Getting Your Fig Tree to Grow Faster

All right, fig lovers, this is Ross the Fig Boss. Welcome back to another long form video. I've been really enjoying making these long form videos. Basically, we've been going around the yard and bringing you guys through everything I've been doing this season, showing you guys every step of the way what I'm doing so you guys have an idea of what you should be doing. A lot of show and tell in these. Compared to the other short videos that I make, maybe they're actual shorts, like minute to three minute long videos, or if they're actually just the standard five to 10 minute long video I make, this is covering a lot of different topics. There's so many nuggets of information in here about how to actually grow fig trees. It goes into the actual depth of the how and why and not just me telling you or somebody telling you, do this, don't do that. You're gonna fully understand it. So if you wanna actually learn, like really learn about growing fruit, even just other plants, these are the videos for you because we're covering these topics in huge detail. Today we're gonna be talking about how we can get our fig trees to grow faster. You can see I have figs back there. These were planted in the ground, I don't know, seven, eight, 10 years ago, something like that. And they were cut down to the ground, not by my herning shears, but by the wintertime. The winter came in here and hit all the trees on the property that I didn't protect very hard. We had a very nasty winter. And as a result of that, the trees grow and grow and grow. And a lot of times they actually don't fruit. So it's really critical that we talked about in other videos if we want our fig tree to fruit, we have to protect it. We have to learn how to prune it. And that's probably number one. How do we get our fig tree to grow faster? Well, we just cut it more. That's a big one right there. So we're gonna cover not just things like that. We're gonna get more into detail of that, but also other things like fertilizer, water, sunlight, other tricks that you could use to actually make your fig tree grow faster. Everybody has different goals and that's the other thing, right? Who am I to say this is wrong, this is right? There's a million ways to do the same thing in gardening. That's the best part about it, right? So there's not really one right or wrong answer. Someone might want a big fig tree. Someone doesn't want a fig tree that they can't harvest from. They wanna keep it smaller. Today's all about getting it bigger. And that's what I like to do on this channel, to take you guys through these things so you can understand how amazing this hobby can actually be. Why am I doing this? Out of all the hobbies out there, growing plants is one that a lot of people like, but you can really get caught by the plant bug or even the fig bug very quickly if you just kind of understand what it is I'm doing here. So that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to inspire. Now, if you're unfamiliar with what I'm also doing and have been doing for the last decade, I've trialed over the years like 400 to 500 different varieties, mostly in pots. We've been trialing a lot in the ground, but we've done a lot more varieties in pots. Over the last decade, I've been studying these fruits very closely. We even started our own varieties here this year. These are new seedlings that we started. And I also have a nursery online, figboss.com. There's so much more information in addition to these videos I make. Go to the website, check out the fig trees I have for sale. If you're interested, I'll ship these guys to pretty much anywhere in the country. We're even gonna start shipping to Canada pretty soon. I'm hoping to get something going with that. And also, you know, there's all kinds of other information there that you guys can learn from. It's not just about selling trees. There's articles, there's a whole variety database of different varieties I'm growing, a video database, an article database, all that great stuff. So let's get into it now. How do we get our fig trees to grow faster? And maybe some people want the answer to this question when the trees are young. These are actually a bunch of trees right here that we planted just this year. I mean, I planted these probably two months ago. It's actually August 27th at the time of filming. Still haven't been to the outhouse arboretum just yet, but it's only two days away. And these fig trees are growing so fast. We just planted them from one-gallon pots. It's a four-by-nine-inch pot. We talked about in other long-form videos how to care for these guys after planting, you know, what we need to do in terms of compost, watering, how to plant them, like the planting orientation, and also things like removing the tip, which a lot of these guys, we remove the tip on. Here's how to do that. Just come in here, break this off with your thumb, and that's removing the tip. That's called pinching, right? Because you're just pinching it off. That's gonna change the oxide in the tree. And that's what we're gonna