Planting Fig Trees for Success - 75 Planted This Year!

All right fig lovers, it's Ross the Fig Boss. We are back with another video. I'm really happy to be doing these videos for you guys. They're more podcast, longer form content that we get to show you guys all kinds of different things, take you guys around the yard, show you all different points of interest, and really how interesting this hobby of growing figs can be while giving you guys so many different nuggets of information. You get a really good glimpse inside my mind what I've been thinking, what's going on, what I've been doing, all these different things. It's so cool and I know you guys have been appreciating it. Please let me know down in the comments if you want to see more videos like this. Hit the like button for me, hit the subscribe button for me, and also I know a lot of you guys have been putting lots of questions in the comments. I appreciate that. If anybody out there has some expertise, feel free, please help me out. Answer some people's questions in the comments. It definitely helps me because I've been so busy lately. I'm supposed to be taking a break. As you guys know, I've talked about how I was pretty burned out because the growing season's been so long, plus you add in tax season. I've been basically going non-stop since early February and we've halted our sales of our fig trees because of that just for the last couple weeks and we'll probably resume them towards the end of August, maybe early September. I'm also, by the way, going to be at a few events. I know I announced this in my newsletter. If you guys are not a part of the newsletter, it's gold. Again, just like these videos, so much great information to help you guys along the season. Go to my blog. You can put your email address in there at the top of the page and you'll be subscribed and you'll get an email from me right away, but you'll also get the I've been pretty good about it. I've been putting it out at least every 30 to 45 days and I haven't really been doing that since I started, but we got a new newsletter. We have really revamped the whole website. I talked about in the other videos as well that we've been doing lately how we have three new directories on the blog. There's the video directory. Again, if you're lost along this video and you want to learn more about a specific thing that we covered, I've covered everything. I every question you could possibly have, I've covered it in some video or some article. So on the blog is a great way or on the website is a great way to navigate through all that content. I created these directories with the help of AI. I've just created all this HTML code. It categorized and I went over and made sure it was all correct. And it basically makes it so easy to go through all my videos, all the articles I've written. And also I have a variety directory there too, which is great as well for people that are interested and want to learn more about variety. So there's so much information out there I've been putting out for you guys, but this stuff I think is just a little bit next level. So again, do me a favor, hit the like button for me, hit the subscribe button for me. We've been hard at work. This video, we're going to talk about some of the things I've done recently. As an example, just the other day, I up-potted with the help of someone who's been helping me. We up-potted about 80 fig trees, seedlings as well into three or five gallon size pots. Monday I also planted another 15 or so fig trees. Today I planted some as well. I've been adding compost to the soil and that's what we're going to talk about mainly and cover in today's video is caring for fig trees after planting. I'm showing you a little bit of the planting process. I've got videos on planting obviously. Someone also, by the way, this reminds me, someone asked me about hormones. We've talked a lot about hormones of fig trees and how they affect fig trees and all these different things that you might observe different things about your fig trees. But once you understand the hormones of your fig trees, you understand why your plant's doing what it's doing. Someone had mentioned pruning. If I've done a pruning video about how pruning affects hormones and all these different various scenarios. If I have done a pruning video, I just want to mention this, in the last three years or more, maybe three or four years, I've always been mentioning the hormones in every single one of them because every time you prune your fig tree, whether it's from winter damage, your own hand, whatever it is you're using, any tool, you're changing the hormones in your tree and it's dramatically affecting your tree in crazy ways, way more than you would ever had imagined. So let's kind of get going here. I just swallowed a bug. But anyway, let's show you guys what we've been doing here. First and foremost, like I said, we've been putting the compost down. I got my hose over here as well because once we plant a fig tree, I just put these in. This one here in particular, I just put this one in. We're not done. We're going to show you the process. I put another one in over there. Some of you guys may be thinking also, why are they so close? We'll get to that. But we put them in the ground, packed in the soil around the root ball, added the compost on top. And now I'm just using the hose to really drown the root ball, drown the soil really create just a well of moisture around the root ball and the surrounding soil so we can rehydrate the soil. And you'll know when you're kind of digging