than half of them produce anything in an average year and half of the ones that do produce only make a handful. So don’t take “growing unprotected” to mean that most are “growing productively unprotected”. Rather than babying the figs, I just went with volume and since we seem to be on the edge of where they productively exist, I often get enough to make me happy. Or rather, to make my family happy, as they like figs more than me. They have to be quite good before I am interested (Bryant Dark was this year).
I don’t think I am exaggerating anything, but I can see why it is important to take “fig stories” with a grain of salt. If someone is telling you what happened one year and it is really very different than when you (or even the person telling the story) can expect in an average year. I’ve had plenty of standout years that were never reproduced (yet). In addition to this year’s Bryant Dark and the Reservoir brebas in 2021, in 2020 Adriatic JH were excellent (hasn’t ripened any again since…). That was enough to get me to plant at least one more Adriatic JH in-ground and neither has managed to ripen a fig in the subsequent 3 years…Hopefully Bryany Dark does better going forward.
Wow- you’re going all-in on figs. I don’t think I’ve grown that many after 7+ years.
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Walking and putting an offer on land to expand my uh, hobby?
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It’s been yucky outside so all I am doing is working on peach rooting inside. I got some initials showing now after a few weeks with hormone on a wet paper towel so I potted them up today. I have never rooted peaches before and am curious if it will work.
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honestly its more or less a collection of potential than a love of figs. I started a bunch of cuttings last year and got 70% rooted but then my wife had a spinal injury and my attention shifted to gettting her better and keeping my family up and running as best I could. I was able to get the cuttings up potted into 10 gallon grow bags and put on a drip line and that’s about it. never fertilized so they stalled in growth (plus the medium I used wasn’t the best in hindsight, too much wood mulch and likely had some significant nitrogen robbing).
Long story short I’m growing 15 varieties right now that have never produced an edible fig. I’ve never eaten a fresh fig before. based on all the feedback I keep reading and seeing on youtube they sound like delicious and unique additions so I keep trying to get all of the winter hardy delicious versions that are ~6 a cutting. It doesn’t hurt that I love rooting cuttings. just a blast to see them grow from sticks to tiny plants.
I doubt I’ll get more than 80% takes but if I got 100% this is what I’ll be growing (list includes the ones already potted). a nice mix of sugar, Adriatic, Bordeaux, Dalmatie, dark berry, honey, with one “exotic berry” in smith. I have plenty of property to put these in ground when the time comes and test their cold hardiness in my zone 7b/8a area without protection.
Adriatic JH
Atreano
Carini
Celeste
Coll de Dama Gris
Cuore Di Bue
Dark Portuguese
Florea
Golden rainbow
Green Ischia
Hardy Chicago
Hog Island
Longue d’ Aout
LSU Champagne
LSU Purple
LSU Tiger
Lyndhurst White
Makedonia Dark
Marseilles Black VS
Mittica White
Nexoe
Norella
Olympian
Osbourne Prolific
Palermo Red
Peter’s Honey
Ronde de Borbeaux
Smith
Stella
Sucrette
Susser Georg
Sweet Joy
Takoma Violet
Teramo
Unk Hungarian
Vern’s Brown Turkey
Verte (strawberry)
Violet Sepor
Violette de Bordeaux
Violette de Sollies
White Marseilles
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Funny. You are so right. Everything depends upon the environment. Even the next door neighbors
“terroir” can be different!
What a great collection! I bet if you find the time to feed them and put some compost on them you will get figs. Sorry to hear about your wife. I hope she is getting better. It is a challenge to be a caregiver an take care of the kids. Finding time for the figs is a challenge but maybe a stress reliever.
Interesting. My newly planted bagel peach badly needs pruning and I have been toying with the idea of rooting the cuttings. Glad to know they will root with this technique. (I plan to prune my tree with the “grow a little fruit tree” technique of cutting the tree at knee height.)
one day she was fine and a few days later she was is so much pain she could barely leave her bed or get any sleep. We had to take her via ambulance to the ER and she was in so much pain she passed out. quite a scary moment. no diagnosis in the hospital but same day saw an orthopedic surgeon and the next day we found out she had degenerative disk disorder and needed a triple spinal fusion and discectomy. we got lucky in that a family friend who worked as a nurse had a spinal fusion done and we loved the doctor and were able to get her into surgery ASAP. I spent a little less than 2 months out of work taking care of her and maintaining the house with our 3 and 6 year old daughters. She is back to ~95% normal now. one heck of a 2023 for us!
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Scary experience. I’m glad to hear that she is on the mend and you can all breathe a sigh of relief. Hoping for a better 2024.
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January 1st we were spreading a large quantity of spent coffee grounds for mulch and compost.
And then last week I purchased a 30 inch by 10 foot heating mat that I had my eye on for a while, unrolled it atop some board insulation, put a bunch of gang potted fig cuttings in place and slowly dialed up the dimmer switch that feeds it until the two K Type thermocouples indicated I had the temperature where I wanted them.
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