talk about a lot today is hormones, hormones, hormones. Oh my God, what are plant hormones? Can I inject my plant with testosterone? No. The way we change the hormones in our plants is actually by pruning them. And you're doing a lot by pruning them. You're doing way more than you think you are. Also, things like water, sunlight, and fertilizer are the go-tos that people think about when it comes to making their plants grow faster. It's actually pruning. Pruning can have a huge effect on things like fig trees. First of all, fig trees already grow really fast. They're one of the fastest-growing fruiting plants you can have. Now, behind me here are some peaches that were a spy aid. Planted these a decade ago or more. And they're huge. I prune these guys every year. They produce a ton of peaches for me. Lately, the squirrels got most of them. But you know what? They're on standard rootstocks, these particular trees, and they grow really fast. And so I would say, you know what? You can have a fig tree that grows pretty much as fast as a standard-sized tree. The tricky is, in a cold climate like me, I'm in zone 7A, your trees really are never gonna get this big. This would be a dream. Oh my God, this would be an absolute dream. Look how much bigger they are than the house, by the way. So they're huge. And that would be something, if somebody has a tree like this, they probably did a lot of winter protection. Maybe got lucky. Maybe it's in a great microclimate. Maybe they're actually in the city-city. There's a lot of concrete there. And you can just end up getting something that's multiple stories tall. We had a few trees this past year. I would say about somewhere around 15 trees. I don't know why I said a few. That were, you know, good size. They're coming back really strong because of all this pruning. You can see, like, this branch here is already, you know, close to eight feet. And that was started all the way down there from the base. This is not, this is all one-year-old wood here. It's insane how fast they grow when they're pruned like this. So they can catch up. Don't get me wrong. But the winter, you know, is inevitably gonna knock these trees back every once in a while. I'd say every decade. And if the variety really isn't that hardy, maybe it'll be every five years. You might get something harsh in a zone like mine. So, you know, you can end up having larger trees. Don't get me wrong. But if that's what your goal is, to have a larger tree, certainly you're gonna wanna protect it. And you're also gonna wanna prune the heck out of it. And the more you prune it, this is the problem. The less lignified the branches become. So there is a trade-off. I'm gonna try to give you guys all the information, but you may not, by the end of this video, realize, you may think, I don't actually don't want a big fig tree. There's a lot of reasons not to have a big fig tree. You know, some people wonder as well, how big does a fig tree actually get? Well, like I said, you know, they can compete with the standard size peaches here. I've pruned these guys every year pretty much and kept them a little bit smaller, but certainly you could have a fig tree that's 20 by 20, no problem. 15 by 15, 12 by 12. But I would say for most people, you can control them by not doing the things we're gonna talk about in this video and keep them six to eight feet tall and wide. And that's about the spacing I would recommend for most people, six to eight feet. Otherwise, if you live in the perfect climate, they can get 40 by 40, even 70 by 70, depending on how long it's there. I mean, that could take a long time, but there are trees in California, perfect weather, that are massive, absolutely massive. So if you want a bigger tree too, here's another good tip. Not only are we gonna prune the heck out of them, but we are going to get the scaffolds to form higher. What are scaffolds? Well, we talk a lot, especially when we did the training video recently. I'm not sure if I published that one. I might be saving it for the wintertime. Oh yeah, guys, we're saving videos to publish in the wintertime. But when it comes to training these trees, whether they're in pots or whether they're in the ground, it's all very similar how I approach it, in that we need a single stem whip, is usually how I do it in pots. One stem, we go up, reach a particular height, or actually we want the right leaf size. Once the leaves get to the right size, then I'll remove the tip here. That's where I removed it, that's the scar. We talked about pinching just now. And then we had two scaffolds that formed on this tree. Then we went ahead actually and pinched it again. And now we're gonna form laterals and fruiting branches, which is great going into next season. It's exactly what we want. Okay, so now you know what scaffolds are, but if your main trunk, let's say, instead of this tree here, the main trunk is only, I don't know, about two feet on this tree. Instead, the main trunk is like eight feet up or five or six feet up. That means the scaffolds have a higher origination point. Think