Training potted Fig Tree Growth Early in Season

Hi, I'm Mark. I'm the fig professor. So, we're in spring. It's April 11th on Saturday and the trees are outside. They're growing nicely. One of the important things about the management of your fig trees is making sure that you can control the shape of the trees early on. Now, if you notice I've already been plucking off some of the growths and that's to control which direction which branches grow. So, I'm going to show this as an example. This is an I-258 growing real nicely. Last year, I don't know if you remember, I had a single stem or a single trunk leader that went up gives a nice thick base and that's what we're going to be working off of. So, now this year we're going to start shaping the tree. So, I'm going to remove everything that I don't want. Now, I have a growth on the north, the south, the east, and the west side. So, I'm going to have a branch going out in each direction completely opposite of each other. So, what I want to do then is remove the remainder of the growths that go lower down the trunk and that way it'll put more energy into the existing branches and you're going to get a good shape. So, here's the north, the south, the east, the west, and everything underneath this little bud. We're going to go ahead and remove that. We don't want that. There's another one here. We're just going to scrape it off with our nail so that that doesn't grow and then one more here on the side and these are kind of too low as far as a branch anyways. If this was growing in an opposite direction, wasn't growing in an opposite direction in the same direction underneath, I would have removed it and leave it as a three-way or a tri-fork growth. So, what I just did to this tree is going to end up going like what we have here with the Golden Riverside. So, you can see I have one, two, three, four branches each going south, north, west, east and it opens it up. So, what I just did to the I-258, this is what it's going to look like later on in the season as those branches grow out. So, that's kind of what you want. So, as you go through your trees, if there's branches that are growing into each other going towards the center, you'll want to remove them. You want to make sure that the branches are always kind of growing out in a crown shape. If it gets too crowded and you have three growths that are real close to each other, remove the middle one so you get a nice fork or a letter V kind of going out and it'll open up the space, give the plants more air circulation, more sunlight and they'll grow much better. So, hopefully the limb removal video here is informative. You guys benefit from this video and well hopefully you enjoyed it. Thank you for watching.