Grow Figs from Twigs

Hey nerds, farmer Jesse here. So one video request we get a lot is for more fruit or perennial crops. And so last week I went down about an hour or so from where I live, uh, to our buddy Blake Cawthron's farm, peaceful heritage nursery in Stanford, Kentucky to get some good advice on a few different fruits and nursery production. In this video, we're going to discuss propagating one of my absolute favorite fruits, the mighty fig figs are considered a slightly warmer climate crop, almost tropical than we have here in central Kentucky. But Blake discusses not just how they grow and sell the plants there at peaceful heritage, but how he keeps the plants alive over winter and also some of the production details about producing in high tunnels and just production in general. I have personally been wanting to dedicate a little tunnel space to figs. So this was a bit of a personal journey for me as well. And I hope you get as much from it as I did. Also Blake is the author of a couple of books on fruit production and is coming out with a new one soon on small scale organic nursery production. So yeah, I will make sure to put all the links for all of that in the show notes. Otherwise let's get to it with Blake Cawthron of peaceful heritage. So this is one of our high tunnels. And I call this the fig tunnel because it's mostly fig plants in here. And figs are something that grow really, really well with minimal care, minimal input in areas that have a slightly warmer climate than we have here in central Kentucky. So in Kentucky here, it's just a little too cold to get longterm woody growth above ground on figs for the most part, because there's always going to be a winter like last winter where it went down to negative seven degrees Fahrenheit, slammed them down to the ground. So we grow them in this protected environment in here. It's unheated in the winter time. I heat it just a handful of times if it's going anywhere near zero, literally usually five or six times a winter. I heat this thing with a wood stove. And other than that, it's just completely unheated. And so we've been trialing a lot of different varieties of figs over the years. This one's called LSU improved Celeste. You can see it's loaded down with figs here. And if a variety doesn't seem to perform well here, we phase it out. So this is one of the fruits on LSU improved Celeste, delicious fruit. This was developed by Louisiana state university. And for the most part, we've really enjoyed their varieties. They do really well. And there's actually figs from all over the world in here. There's ones from Sicily. There's ones from Greece. Is the Chicago hardy actually from Chicago? It's from Mount Etna. It's a Mount Etna type. So it's from Italy. Yeah, figs from Italy. And so the only real challenge that we've had with figs, there's been besides the cold hardiness issue, one of the issues has been fig rust. So that's what these little spots are on the leaves. So this is something that we're currently tackling and trying to figure out how to deal with organically. It's probably going to involve some organic antifungal sprays. Another challenge has been wildlife predation. And you can see last night this fig was perfectly fine. And then something came in during the middle of the night and ate it. It's probably a possum. Could also be a raccoon. It was one or the other for sure. And so one thing that we found is necessary. On the farm here to protect from wildlife is trapping animals. And we do live trapping. They're completely unharmed. And then we release them far, far, far away from the farm. And that seems to be a really good way of dealing with it. So that's just one of the realities of when you're growing organic fruit or non-organic fruit, even that you're going to have a lot of wildlife pressure. I've been training these for years to the Japanese espalier system. And that involves training the branches very low to the ground, just a few inches from the ground. And the benefits of that are that when the branches are low to the ground, there is some insulative effect from the ground, because here in Kentucky, at least, the ground doesn't really free solid. And so it's always releasing a little bit of heat. And it does protect whatever is extremely close to the ground. And so we found that having the branches down low to the ground helps a whole lot. And then we also come in here after all the leaves have fallen down. We cut down all these fruiting shoots down to just a couple of buds. We cover the whole thing with sheets of cardboard and then about three or four layers of row cover. So we use like Agribon or whatever row cover. And then we seal up the tunnel. We close it up, seal it up pretty tight. And the figs get through the winter. No problem like that. And so all these shoots that you're seeing, this is all growth from this season. All these were just a single bud. And now they're six, seven, eight foot tall shoots. So this just shows you how extremely vigorous fig trees are, that all these branches that are going up here, hitting the ceiling, some of them are even hitting the ceiling like that. That's all just growth from this year. And these are the fruiting branches. That's what gets fruit. That's what you see here. And I'm convinced that these could be an excellent niche market for market growers in Kentucky and similar regions. Figs are a very high value crop. They're relatively easy to grow. You could put them in a clamshell, take them to the farmer's market, maybe market them at fancy restaurants, gourmet, grocery stores, co-ops, things like that. They would really sell. And I've run the numbers on it. And