up and you're creating a hole, you can feel the soil and you can know how much moisture is in that. We still are rather wet here. Believe it or not, it is like the middle of July. We have tons of new growth. Look at the food forest area back here. And I say food forest because there is big giant shade trees, got a black cherry there. And I think what is that? That's a maple. And you've got like persimmons underneath. There's pawpaw on the back, all kinds of crazy stuff. Elderberry, gumi, even, you know, gooseberries and things down there. The growth has been insane this year. And you can see it with the grass. You can see it with the weeds because we've had a lot. We've had just weird weather. But normally I would say by July, the soil is like dried out. The soil is very devoid of moisture. But because we've had so much rain, even the weeds have been growing and coming back. It's so hard to keep up with. There's another thing like, you know, it's multiple properties, multiple jobs. I'm caring for so many different things, emails, all these different things. Now I got the weeds to contend with. So this was completely weed free when I planted about 40 fig trees in here. And now the weeds have grown back. So I got to come in here one of these days and do some weeding. You know, it is what it is. Don't look, by the way, you're not supposed to see the weeds. No one's supposed to show you guys that. OK, but long story short, we we planted these trees out something I'm going to be stopping soon. I don't like to plant these trees past here in the Philadelphia area about past the middle of July. It is actually July, I think, 24th today, something like that. It's a Thursday. So you can figure out the date, but I still have more trees to plant. Some of the trees I really wanted to plant. I didn't get them established quick enough to get them in the ground. And that's for just various different reasons. But maybe we'll go to the first of August. But very soon here, I'm going to be done planting. I'm going to be done potting for the most part. But we planted, like I said, a lot of trees recently. And also when we come back to this in just a minute, I just want to show you the patio, because I know you guys like to see stuff. We've showed you guys in the other video how many fig trees we have that we've up potted. It's now it's easily 200 and something that are now from one gallon size pots into these three or five gallon pots. And they're looking amazing. I mean, absolutely amazing. I already removed the tips on some of these. They are just taken off. If you've known, you know, when exactly I up potted some of these, it's amazing that they look like this. Here's a fruit that's forming and you can just, you know, remove these. I've talked about that in the last one, how we trained them, how we're removing the fruits on the young ones. If they're young and they don't look that great like this, they're not really growing. We know there's a bit of an issue. And part of the issue is likely because there might be some fruits that are forming on here, even on these young ones. I'll show you. This is crazy. I get this question a lot. Why, how, uh, how long does it take for fig trees to form figs? Well, how long does it take for them to bear fruit? Did I already remove the figs off of this? I might have. This one here is so small. It's got a big fig on it. Got to remove that. Cause if we don't, it's not going to grow. There was one down here. I swore. Oh, here it is. Look at this guy. This is Koldodon bordisotanka. I've not tried this or grown this fig yet. This is unbelievable how precocious this is. Now I'm going to remove all of them. Sometimes I've said in the past, I'm going to keep one or two on there, but something so small like this, not enough leaf leaves on it yet. If it was like this tree next to it, for example, this, I could leave a further two on it and I would feel okay, but we got to get the, the, some of these small ones growing and happy and healthy. Like see these here. They're, they're just kind of getting, getting going here. And some fruit set is, Oh, look at that. So there is some fruit set in there. Uh, you can see the double dots right there. So one's a new fig. It's actually going to be the one there on the left. And then the other dot here is a new branch. If we were to remove this tip and I've talked about also, by the way, removing the tips, we can do it on this one. This is just for form purposes in the first year we'll form the scaffolds. And then the second year we'll get the, uh, really good high, high, high fruit quality in the second year and be able to actually evaluate the fruit quality in just the second year, growing it in a pot. And I've talked about that many, many times now, but we've also talked about it in the last longer form video, the video before that we've been really just all about the hormones and things lately. Cause it's just such an important thing to understand. Uh, here are some of the seedlings we have. There's some weeds. I got to take that out, but these are seedlings. Yeah. I planted these from seed. Figs are not generally grown from cutting or they're, they are generally grown from cutting, excuse me. So they're not grown from seed, but I had bred these. We pollinated some female figs with some male capper fig pollen that I had with our own hand. We didn't use the fig wasp. We don't have the fig wasp here in the Philadelphia area. And now the seedlings are doing pretty good. Um, they look a bit sad because I had them so close together, but they're going to be