about it, right? I don't wanna remove this leaf, but think about this section of the tree, this bottom two feet here of just the trunk is there for just what, for what exactly? Think about it, what is it there for? It's pretty much there for nothing. It doesn't do anything, right? The whole idea of a tree and not a bush, which is what fig trees naturally are, they are bushes, meaning they are multi-stemmed, multi-trunked plants, okay? They will naturally do that. They don't wanna be grown as trees unless you train them that way. You can certainly do that, but even if you had a tree with one stem and all these other ones here were gone, well, it would still want a sucker every year, and I've done that for years. That's how we had 15 larger trees on this side of the property is I trained them as a tree, and every year they would send up these suckers, and I would prune away the suckers and sell them. You can compost them. I think you can use them for firewood. You can dance with them. I don't know what you wanna do with them, okay? But that's my point, right? We have trees or bushes, doesn't matter however which one you wanna do, but this section here of just the trunk before we get to these new scaffolds is useless. It's there for beauty, really, and if you didn't wanna have a trunk, you just have your multi-stemmed trees like this one here. It's growing out to the left here, but then I also allowed this to grow, and now it's a multi-stemmed bush rather than a tree, okay? But if you had that longer, my point is you had a bigger trunk before the scaffolds. The taller that is on pretty much everything you can think of. I don't know if there's a, I don't like to think in black and white, hundreds and zeros when it comes to plants, but I think that's the case. If you had scaffolds just simply higher, your tree will be higher. That's it, inevitably. It's gonna be harder to control. It's gonna be harder to reach the fruit. So if that's what you want, man, then training the tree to be a bigger tree is gonna be key, and they're usually gonna wanna grow after a really good pruning. Look at this tree. I mean, it's just grown up single stem, and you could top this at any point you want. You could top it in the summer. You could top it in the spring. You could top it in the wintertime. I don't care, but the point is you cut your trees back really far, and what I mean is by cutting them back, we're not, we're cutting, we're shortening the branches. Does that make sense? Rather than removing the branches completely, right? So here's a salam tree that I protected this winter. Let's remove some of these leaves. Okay, so you can see the main trunk down there, and it starts branching out into four scaffolds. So that's good for this tree. It's low. It's gonna be a smaller tree, manageable, but if I wanted to keep this tree more manageable in the future, what I could do is find the tallest shoot on the tree and trace it back to a lower origination point and make a cut right there and not leave anything behind. So I'm not shortening the branch. I'm removing the entire branch. In this case, it would be removing the entire scaffold, but if I instead, on this branch here, cut this back by 75% and then left 25%, I'm getting bit by a mosquito. You see how what I'm doing here, guys? I'm here braving the elements for you right now just so I can teach you about figs. I know. I'm so, I'm so, I'm so honorable. What's the word? I'm not thinking of the word. Anyway, okay, long story short, enough bragging. This is, if we leave the 25% there, the response is gonna be huge amounts of growth, huge. So the more we cut, the more we shorten them back, 33%, if we remove 33% of the wood, leave 66%, we're not gonna get as much of a response next year as if we cut it back by, you know, all the way down to, we remove 75%, let's say, whatever it is. So you can cut the trees back by a lot. I mean, you can cut them back, like the winter does it for me, cuts them back down to the ground. So you could do that as well if you really wanted and start over and have a beautiful, healthy tree. And sometimes you might wanna start over. Some people out there, you might have a really sick tree that's not doing well. It's pretty rare, but you know, you have a tree that, for whatever reason, isn't doing well. Maybe the leaves are green. Maybe it just doesn't grow, it grows a little bit every year or it doesn't grow enough every year or maybe it has a lot of fig mosaic virus or maybe it's just not the best tree. Just there's something that seems like to you, it just doesn't seem right. It's just sickly, whatever it is. It's not the fact you have a dud because if you rejuvenate the tree with pruning, doing exactly what I just mentioned, either we cut it down to the base, maybe we leave a little bit of a stub or we shorten the branches, like I said, 75, 90%, whatever it is. You're gonna be amazed at the response. We talked about this in one of the other long form videos and we talked about the Smith tree I have over here in like a 10 gallon pot. We air layered this off from a bigger