I lost a couple I obtained late in the season, I won’t add anymore past spring/early summer in the future. I do keep them moist all winter checking once a month. I have so many it doesn’t matter. Well except one which is valuable, oh well.
We were away for almost a month plus, it was very cold for a long time. If we had been home, we might have moved them into the unheated basement.
I am not even sad losing these figs. Except for my inground CH, none of my potted figs is productive. They required frequent watering, fertilizing, potting, up potting, etc. A lot of work with little yield. Why bother?!!!
Sometimes stuff doesn’t work for you, so yeah, like for me it’s apples. Not that i can’t grow them, I’m just not that fond of them. I like them, but could only eat a couple a week. On figs I get a few hundred, in containers too. Many of my friends ask me for them. So they are working for me.
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Both Hardy Chicago that are planted did well. They have very little die back. The verte’s died half way so far. My two potted figs from the garage are still green with figs growing but leaves are just starting to poke. Not sure if the roots are doing to well on these two from the lack of watering and spending one night out in the fall that was around 20 deg. I have several that died to the ground. It’s still early to tell exactly on all because they really aren’t growing much, but they are trying. I have some figs that have green cambium most of the way to the tops but no buds swelling. I think they will sprout when we get the next warm spell.
The worst thing about that cold in November was it killed lots of buds.
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I removed the winter protection of my inground CH in early April when the weather was warm. Big mistake!!! At first, there were several green wood up to 2 ft above ground. Then, It got colder around 30-32F a couple of times within 7-10 days after that. My guess was that a big change of temp did not do it any good. The wood turn brown. Temp hovered around 40 F at night for a while.
Look like all wood is dead to the ground now. This is very disappointing because this was the second year I winter protected it. This year I took the protection off almost two weeks earlier with a worse result.
New shoots are just emerging from the soil level. It will take a while to get going. I’ll see if it will amount to anything.
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Tippy,
That’s disappointing! I pulled the winter protection off my brown turkey recently and had major die back but not to the ground. Since the wood is not dead It should save me lots of time which we need desperately to ripen figs here.
I guess being protected makes it a lot more vulnerable to temp at the 30’s after protection is removed. Maybe, removing protection later like you did would be better. There is always next year!!
Anyway, because of my CH location very close to the house, I am confident, with some protection, it won’t be totally dead. But like you said, whether or not will it grow and set fruit in time is what matters.
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Both of my chicago Hardy are still alive to almost the tips but are still trying to get the leaves growing. Some of my figs are growing figs with no leaves yet or have swollen buds starting. I think they will make it but they are really slow growing now.
I think your right. I didn’t get my figs protected in time.
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Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words and here is what my brown turkey I protected looks like. This is a significant improvement from what I normally have. The die back seemed to occur after I uncovered it.
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Glad I tried more row cover last year. I saw an improvement 2 years ago on trees that were covered to extend the fig harvest, it was a similar cold snap but in October and at least 5 degrees warmer than this past year. Damage to unprotected trees was much more mild 2 years ago and I had no damage to trees covered with 2 layers of row cover, but last year the ones with only 2 layers (most of them, unfortunately) had almost all of their buds killed and partial damage to the cambium.
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