fine. Um, it's just a bit of humidity, a lack of water. Um, just from heat stress in the greenhouse, the greenhouse is like 110, 120 on certain days. So, uh, they, they've been in there for like months growing as seedlings. So we got them now in these three, three gallon pots. And I have about three, three trees, three seedlings per pot. We just have too many pots. We can't do it. These are some Figo Roxo seedlings. Got all kinds of different varieties like Colada Mutante. This is a more Figo Roxo, a lot of Roxo seedlings. And the whole goal of this obviously is to create new varieties, but some of you guys out there have a very odd view, I think of breeding and what we're doing. First of all, we don't really know much about big breeding. Um, not a whole lot of people do. There are some people out there that I've been, uh, kind of talking to and just seeing what they, what they've been thinking. Cause they're, they're ahead of me on this, but, uh, these seedlings here, we're going to learn a lot from them just by growing figs from seed and growing them a little bit of a different way. We can learn a lot. And that's part of what I do here, right? You guys been watching the channel long enough. If you're not, you're new. What am I doing here? Um, I got fig trees everywhere. This person's crazy. Maybe you're thinking at this point, um, well, I've been growing figs passionately. I've been studying them very closely for about a decade. I've dedicated a lot of my twenties actually to learning about this fruit. My lovely parents let me use this property. You see this patio planted all kinds of crap, not just figs, but all kinds of fruiting plants. And we had a garden over here and we just went all out, learned as much as I could, turned it into a business by studying this stuff, learning about it, becoming a very reputable source of information. I don't claim to know everything because we are still learning. And that's the best part about growing figs and growing plants and, and, uh, having this hobby of just being in nature and observing nature. There's always something new to learn. So when we grow fig trees from seed, some of you guys might have preconceived notions. I don't have any preconceived notions. I know what is said to be true, but I'm throwing all that out the window. And this is how you have to approach something like this. You, uh, you need to approach, if you really want to learn a lot about something, you have to be open-minded, as open-minded as possible to any little thing that might not be true, might be true. And that's how you get to the truth. Challenge what you think is true. And that's what we did here on this property too. I planted fig trees way too close, which we're going to talk about. It ended up working out. Uh, that was one thing I did. Um, putting fig trees, multiple fig trees actually in the same pot is something we did many years ago. And that ended up working out, although I don't recommend it. Um, there's a million ways to do the same thing in gardening. Everyone has their own little way. Everyone's a little, you know, this is better. This isn't better. This is what you got to get rid of. You got to get rid of that little, that little thing in your mind. Uh, when you first start out, people, um, you hear, you hear people that are sources of information like me, and you think everything they say is gospel. Well, it's all context. It's all context. And just because I'm doing something a certain way, doesn't mean that you have to do it a certain way. We're going to talk a lot about that in this video. The last one, we talked about how to evaluate fig trees and we said context matters like eight times in that video. This is how you learn about fig trees. This is what makes it all interesting. And, um, just because again, somebody is doing something a certain way doesn't mean it won't work a different way. So the seedlings we're going to find out, do they do? Okay. Back to the original point. Actually, the main goal of this is to learn about them. But the second goal of this is to create another male edible capper fig, multiple male edible capper figs. I don't even want the female varieties right now. Uh, some people will do the testing and they send in leaf samples to like a company and they can test the leaves and tell you which ones are common San Pedro, Smyrna or capper fig, right? So when we plant a fig seed and we actually do the breeding process properly, right? We have to pollinate the fig. If we don't pollinate the fig, the seeds inside of the figs that you eat and grow won't germinate. So we do that first. Then when we germinate the seeds and they're actually viable, 25% of them theoretically should be what's called a common fig. So there's four types of figs. Okay. This is just like really basic here, but we got to get it out. Common figs are female varieties. There's three types of female figs, common San Pedro and Smyrna. The fourth one. So the other 25% that can happen when you plant a seed will be male. Okay. But of the three female varieties or three male type, three female types, common fig doesn't require any pollination whatsoever to ripen fruit. And these are the ones that we all grow and love and should really care about. The Smyrna's and the San Pedro's, they have their own little thing, right? The San Pedro's are mainly there for Brava production. One in particular is a Desert King. You might've heard about a lot and that will produce Brava's hopefully in higher quantity to justify the fact that the main crop requires pollination. The Smyrna requires