stump, bigger trunk that we had. And I put it into this pot and it's been in there for like 10 years, that tree, in the same pot for 10 years. And everyone's like, you gotta root prune. You gotta root prune every two or three years or whatever it is. If you don't root prune, it's gonna die. I don't know why they sound like that, but they do. Anyway, they basically said that. And I just said, you know what? I'm gonna just leave it in there. And eventually I learned, if I come in here, the tree did eventually slow down. The tree eventually got to the point where I was like, oh no, this doesn't look good. I'm seeing what other people are seeing. Really similar to this tree. This is a Celeste. It's been in this pot for quite some time. We got main trunk, four scaffolds, three main ones there. And then you can see as it gets up the scaffolds, we got further up. We got now the laterals and the fruiting branches, but these laterals and fruiting branches are pretty small. Look at that. Look at that new growth of the year. It's like an inch, an inch of new growth. That's nothing. So in order to rejuvenate these trees and keep them going long-term in pots, you just cut back those laterals and fruiting branches by like 75, 90%, maybe even 50%. So the length of this is only an inch. Cut it back pretty far. Or instead, remove this whole system, this whole crap up here. So one, two, three, remove all three of these, and then cut this back, the older wood, slightly older wood by 50% or 75%. Because I didn't prune this tree at all. And this is the result. You know, when you don't prune them, the trees grow a lot slower and a lot of different things happen. We've talked about this in how you evaluate figs. The shape of the fruit changes, the way the fig taste changes, how many figs it produces, how early it ripens, all that stuff. So if you're thinking, oh, well, I'm a master fig grower and I know everything about fig trees and you're putting out information on figs, but you don't really know those simple little things of what I just said and how the hormones play into all this. The hormones control all of it. We didn't really say that. I just said they're important, but hormones control so much, so, so much. And you don't really hear about it in hormones. You don't. I mean, unless you're in like ag school, you don't really hear about it. Maybe master gardeners take the class or whatever it is. I don't even know if you need to pass a test or whatnot. Not sure what's involved anymore. But let's say you're one of those people. Yeah, you're gonna hear about the hormones and you're gonna learn about them and you're probably gonna forget about them. But it's probably the most important thing within your plant. I think it's more important than sun, water, and nutrients because those things are pretty basic. Everyone gets that right. You know how to grow plants. You got a good green thumb. You know, everyone can do that. That's not some differentiating factor there. And I think that's kind of my point about, you know, when we talk about this topic of getting your fig tree to grow faster, I'm gonna assume for the most part, you've got your fig tree healthy and happy. If it ain't healthy, it's not gonna really grow. It's not gonna grow well. And it's not really gonna fruit either. What you're looking for on a happy fig tree, simply put, are leaves that look like this. If your leaves look like this, your tree's healthy, you don't have to do anything. If you got new growth here, look how pristine the growth is. Some varieties have a lot of fig mosaic virus and that virus can definitely hinder their ability to photosynthesize. And that can really put a damper on stuff. Some leaves, look at this. You think this is a sign of bad health? Not necessarily. This is actually a sign of stress. At one point, this tree was underwatered and maybe some of the other leaves that formed earlier in the season fell off because this tree didn't get enough water at one point, stressed out the tree, stressed out the leaves. The leaves took damage and some of them fell off. And what you're seeing here is just one of them that stayed on. And that's why it looks like that. But look at the rest of the leaves. Whoa. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. So like, health. Oh, here's another one over here. This thing actually, something similar might've happened. Because look at the branch next to it. So everyone likes to freak out a little bit when they see these leaves like that. It's wear and tear, mostly. Season's going on. It's wet. We're starting to get rust. We had a lot of anthracnose earlier in the season. Here's some rust on some of the fig cuttings. You know, as long as it's not too bad, as long as the leaves are not defoliating, they're not yellowing, you probably have a pretty healthy tree. You can always make it healthier, by the way, through pruning. I mentioned that already. One of the other ways, and this is just the basics here, right? We need to have consistent water. That's it. Consistent water. Water is probably, other than the hormones, is