Higher Quality Figs at a Younger Age

All right, fig lovers. This is Ross, the fig boss. Today's video is perfect for anybody out there who has a young fig tree, especially if you're growing it in a container. This is my little secret for getting high quality figs by the second year growing them in a pot. For many years, a lot of people told me um that you can't really get high quality figs until the fig trees are well into their older years. And I just found um by doing the technique that I'm going to teach you guys today, that's not necessarily true. I will concede that fig trees when they're young produce fruit that's of lesser quality. And as they get older, they will produce higher quality fruit. All we're going to do is remove the apical bud by pinching it. We're going to use our two fingers. You can use pruning shears as well. We're just going to remove that. What this is going to do is it's going to encourage your fig tree in about two weeks to start to send out scaffolds. It'll also send out some figs if the fruit buds are present and not as developed just yet on those on the tree. Um, but mainly what we're trying to do here is actually not form fruit. All these trees here that you're looking at are in three to five gallon size pots. I just rooted them this winter time. Um, we're getting the form established. We're not evaluating the fruits because the fruits that are produced from these trees, as I mentioned, they're not going to be of a great quality and the taste is just not going to be up to par. But next year, in the second year, after we root them from cutting and put them into these larger pots, by forming the scaffolds, now we're getting a really nice structure. And you can see here on this tree, I've already removed the apical bud here. It's missing. So, some of you guys, by the way, you might have multiple stems coming from the base of your tree. See how this one has two? That's okay. If you have more than more than two, you have three. I think three is really the max. You can see here over on this one, this tree has two. I've already decided to pinch this one off. This one still has its apical bud intact. And the reason for that is because this one is a bit more advanced than this one. And you can kind of see it in the height of it. Um the heights have kind of caught up now at this point, but you can also see it in the size of the leaves. The size of the leaves basically means once you have these larger leaves, the tree has really started to take off. and it also has a lot of sunlight to grow into specific areas. So, this tree down here, we're starting to get a little bit larger leaves. You can see they're still a bit small. Um, but this is not really the right size. I mean, I usually put my hand on here. I kind of just know it by eye. Here's another leaf, another tree that we removed, the apical bud, and you can see kind of the size of these leaves. I just put my hand up to it and if it's bigger than my hand, I know we've got something good. And it's usually should be more than one leaf, not just the one. So once we do that, and we have the branches on this particular tree as an example, we've already removed this apical bud down here, and this thing's on its way to forming scaffolds. All I have to do is stake this away from the other one so that they're kind of in a V pattern growing away. That way they're going to get more sunlight. They're going to maximize the sunlight in this given area. This one here on the right is going to form scaffolds. Probably two to three scaffolds, and that's what we want. Now, here on this one on the left, we're about at that right size. I think I probably should wait a little bit longer, but just for demonstration purposes, we're going to do it. See this leaf here? That's a pretty good size. But these other ones here, I think, are a little bit too small. But we're going to do it for demonstration. We're going to come in here with our thumb and our pointer finger, and we're just going to break this off. So simple. Toss it away. And this in two weeks, we'll be doing the same thing this one's doing, forming the scaffolds, and then that way next year we actually get really high quality fruit. So, here's actually another tree we just did this to. You can see the leaves are rather large. Um, but also it's got fruit all up and down this thing. And that's kind of a problem. Um, the fruit is going to slow down the growth because all the fruits, if you think about it, are sucking away energy, whereas the leaves are producing energy. So, if you have an imbalance, too many fruits, your trees are not going to really grow all that much. And the whole idea in this first year is to get these trees to grow and to form strong long scaffolds. So you can kind of get an idea with this tree here. This tree is in a 7 to 10 gallon size pot. You could see we grew it out as a single stem and then there in the middle we topped it. And then after topping it, it formed all these scaffolds. Some of them are not as healthy or productive as I would like them to be. But then you have about three to four scaffolds in here that look really good. Then if you trace these scaffolds up, you then start to get your fruing branches. So now that this tree's entered into its third season, by the end of this, all I have to do is take these fruing branches, which you can see here from here to here, we're going to reduce this by 50 to 75%. I'll do the same thing here on this one. all these up here, basically this entire length of branch. And that will just rejuvenate the tree. The more we prune it, the more it wants to grow in the winter time. And this will keep it annually productive for a long period of time. So that's there the video, guys. Hope you enjoyed this one. Also, check out my blog, figboss.com. There's tons of information there. 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