pollination of the main crop, but doesn't produce a Brava. That's the only difference. And then there's the male fig. Now the male fig, I'm not convinced all of them produce pollen in the Profici. I heard somebody tell me that they're talking about that they do. I haven't seen that. Kind of confused why they said it because I've grown a couple of male varieties that ended up not producing pollen in the Profici. So you can end up having just a male fig that will produce figs that are inedible and they do almost nothing. The only real evolutionary purpose for them is to house the fig wasp. The fig wasp will basically sleep inside of these figs over the winter time. They'll go from the first crop of figs, which is the Profici or the Brava's if you talk about them in female terms, that ripens on last year's wood. Then the main crop forms. They go from the Profici into the version of the main crop. Then they go into the second main crop. Yeah, there's two sets of main crop. Then they go from each crop basically and they live and they travel and they propagate or multiply. Then they go and pollinate the female figs, assuming there's pollen. So what my goal is though is I want to find a male fig that produces pollen. Why do I want to do that? Well, because I used a male variety over here. This is it right here called the UC Davis Capra fig to pollinate my favorite female varieties. I'm now injecting into my genetic bank unknown genetics. If I had pollinated, let's say Celeste or Hardy Chicago or the ones we looked at here, we know what they do. We know what their benefits are. Hardy Chicago, extremely hardy. Celeste, very rain resistant. Figo Roxo, very tasty and also rain resistant. So my goal is to create a male variety that will have less genetic noise. We're going to have to do multiple rounds of this. Unfortunately, we're going to breed a Capra fig. We're going to take that Capra fig and we're then going to start pollinating the female figs again to then get another generation of female varieties. Some of these people, and I don't know how much of this happened in the 1950s with LSU, but some of you guys out here right now that might be breeding, this might be new information to you and that's something that maybe you didn't even think about. But when you plant, you grow figs from seed, there's a good chance they're not any good. Just take someone like the fig hunter, shout out to David Burke, who went around and still is going around different parts of California and finding all these seedlings. Some of them are really good, but the vast majority of them that he finds are not good. So what do you think my results are going to be? They're going to be somehow magical because I'm the fig boss? No. Unfortunately, we have to find a male Capra fig that we hope, we don't even know, we hope that it inherits some of the genetics from the female variety that we pollinated. So if it was Hardy Chicago, we hope that this male Capra fig inherited the gene from Hardy Chicago, or many genes actually, they have many genes. In fact, figs have almost the same amount of genes I think as us. Grapes have more genes than us. So you think if there's just one gene responsible for hardiness, you're probably gravely mistaken. So this is going to be a long, it's going to be a long undertaking. So if I can grow them in here in these pots and just grow them out for a couple of years, just, I want to see also what they do. You know, if they're not, if they're not male, it's okay. I want to see what the female figs are like. Okay. And that's kind of where we're at with this. And we're just biding our time. I do think it is going to take a while for these to fruit. And you can see the hormones in some of these. They're really, really bad. The balance of hormones is, is just favoring growth. This is a decent one to look at right here. Not only do they have like really far node spacing, they kind of look like tissue cultured figs in a way where tissue cultured figs kind of go to this like juvenile state. And that's kind of what they're doing here. So we're going to try our best to influence the hormones to you know, get them to fruit earlier, but it's going to be a while. Here's some Calderona seedlings. Interestingly, you know, these leaves look nothing like Calderona, but some of the seedlings I was growing and like, I noticed the leaf pattern looks so similar to the female variety that I was like, holy crap, that's, that's crazy. So that might, that might teach us something right there just with the leaf patterns, you know. Other than that, can't really draw any conclusions. Now, what did we do this past weekend? I up potted about, yeah, it's at least 200, 210, I think, one gallon fig trees that we've been growing and selling to you guys on the website. Like something like this, took this and put it into a five by 12 pot. I got to clean up these trees. I'm going to also cut them back a little bit. Just cut the tops off of some of them. I got special boxes for these, but the whole goal of this is to make it so that my one gallon trees don't require nearly as much water. And because we're not selling them for the next month or so, they're going to get a much larger size and continue growing and continue to be happy and healthy. Now that they're in a larger pot, they can't stay in these smaller pots for too long. Like here's some trees right here that just, I didn't get water to fast enough because they, I have to be here every other day to water all my trees. And if I'm not, they will dry out. So I had to up pot them and you can see some