really the main thing that's gonna drive your fig tree towards growth. Because even though the hormones are telling it to grow, that's basically what the hormones are saying. They're giving the commands. They're telling it to fruit, or they're telling it to grow. But the basics have to be there. The nutrients, the sunlight, and the water. The water, if we don't get enough water, the trees will stop growing. I promise you. So down here, which, butterfly bush collapsed, but we do have our irrigation timer in here. This thing kicks on and waters the trees every day. For the same amount, I don't worry about it. Especially the potted ones here. I'd rather have them get a little bit more water than less water, just because I'm not too concerned about the quality in the ones in the pots. But in the ground, certainly things can dry out. I don't have irrigation set up, but we've had so much rain this year, it's been an unbelievable amount of rain. The weeds, you guys know from the other property, we talked about weeds, how it's hard to keep up with it all. The weeds are insane. Why do you think this thing broke? This thing grew probably too much. Maybe had too much wind. Because it grew too much, now it's split. So, you know, it's the same, it's just what's happening this year. You can't control it, but it's a good thing. Because I planted a lot of little trees. A lot of little trees. See that little guy right there? He's looking great. These guys are all looking great. And so, I actually don't mind it. We didn't really have the greatest winter, so we even had a late frost. So I'm not really having high hopes for fruit this year anyway. I think I'd rather just have stuff grow. Oh, look at that groundhog. I spotted him and then all of a sudden he ran underneath the, oh, he's not running. He's watching. Man, they're menaces, let me tell you. You don't want any groundhogs. Oh, he just went under his shed. I walked a little further. Okay, so we've got water. I'm telling you, if water is just not enough water, the soil dries out. Fig trees are very drought tolerant. So their behavior is very simple. They shut off when there's not enough water. They can even drop all their leaves and they drop all their fruits and the tree's fine. You do the same thing to a blueberry, honeyberry, so many woodland type plants, perennials, that you can, I can name a ton of them. They just will die, basically. Citrus, same thing. Soil dries out, this branch starts to die back. Maybe the tree won't die, but the blueberry plant will. Honeyberry will. And the fig tree's really no different. As soon as the soil starts to dry out, it goes into like this defense mode. And it's like, hey, I'm gonna drop my leaves to protect myself. I store water in my wood, kind of like a cactus. It's kind of pretty close to a cactus. And we're gonna be fine. We're gonna be fine. But I'm not gonna grow till next year. That's what it says. So that's the thing here, guys. We wanna make sure we have enough water. Water in excess of what the tree needs might not be necessary. So just something consistent. Maybe there's some optimal level for growth, but generally, like I said, I think it's just in excess. Anything in excess of what it needs is just unnecessary. And beyond that, it's really the hormones. Now, in terms of the sun, you need sun, right? The sun's gonna give the tree energy. So the leaves capture the energy, turn it into sugars through photosynthesis, gets a bigger root system, and the tree just grows. It has more access to water, nutrients, and it just keeps going. So, I mean, more sun's better, but even for growth purposes, like you have too much sun, that means maybe too much heat. You guys down there in Arizona, West Texas, Southern California, maybe it's actually too hot. Maybe it's actually too sunny. Maybe you got a problem where you need to cool things down a little bit. The temperature in the soil, actually, can be a major factor when it comes to whether or not a fig tree's gonna grow. Again, it enters the defense, almost like a defense mechanism. If the temperature in the soil gets a little too hot, I would say over 100. You don't wanna get the soil over 100, and that's definitely the case, I would imagine, with some of you guys out there. 90, maybe somewhere in the 90s. And the tree might just sit there and say, you know what, it's just too hot, man. It's just too hot. The metabolisms of our trees definitely do better the warmer it gets. So, I would say it's probably not that big of a deal. The main thing is just consistent water. And maybe when it is so hot, I think my theory on that is that if it is just too hot in the soil, but you have consistent water, everything's fine. But when you have the combination of the two, a lack of water and it's just too hot, that's when you usually get disaster. So, that's my newer theory on that, but some people do claim that there is a summer dormancy, but I think a lot of it just might have to do with the lack of water in the summer. All right, what about, so we talked about temperature, sunlight, water, fertilizers, the last