anyone got any tricks to get a still sleeping fig (Celeste) to awaken?
Celeste is a 3rd year plant in a 5-gal pot. I cut back the plant by about half a couple weeks ago (so the remaining stems are about 2 feet tall, but still no growth. The bark still scratches green.
Did you check the roots?
I am rather tight on space, and I am trialing combining plants per container, but I usually add small herbaceous plants to a tree’s container, or different forbs together. I have a garlic vine in a 7 gallon pot with marjoram, a carpet of spiderwort with my Wild Treasure blackberry, mojito mint and betony with my chestnut rose, canada onion with my apple rose, mizuna with my rugosa rose, and until recently violets with my juneberry (I removed them because they were more vigorous than the juneberry).
The way I figure, I always have to periodically weed my containers… if they’re gonna get weeds, I might as well plant my own weeds.
Dear Cesar, I too have a Violette de Bordeaux, but it is in a larger pot. I will re-pot it again this fall. They love the earth and a lot of room. Why not plant it in the ground? You will get a tree in no time!
I can tell by the size of your pot it is too small.
Roots look good. Thick and fleshy
just stubborn
It was in a much bigger pot, but the soil was heavier, the companions too vigorous, and it got root rot. I planted it in the current pot when I rescued it. Now that it’s doing better, I have to up-pot it again. It’ll have to be a different pot though, the previous one was given to a Mango:
As for the ground, it’s heavy clay in my particular neighborhood. The last time I planted a fig in my soil it fared very poorly.
@Caesar
Figs in 20 gal, 15 gal, and Stuewe TP915R nursery pots. The white pavers are 18"x18".
Of all my in-ground figs, VdB is one of the most vigorous and regularly goes from 4’ to 12’ every year. I do prune it pretty hard in the winter so it has a strong root base to really take off in the spring. It’s well over my head at this point and I need to think about tipping the branches as any fruit out of reach is bird food (and most of these will not ripen.) That super tight nodal spacing is somewhat unusual for VdB in my opinion. This variety definitely wants to be a bush and it’ll grow wide if you let it.
The Black Madeira is a slow grower, but this is typical.
My Smith is a fairly slow grower as well, although some of the side branches have put on a decent amount of growth. From what I’m reading this isn’t terribly unusual either.
The Deanna has a medium vigor, but I wonder if that is because it is competing with some other nearby trees. I pruned it down to about 4’ this winter and it’s at about 7-8’ right now. I haven’t seen anything on the vigor or eventual size of this tree.
Lastly I have a seedling and that takes off every year. I didn’t prune it this winter and it’s probably pushing 15-18’.
I suspect it is similar to VdB but not the actual cultivar.
Could be. I picked it up from Anderson’s Nursery and I believe it had a Dave Wilson Nursery tag on it.