of them didn't like, didn't like that, but they're going to be good now, you know, and I'm going to hook up irrigation. I've already got this all laid out and basically each of these is going to get a spot spitter, just like all the other trees I have. That's a big job. That's probably the final, final big job I have left is to irrigate everything and make sure it's on irrigation. Now that was a huge job. Thanks to my friend, John, who helped me out on that. Um, so that was, you know, you guys think I've been on a break taking time off or something. Uh, really I just needed the time off to, to get my own stuff done, take care of my own trees. And, um, this middle row here, we just put these in because we did this about 80 trees, um, about the other day. So I've been doing all kinds of stuff here in the yard and, uh, you can't even walk now. You can't even really walk in here. I had this middle section for a walkway, but we're not going to be, we're not going to be able to walk on here. There is something interesting. I have been getting some main crop and in here is a, a nice fig that we've got. How do I even know which ones are ripe in here? I don't, unless I'm really paying attention and looking around every day. Uh, I just happened to spot this before birds or squirrels. This is, anyone know what this fig is? Take a guess. Very, very productive fig. Okay. And here's the leaf pattern. It's one of the best figs actually. Talk about a fig. Someone asked me, uh, locally, my friend Craig at Coastal Fig Company, shout out to Craig. He asked me what varieties hold their value. Cause a lot of them are just pump and dumps, but this is one that holds its value. Let me tell you, it's called Violet de Bordeaux. Shout out to Byron, by the way, who gave me this tree. He told me, um, this was a really special one. And then he, uh, I told him, I was like, are you sure this isn't Violet de Bordeaux? And then he said, yo, yeah, it is. Whoops. But, um, he really likes it. So, uh, I don't blame him. Let's try it. Oh my goodness. What? Holy crap. That's good. Wow. Byron. You know, some people out there think that there are different strains of Violet de Bordeaux, and they could be right. That they're not all created equal. This is one he calls, is Dhabia. Interesting name. D-H-A-B-I-A or something like that. Byron's been growing figs as long as I have, probably longer, actually. He really knows his stuff. Um, so if he tells me he really likes a fig, why is this so dark, man? Why, why does this taste so good? Now, here's the crazy thing though. I haven't had a Violet de Bordeaux in years. I had a bunch in pots. Man, they were some of the best producers I had in pots. It's one of the best figs for pots. And then I got rid of some, all my extra ones, sold them, and a planted, I had a Nero 600M over there, which is another name for Violet de Bordeaux. Like I said, there's, there's at least 15, 20 names for Violet de Bordeaux. Are they different? I don't know. But long story short, I had that one. I thought, you know what? It's one of the best trees also for in the ground. It'll be fine. And just year after year, after year, a lot of the trees in the Southern plot here didn't, didn't produce anything or much of anything because they got killed down to the base by the winter every year. And that was sad. Either, you know, either Violet de Bordeaux is a much better fig than I, um, than I thought, or this fig's amazing, or Davia's amazing, let's say. I, maybe I'm just misremembering, but, um, I had some Fayumi last year, which I thought was Violet de Bordeaux, but they were very round, not oval like this. And I was very confused, but they tasted amazing. And it just could be that, uh, I haven't had Violet de Bordeaux in years. So sad. I'm telling you guys, this fig is unreal. This is gets, this is the kind of thing that gets you hooked. Oh my God. Just so sticky and jammy. There's like hints of grape in there, but predominantly strawberry, really good. Oh my God. That's what it's all about. But yeah, we've been getting, we've been getting some main crop, but that, that tree was in the greenhouse. So it's an early, early headstart for us. Now, as I said, we had all these here in the middle that we just potted up the other day. All these, believe it or not, are going to look like these, just this, this row here in about a month. And then we, these are a little further ahead, like this little section. And these are even further ahead right here. Uh, those are much older trees back here, but my point is, is that we're going to be able to get them growing as a single stem or multiple stems. And then very soon we'll be able to remove the tips here in about a month. So that'll put us probably for most of them in September for pinching and getting the scaffolds to form. And if we can get the scaffolds to form, that's the, that's a great time. That's definitely not too late. Um, we're going to get some good fruit set probably on every single one of these next year. I would say the majority of them. Um, and that's, that's the name of the game right there. Here's one exactly right here. Like, so I'll just remove the tip. The scaffolds will form. This is a ficus Palmata hybrid. You could see how long the scaffolds are getting and how quickly they grow. And that's all we want. There's another Palmata hybrid. I'll remove the tip on this one too. That's why it's called pinching. You just remove it and that changes the hormones in there. All right. So that's, what's been going on. Um, that's what we've been doing. And then let's go back to