one. Just cover the basics, man. I know some people don't wanna hear that. You got the weed growers, you got the fig growers, you got the pepper people. These are all the crazy people, mostly. Those are the three main, the three craziest of the plant world. Maybe the dragon fruit people, we can lump them in there, I don't know. But certainly, I'm telling you, you just need the basics. And I see this all the time because you can see it with fig trees specifically more than you can see it with potentially other plants. Figs have fig mosaic virus. All of them have it. It's not a problem. It's just that if you have the right, the wrong level of nutrients in the soil, you're gonna see more symptoms of it and then you're gonna start thinking, oh, maybe it is a problem. If you just give them the basics and cover all the deficiencies, there's no deficiencies, you're good. That's it, that's it. Do a soil test in a pot, just get a really well-balanced fertilizer with everything in it and apply it. Every year, you don't even have to worry about it. I'm telling you, too much fertilizer leads to fig mosaic virus symptoms. So you can see it, it kinda stresses out the plants. The same thing, the opposite's the same thing. Not enough fertilizer, you end up getting more fig mosaic virus symptoms. But a lot of times, you'll actually see some yellowing. I don't have a whole lot of fig trees that are yellowing, but I did notice some because I really didn't fertilize a lot of these trees. We up-potted them with this mushroom compost. I've been talking a lot about that and showing you guys some of this stuff. Yeah, this one here has got fertilizer. See these blue beads, they're teal colored. For anyone out there that's colorblind, I guess. Here's some more beads. See the yellow ones in there? I don't know if this one has any. And I think a lot of the newer ones that I up-potted just never got around to it, but they're growing. They're happy. Yeah, a lot of these guys down here, smaller trees, they don't have any fertilizer, but I did see some yellowing somewhere. Let's go on a field trip and find it. What does yellow look like? You'll see it usually at the top of the tree, not lower down like those yellow leaves, not this. I mean, you could say maybe, you know, look at this. This is a bit yellow, pale. You want the darker green. Now, every variety is a little different. This one here is actually a Ficus palmata hybrid, Ficus carica and Ficus palmata. This thing just gets darker leaves in general. Some varieties get darker leaves. Look at this yellow. This could probably use some food. I should probably give that one there a little bit of food. So, you know, you try your best. You do what you can do, but generally you only got one fig tree. Just give it some fertilizer every year. That's it. In the ground, you don't need to necessarily do that. Compost is king. Wood chips, mulch, let it all break down. You're gonna not really need anything, but you should still do a soil test. There can be something missing that maybe your compost and wood chips or whatever you use doesn't really have. But this used to be my garden, so we added tons and tons of organic material to this over the years. That's why this is growing so well, partly. We had that box checked. We need all the prerequisites, sun, water, temperature. By the way, temperature-wise, I didn't mention this. The fig trees really won't grow that much. They grow a lot faster when the soil temperature is warmer. 50 in the soil, not that much growth. 60, it's a pretty big jump from 50 to 60. 60 to 70, huge jump. 70 to 80, you're talking business now. You wanna be close to 78 degrees as possible. That's where you're gonna have the optimal metabolism for growth. And pretty much anything you want your fig tree to do. 78, remember that. When it comes to propagation, anything metabolically, that's what you want. Okay, now how else can we make our fig tree grow faster? We mentioned fertilizer, sunlight, water, all that stuff, pruning. We mentioned how to train them to have a bigger tree. One of the things that people overlook all the time is actually something, what do we call this? Ground layering. I guess we can call it ground layering. So there's the trunk of my tree and where this is originating from. But if I come over here and I bury this, put this close to the ground and then bury a section of the stem, or let's say from my finger here all the way to the base of the tree, if I bury this with soil, really pile it on, what is that gonna do? Well, it's gonna root all along the branches. Figs root so easily. One of the best things about them, it's really easy to propagate them. So if you have an air layer, you ever done an air layer before? An air layer is where you just take your branch and you just wrap wet soil around it. And as long as you wrap it around these lenticels here, you can do some scoring, girdling, but as long as you wrap it around each node, there's gonna be lenticels. See these little dots, little dots. Here's a big dot, small dots. They usually concentrate around the node, usually