you can definitely sell thousands of dollars in fruit from just a small high tunnel like this every year with minimal effort. No replanting. This is a long term perennial crop, and it's just really fun and pretty easy to grow. So in the nursery, this is the process of starting our fig trees. So we do some dormant woody cuttings and then we do some greenwood cuttings. So the dormant cuttings are taken, obviously, when the plant's dormant, it's lost its leaves and you have actual wood. Greenwood cuttings are taken in the summertime where the the shoot is partially lignified in the wood, but not completely. And so it's referred to as greenwood. And there's a lot of nuances in there that we've had to figure out about how big they should be, when exactly you should take them. And that's all going to be covered in the nursery book and nursery course, which is coming up. So this is an example of a greenwood cutting, and we use these special ten inch tree pots and they're all square pots, which is a major part of our strategy. And so the figs will take these cuttings in anywhere from July to early August, and we get a certain amount of nodes in there and we leave one leaf and we propagate them in our intermittent mist system. And so this will grow a root system this year and not much else. Maybe a short shoot like this. That's about all it'll do this year. And we'll overwinter this next year. It'll resume growing. We'll grow into a two to four foot tall plant from there. And that's what we sell and ship out. So figs are really easy to propagate, and we do a lot of other propagation, the intermittent mist system as well. Mulberries, gumi, grapes, aronias, a few other miscellaneous things we're trialing also. So this is one that's been grown from a dormant cutting. It's been growing in here since about early April. So it's put on a substantial amount of growth. You can see the wood is turning brown, which means it's lignifying. And so dormant cuttings work great also. And we have these on a mist system. So these misters go off two to three times a day. We have it all on all on timers. And this is great for doing the cuttings. So if the plants are a little bit bigger and they have more leaf, we notice that they actually start to shed the water from the mist system. And that's not good because then they weren't getting enough water. So we have all all these plants on individual spike irrigation like this. Irrigation is an essential part of the process. And these are these spikes. And this was drip irrigation that was developed in Israel. And so it drips down the water directly down here into the root zone. So there's almost no evaporation of water. And we try to water minimally so that there's no wastage. And the wastage would be water running off the bottom, which always happens a little bit, but we try to minimize that. So when the plants are too big for the mist system, we put them in here. We put them on spikes and that delivers water directly where it's needed. We also run a fertigation through here. So we'll run water soluble fertilizers through the mist system and the spikes. And this drips the fertilizer right down there into the root zone. We've seen really, really good results with that. So this is the final product with the figs. We showed you where we started them from cuttings and the intermittent mist system, grew them out for a season in the greenhouse. This is what they're going to look like a year from now from the intermittent mist system. So you've got a nice, strong, lignified plant. It's got a great root system in here. We'll just pop this down and show you what that looks like. So you can see beautiful root system here. This is just a random one I pulled out of the crate. And the tree pots really help. You'll notice there's no there's no root circling around and getting interwoven with each other. That's because these are specially designed to help prevent that. So it gives a really nice, healthy root system. It's fairly deep, deeper than your your traditional gallon round pot. Got a nice, healthy top. We can throw this in a box easy. And this would be about a $60 plant right here. So we ship them by, yeah, tall boxes. And we we use UPS for that. So if you're interested in fig production, that's covered in detail in my book, The Berry Grower, which you can find on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. I have an entire chapter on figs. I talk about the Japanese espalier system, how to train them, the best varieties for the eastern U.S. and the western U.S. So a lot of that's covered in detail. And if you're interested in the propagation of plants again, you can check out the nursery e-book that's coming out soon. And there's a link to that in the description. Yeah, yeah, that's a big fig. All right. How awesome was Blake? I got to try some of the figs in this video. They were awesome. So expect this channel to turn into basically just me visiting fig farms soon. It'll be great. You'll love it. Check out the links to pick up a copy of one of Blake's books. The links are in the show notes. The books are excellent. You should definitely check them out. Otherwise, like this video if you like this video. If you're not subscribed to this channel, hit the subscribe button. And if you are subscribed, you're awesome. Another way to be awesome. Pick up a copy of The Living Soil Handbook at no till growers dot com. If you have not already or a hat or other merch doing that helps to support these videos or just join our Patreon page at Patreon dot com slash no till growers or just hit that Super Thanks button. That works too. Super thanks for watching. We'll see you later. Bye.