these trees that we planted recently. So I want to finish this. So you can see here, this is the root ball right here, and it was in this, this pot, right? So you can imagine what it looked like. And all we needed to do was dig a very shallow hole. I plant them sideways. We've talked about doing this before. The reason being is that we can protect the base easier this winter. And if I protect the base, there's a very unlikely chance it will die and it will always come back from the base. So why not just grow it along the ground the first year? There's nothing wrong with that. So then what I did was I dug a small, a really shallow hole takes very, very quick to plant small trees like this, which is partly why I like them planting them when they're small, but you just pack the soil with your fist around the root ball. You don't want to press on the root ball itself, especially a young tree like this could be very fragile and you could break the root system and you can get transplant shock and you will have a very sad tree. And then we're going to take the surrounding soil, throw it here on top like so. And as we were showing you earlier in this video, we are going to drown this tree. So I can just leave this here on the ground, but I want to drown this tree. It will pool. It will drain. It'll drain slowly. We have clay soil here, but I want this soil to just completely saturate around the root ball. I want the soil that we just put on top of the root ball to really sink in. And because we added compost already, I didn't do that right away for other trees that I planted, but I would highly recommend get the compost down and on here. It's a cheat code. I'll tell you, I'll talk more about that in a minute, but now we are watering the compost as well. And when we water the compost, it's going to activate it and make it come all the life that's in it. It's going to make it come to life and you're going to water that life, basically take some of that life away from the compost. And it's going to now inoculate itself into the surrounding and soil below it. So it's going to slowly now over time, the life in the soil and the organic material in the soil is going to change the soil below it. That's why we don't add anything in the hole. We, that's why I don't care about the soil quality too much because we're always going to add something on top. You keep adding things on top year after year, you end up with an incredible soil and your trees grow. Like you just, you just won't believe it. It's a cheat code because not only is it giving the soil life, but it's conserving moisture. Now the life is a really critical point here. Okay. Because my clay soil here is very devoid of, of life. It just is. In fact, when my parents bought this property, there was all these trees, big shade trees on the property. And it was just land. They bought land, took down a lot of the trees and then built the house. But when they came in and excavated the, the, the lands to build the house, they took the top soil with them. And I have some just crap soil because of that. So if I didn't inoculate the soil, I made it, it was became abundantly clear when I first started. I had trees and stuff back here and against the fence. And like, just, I mean, it looks just nothing like it does right now. Uh, they weren't really growing. They weren't really doing anything. Nothing was, you know, this whole thing. I remember this fence back here. You can barely even see it, but this fence, we actually had to put in a ton of top soil. You get at home Depot, just crap. And we built up this berm to put this fence in. So the only way I was able to have any real success and get quick success is really the name is really what I'm saying. You can have success just by not putting compost down. Okay. The no doubt, but you're going to be a lot better off. It's going to be so much quicker for these plants to get established. And a lot of it just comes down to conserving that moisture and changing the life in the soil. Okay. So that's about enough. What did we run that for? But what I also want to do with the hose is really just soak the compost everywhere, just all over this as if it rained. And we do have a problem with the hose. Cause I just pulled it. There's probably a kink in it somewhere. Someone out there is probably like Ross, do you need one of those? Never kink hoses. Well, I don't know if they last, do they? Oh, here's the culprit. What I really need is more water pressure on this property. All right. So that's planting fig trees. And that's what we're doing after, after the fact that's some after care things that anybody can do. If you don't have compost, get mulch. Let's talk a little bit about the compost real quick. I've talked about this in other videos. Some of you guys are just like, did I hear that right? Ross is growing his fig trees in pots in a hundred percent mushroom compost. Yeah. Yeah, I am. What are you going to do about it? I've actually been growing fig trees in a hundred percent mushroom compost, this exact stuff for, I think it's been four years now. And I'm telling you, they take off. You guys see the fig trees. Yeah. I don't need to explain. We did talk a little bit about fertilizing and soil in that first video. We did check it out. If you're interested, watering, sunlight, all that stuff. And yeah, it's just an amazing material. It's filled with life, but some of you guys might be thinking, all right, well, I don't have compost or I don't have the mushroom compost. I can't get it delivered. This is a, this is actually a really