below the node. So if you wrap wet soil around that, you're gonna get roots to form. It's gonna take a little bit. You don't even need rooting hormone. That's the crazy thing. And you can get this tree to have basically a bigger, wider root system now by bending it over. What happens when we have a bigger root system? Well, if we have a bigger root system, we can allow our tree to have a wider canopy. I'm essentially, by burying this over here, this part of the tree is gonna stick up like that. And it's gonna grow upwards. The rest of this will be buried. We might have some shoots that form along here and start growing upwards from the soil line, below the soil. But this will be up here like this. And believe it or not, we're gonna now capture sunlight over here. We're gonna capture sunlight over here. And the rest of the tree, which is over here, is still gonna be doing its thing. So now we're gonna be making use of more sun, essentially. The tree is gonna have wider access to soil and nutrients, right? The root zone has now expanded. We're gonna have a bigger tree. And it ain't gonna take that long. One year, basically, you're gonna see some huge benefits by just doing that. You can just do each of your trees, one branch, bend it over, bury it. You're gonna be amazed. I have a friend, shout out to Bill in Missouri. He does this to a lot of the trees he loves, and he'll bend multiples, each in different directions. Let it take up more space. Sometimes he'll dig them up. He'll send me some or send people some. You know, that's one way to propagate them, ground layering, right? It's a type of propagation. But you just leave it there if you want to have a bigger root system, okay? This is another way you can get your fig tree to grow out into the sun more. Let's say all that over here is shaded. Well, if we bend it over this way, bury it, it's gonna now have more canopy over this way. And that also leads me to my point about the sun that we didn't mention. We only have so much sun, right? Every day, the sun sets at the same time and rises at the same time. There's a different intensity. The days get shorter, the days get longer, right? But generally every day, where these plants are, they're getting the same sun, right? So unless I have the ability, what I mean is to move this over here into more sun, this is all we're getting in this spot. So for the whole year, we're getting X amount of sun right here. For the whole year, we're getting X amount of sun over here. Now, if I can move it into more sun, that's great, okay? Hats off to you. But how do we capture more of the sun that we're already given? Because the sun is gonna allow us to have exponential gains, huge gains. I mean, other than the hormones, the sun's gotta be the most important thing. I probably said that earlier in the video. Like, what did I say? The water's really important or something. I would say, you know, the sun can definitely compound your gains. The hormones are gonna tell it what to do. But the more sun you have, it's like the more fuel you have. Think about it like that. Water has just gotta be there. Fertilizer, all that's gotta be there. Boxes gotta get checked, prerequisites. The sun is fuel. And the hormones are telling it what to do. So how do we maximize more of the sun where we currently have the trees? It's very simple. This tree here, we actually have a main trunk that came up. We pinched it. Actually, here's the scar right there. And we formed four scaffolds. You may have saw me earlier in the video. I just removed this tip just now. So the scaffolds were getting pinched, were forming laterals, forming branches. But you can see here, it's pretty upright. I mean, this is like rowing racing for the sky, you know? Generally, when you pinch the trees, they tend to have branches that grow up a lot, not wide crotch angles. And so instead, what you could do is you could come into your tree and stake branches to maximize sunlight. Think about it. The sun actually, well, we got a lot of shade trees back here. Sun rises over here. Maybe we get some sun earlier in the day, probably not. And it takes a while. Maybe it goes above these trees and finally gets over here and then goes and sets over this way. So later in the day is probably when this tree is getting a lot of light. So let's say that we are the sun hitting this tree. And you know what? I'm gonna orientate this just to the side for demonstration purposes. Okay, so now we changed the orientation, but the sun's going straight at it. What does that mean? Well, the leaves are here and this branch is actually shading this part of the tree because the sun's coming in from that way. Now, if we took this branch right now, or if we imagine, if we just move this branch like that and fix it in that position, now we're getting sun all over this branch, still at the top of the branch, side of the branch, this side of the branch, and now the middle of the tree is getting sun. Now, what if we did this? This branch is over here. Imagine that. We took the other branch over here and moved it that way. Because