alan you might be interested in looking into japanese fig keeping techniques, so called “step over” pruning. it allows you to protect a lot more of the plant by mounding and therefore allows an earlier and more substantial crop when youre cutting it down every year. Forgive me if we already discussed this in this thread, i just thought it could dovetail nicely with your experiments
A photo below of the technique, its basically an extremely low espallier. Theres an old thread on the forums that talks about it a bit as well.