nice resource I have access to because I live so close to Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Got some grapes ripening soon. Sorry, guys. You see grapes, you got to eat them. These are amazing homegrown grapes. So because the mushroom growers, there's so many of them in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, they make this resource. They grow their mushrooms substrate on it. And then when it's done, they compost it down further and then various nurseries get it and spread it around to people like me. So you can very easily get, not this stuff, maybe, maybe it's not a local resource to you if you're not in, you know, the Southeast Pennsylvania area, but you could get compost delivered. The main thing, and I would say if you're going to use it in pots, it's a, it's very different than if you're going to put it on the surface of the fig trees we just planted. Okay. The main thing you're looking for is big woody pieces. If it has big woody pieces in it, and there's nothing, there is no woody pieces in this. Actually, a lot of this is manure and, and woody, woody products that they added to it. But you, you can't even tell like where the woody pieces are because it's just totally broken down. This, this might be the biggest woody piece I've seen. And you can feel how easily, you know, this is totally broken down for the most part. I mean, this is like, I don't know how to explain it exactly, but if you have these big chunks or big woody things in here, here we go. This is decently big, something like this. If you find this in there, too much of this, it's going to steal the nitrogen away from your plants. But that's only if you grow them in pots. If you put it on the surface of your soil, it's just like mulch, just like wood chips. It'll break down slowly over time. It won't steal anything. It'll conserve the moisture. And then as it breaks down, it will turn into this and it will give the life and the nutrients that's in it back into the soil. So that's two, two ways of doing it. This is just quicker, quicker acting. Some people will do much compost tea, worm castings. I don't care what you guys use. Okay. I know a lot of you out there are these really into compost tea and all that. My, my point is just get it on there. Okay. Just get some of this stuff on here and water in the compost itself. Unless you're going to get some big rain that comes in and you're going to be good. All right. So that's planting fig trees, taking care of them. Uh, oh yeah. One last thing, turn this off and I'm going to go show you guys some of the young ones over here. We planted same thing. We just planted a lot of these. We just put compost on them. Not all of them have compost just yet, but just like the potted ones where we remove the tip, we're going to be doing the same thing to the, to these over here. Once they get to the, to the right size, they're putting out nice new healthy growth. I can come in here if I want, remove this tip. The reason why we want to remove the tip on these young ones and small ones is to increase the amount of leaves they produce. If you have one stem and that turns into two or three stems, you then have more surface area, right? So this tree right here has got more surface area than if it was just this one stem, because now we have this branch, we have this branch, we have this branch. So it's capturing more sun, more sunlight. It captures the bigger the root system gets, the bigger the root system gets. There's all kinds of benefits. Talked about that, a lot of that in the last one, but the goal of the, of these is just to get them as established as possible. And to do that, we want to make sure there's consistent water, number one, and we're giving them some nutrients. Like you see here, if you have a soil problem, like maybe there's some deficiencies in your soil, get it tested. And I would recommend everyone just gets it tested, just so you know, what are you missing? This compost and the, you know, worm castings and all kinds of other stuff, maybe you want to add on the surface. Usually it's going to cover some of that, but maybe you have something that's missing in a higher quantity that would just save you a whole lot of time. So that is planting them, getting them established. And then lastly, we'll talk about the spacing. Okay. Some of you, I know you're wondering why I planted them so close together. Why do they look so, they're, they're arranged also kind of weird. Why didn't I plant them in like a grid or something? Like, why are they not in rows? They are in rows to the best of their ability. Now I have, you, you guys are not me, right? So we said in the beginning of this video, I'm going to do things and recommend things, but you don't have to do them, right? Everybody has their own context. Everybody has their own goals. What's your goal? Well, maybe you want one or two fig trees. If you want one or two fig trees, why would you plant them one to two feet apart? I've basically planted my fig trees between the two properties and hundreds of trees. Now they're, they are at least they're, they're no more than three feet apart. It's either one foot, two feet, or three feet. That's it. I actually, actually, I do have some fig trees at the Jersey shore that are planted much further apart, but you guys, for everyone at home, you want to plant them further apart. Unless you're doing what I'm doing, right? Are you going to be trialing hundreds of varieties? And the only way that I can figure out how hardy these trees are is if somebody like me in my particular