even though, let's just imagine we don't touch, actually, you know what? Forget about this branch. Let's imagine we don't touch this. We're only gonna touch this one. And as it stands right now, sun's going that way, it's really only gonna hit this upper part of the tree. But if I bend this this way, look what happens now. You can actually kind of see it already. If you really pay attention to the shadows, look how much brighter this is. Whoa, the green just got, the green got so much brighter. Look at this shade right here, just by doing that. So we're maximizing the sun just by bending our branches on a wider angle, they can capture more sun that way. Talked a lot about that in many, many other videos because it's so important. And I used to come in here and train all these trees, but it was just, it just became a lot of work for me. Too much going on this current moment. It's fun training trees. But I, you know, this is a really cool thing that I think some of you guys are already doing. I see people doing it. Shout out to Jonathan that I met at Squares and Fair. He had a tree like this that he was training. Tree in the ground. He had his branches. And I used to do this with my Ronde Bordeaux right here. Like the middle of his tree, let's say is over here. He took his branches and put them all out really far away on an angle. And so, you know, this branch would get pushed out this way. This branch would get pushed out that way. This one here would go that way. And so he would just end up capturing a huge, he would have a huge canopy that way. You can do the same thing. Some people do that with the Japanese espayes or cordon systems with their figs. It's really a similar concept. What is the Japanese espaye doing? What is the purpose of it? One of the purposes is to maximize the canopy with horizontal space. By making up more horizontal space, you can have these branches grow upwards. They train those, take very special care and attention towards them. But generally, because the tree is now out like this, right? Then you have the ability to have a wider canopy and capture more sun. You can do that with your tree. Just, you don't need a Japanese espaye. Telling you, it's not that great. People love it. They rave about it. They see the Japanese do it. They see these commercial growers do it. Okay, it's cool. It's one little thing you can do, but you can get better fruit quality by just growing them as a normal tree, opening up the canopy with stakes or limb spreaders, and you can have better fruit than they can. They're doing that to maximize yields in the given space that they have. That's really all it is. And they can maintain the trees a little bit easier. It's a system of growing the trees. Everything's simple, easy. You understand what next to do. That's the Japanese espaye system or any system, high dense apples, as an example. And everything matters to them, right? You wanna be able to care for them easier. So the process of them pruning trees is a little bit easier. If you have just a Japanese espaye, you cut it back down every year. It's pretty simple. You just do a couple notes. So those are really the main things there of how to get your fig tree to grow faster. Again, I don't know if you'd really want to. I said a little bit about lignification, but lignification is just the hardening of the branches. They start green, and you can see it on these young ones. The young ones have the hormones in them to grow and grow and grow and not fruit just yet. They are fruiting, some of them. I don't really want them to. They're very, very green, flimsy. But as they get older, the wood matures. You could see it on all these, it turns brown. It becomes a lot harder to move, right? The lignin in there is what it's called, gets stronger. And that, actually that lignification process, the further along it is, before your first couple frosts of the fall or winter, depending on where you're at, that's going to net you a hardier tree going into the winter. So instead of maybe, you know, withstanding only 15 degrees Fahrenheit, your tree can actually withstand five degrees Fahrenheit or even maybe zero degrees Fahrenheit. And so you don't want to prune them in a way the hormones control that. Pruning them too much in the wrong way, shortening the branches will result in lots of growth and less lignified branches. It's that simple, okay? So you might not want to do that in a cold climate. And for those of you guys who I said, you could cut it down to nothing, let it regrow. Some of these up here, like that tree is like 12, 14 feet tall at this point. How am I going to protect that? And if I do, then I have just a massive tree that in the future will be really hard to protect and harvest from. So, you know, you do what you want to do. Everyone has their own goals. Everybody lives in a different place. There's no right from wrong. We've said that. Thanks for watching. Hit the like button. Hit the subscribe button. Check out my blog, figboss.com. We finally have some fig trees for sale. I hope to see you guys for the next one. Take care.