zone, zone seven, a I'm in the perfect place for it, guys. I got to, someone's got to do it. Someone's got to do the work. And I met that calling to do it fully capable of doing it. I'm young. We've been doing it. It takes a long time. We talked about how long it actually takes in the last video. So if I'm going to be testing them, I'm not going to plant them at a six to eight foot spacing. Like you guys probably should. In fact, if I was going to do a hedge, I'd recommend for you guys about four feet spacing. Instead, what I'm doing here is we're, we tested them in pots, right? We talked about this in the last one. We found out while growing them in pots in just two years for the majority of them. I mean, 90% of the trees, it takes two years for me to figure out what the deal is. Is it common? Is it rain resistant? How's the hang time? Does it taste good? When does it ripen? All these different things. Then we take it from here. If we like them, we put them in the ground. We put them in the ground and then we test the hardiness, which takes at least three or four years. But if I'm testing the hardiness, I don't need a six to eight foot spacing. It'd be nice, be great, but that's not what we're doing. And so, uh, if I had just, you know, the limited amount of land I have, well, I'm obviously going to try to plant them closer. We did that many years ago when we first planted them here on this property. And I was taking a little bit of a risk. And I said, well, I don't know what's going to happen. Are they going to compete for nutrients? Are they going to compete for water? Are they going to compete for sunlight? Is the, you know, uh, what, what am I going to be able to do this? And you can, you absolutely can. There, I was inspired by, um, Vladimir Rocco. I saw a post from him. He's a grower in Italy and, uh, he was growing them, I think at like three to four feet apart. And I thought, well, if he could do it three to four feet, why can't I do it two feet? So I did it at two feet. Then I realized two feet works. I can do it at one feet if I wanted. And that's what we've been doing. We've been trying to plant as many as we can in here. And what ends up happening is they form one solid tree. Basically think of this whole thing here as one giant tree. That's what I do. And then I have to manage each individual branch within this big tree. And right now, it actually looks somewhat okay. Um, but it's not when the trees were last year, if you saw any of the videos of how big these trees were before they got killed down at the base, it wasn't okay. It was, it's a lot to manage. You have lots of fruit that's ripening in here, getting in between the trees, getting the branches from higher trees, bending them down, picking them, netting them. Actually netting them would be really easy, but bagging each individual fruit is what I did in the future. I'm going to, I'm just going to net the whole area. I think that's a lot easier, but long story short, it's incredibly difficult to manage for fruit production purposes. Uh, they do compete for water and nutrients, but in my climate stuff grows here really well, really well. We live, you know, if you haven't been to the Northeast, you haven't been to the mid Atlantic or the, or the deep South, we have moisture in abundance. And what is the most important, important thing for plant growth is moisture. So we don't have problems. In fact, if we didn't mow the lawn here, this whole thing would turn into a forest in like two years, two years. That's just what it is here. Somebody lives out in the desert. They don't even know what I'm talking about. So, um, these trees have, believe it or not, a lot easier of a time dealing with this spacing than you might think, but it's not really until they get a big solid root system when they really start to do their thing. And that's the issue with fruit production in here. And we talked about in the last one, they don't really fruit from dieback that well until the root system gets pretty big. Even varieties like this Ronde Bordeaux, which is one of the best for fruiting from dieback. You need that big root system, the bigger, the better. And the farther apart they are from each other, the less nutrient, uh, and water competition there is, but also the sun is a big deal. So for me, I'm always managing the sun. That's also the major, that's probably the most major thing that I really worry about beyond just getting each individual little tree here established. If I can make sure that each of them gets a little bit of sun, like this is a younger plot, right? So I've got a smaller one here in the mix of things. And if these smaller ones don't get their act together, they're going to get out competed really quickly by some of the taller ones here that were planted at the same exact time, right? This one here is much bigger than the one behind it. And the sun comes from here and goes over this way. So the sun's going in this direction and this is going to be shaded what's back there. It's easier if the smaller ones, the younger ones are in the front. I'm not going to plant a small one back there against the house. It's too late. Can't do it anymore. Won't get established. All right. So I hope you guys got the memo. I know this was helpful. I hope this was inspiring. And I know there was a little bit in here for everybody. Please do me a favor, hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, check out our blog if you haven't, subscribe to the newsletter, anything. I really appreciate it. You guys see it for the next video. Take care.