Fig Trees & Upcoming Frost Warnings | What to Expect

All right you guys, this is Ross the Fig Boss. So I wanted to make a timely video for you guys today because we're expecting frost here in the northeast and I know a lot of you guys in the United States, not just me, but also people down in the south and the middle of the country actually. It's pretty extreme that we're getting this cold front that's affecting a lot of people and so I'm right on the edge of it. In fact, I'm not even going to see temperatures below 32, but the chance of frost is still relatively high and so you don't even need actually a temperature below 32 to see a frost. And so it's important to think about this. I know a lot of you guys are a little bit worried and I'm trying to make this video to kind of calm everybody down to just say hey you know this is not really a big deal. I know that some of you guys are worried about the health of your trees, so we're going to cover that. If there's going to be any damage or any things of that nature and then we're also going to talk about what if you have like a lot of fruits still on your trees and you wanted to ripen them, what are some of the things you should do? And so we'll divide this first by two different categories and then we're also going to look by the way at some of the trees I have in the ground because we're seeing really good lignification and I'll talk about like the best case scenario that we can see to get the best quality cuttings and also have the hardiest trees going into this winter time. But first let's break it into two categories about people who like myself over the next couple nights will see a light frost. And so light frost maybe you could define that as maybe somewhere around 28 degrees Fahrenheit or above and the frost is going to be there but it's not going to be there for very long. It's just kind of a short thing. It's a light kiss maybe that only hits the leaves and then by the time the sun rises it's almost gone and then it is gone. And so for people like that and like myself that's a really a thing that's not going to really bother these trees at all. In fact it can almost be a good thing. It's not going to really damage the leaves. If it was you know hard enough of a frost which we'll talk about that category of people well then you should probably lose your leaves at that point. The leaves will get crispy and burned and you'll come out here the next morning and you'll see the different colored leaves and you'll see which ones got hit by the frost and which ones didn't. And over the next few days or so the leaves will start to turn crispy and they'll fall off the trees. And that's going to set your trees right in a dormancy. But for us that are getting this light frost and it is going to be very light here and for probably most of us it's not enough to really do anything. It really isn't. I don't think I'll have much damage whatsoever on any of the leaves. And then on top of that with a light frost around 28 or higher it's actually kind of a good thing because if you have figs on the tree and I'll show you some of these figs on this Ronde Bordeaux. This is kind of why I'm pointing out this particular tree is that we got some figs on here that are still green and hard and they're they're in that final ripening stage as you can see. They're not in that final ripening stage excuse me. They're not swelling just yet. But I do have a fig over here that is in its final ripening stage. You can see it's now starting to swell. It's changing color. It's getting larger. Others here are still green and hard. But this one here if this gets hit by a light frost this will actually artificially help and speed up the ripening process. Which is a good thing because then and I always look forward to this the the figs that ripen after frost are pretty nice. It's a nice little bonus and every time the frost a light frost like that or even a hard frost comes in those figs that are swollen in that final ripening stage they get they get to be some nice figs and it's like a nice little added bonus at the end of the year. So I actually look forward to that as squeezing in all the last little fruits I can. So if you had a tree let's say that you wanted to get fruit from but it was swelling like that you don't really have to worry about it. In fact the frost is only going to help. Now if it's not swelling and it's just still green and hard on the tree as most of these are on this Ronde Bordeaux I put out probably 200 figs already and I pinched a number of the branches actually to encourage more branching more fruits and I'm hoping actually by about two to four weeks from now I can get some of these actually to ripen more of them. But if you're one of those people that has these green and hard figs and it's going to be a hard frost not a light frost somewhere around 25 the frost is going to be there for an extended period of time well then maybe you want to think about actually moving your tree somewhere maybe you want to cover it wrap it and then unwrap it the following day just so that you can protect some of these green and hard figs because the tree itself will get zapped the leaves will fall off but also the green and hard figs will get zapped as well and especially if it's hard enough some of the light frost will only hit the top parts of the tree and so you don't have to really worry about that but if it's hard enough it'll go all the way down the tree and hit all the figs and all the leaves and so those green and hard ones you're just inevitably going to lose them and so if I have roughly about a month left of my season potentially if I don't see a hard frost for another month well then I'm probably better off maybe even moving a tree somewhere and protecting it because I still have a month left now but if all I had on the tree again was these figs that are swelling and in that final ripening stage I'm just going to leave it you know it's all up to you it's a preference everyone has a different situation but it's pretty much that simple and so those are also the big differences light frost again is going to lightly kiss the trees not going to damage the leaves going to help speed up the ripening of the fruits and then the the hard frost what that's going to do again is probably destroy and damage most of the leaves you'll actually damage most of the green and hard fruits and then also speed up the ripening of the fruits that are swelling on top of that in terms of other damage that you guys may see is that if you have new growth at around 28 and lower that new growth will probably take some damage if it's a extended frost it's not very light if your tree is just it's still growing longer than it should and it's not lignified and it's just still a bit soft you know that's the growth that can take some damage at those temperatures once you see about 20 some of the growth here that's really not well lignified like some of this new stuff on the Ronde Bordeaux it could potentially take damage maybe around four to six inches of growth could take some damage on that's on the tips of the growth that really isn't well lignified and so what the nice thing is actually that I'm hoping for is we don't get a hard frost for another month and so the trees will have the leaves on there for another month and so the photosynthesis is still being produced and then the trees have the ability to continue that lignification process because if you lose all the leaves you lose all that that lignification it's it just stops at that point you don't have any more photosynthesis so whatever the level of lignification is going into a hard frost and going into this winter that's about it it doesn't really improve much after that it does a little bit I will argue that but for the most part I would rather wait give them another month at least that's my if I had the choice to give them another month to lignify in time especially things like these Ronde Bordeaux these trees that after the drought had passed here in this climate we resumed growth a little bit and so some of the trees although they look pretty good like this LSU huya looks pretty good but this Ronde Bordeaux as an example you know some of this is still a bit green and you could tell it it was growing really much later in the season than it should have and so you know that's pretty much the situation and you could tell really by just how hard the wood is but also how green it is you don't really want to see much green on the bark there is still some on here but it really does depend on the tree and this drought actually that we had is really nice for the hardiness of the trees this upcoming season because this is a tree like this LSU tiger that got hit pretty hard by the the drought and so it put out a number of fruits not as many as I would have expected it to do it is a very productive thing but it fruited all of its fruits and then pretty much on its just went dormant it's not really needing this frost to kind of set these trees into dormancy and that's kind of the other thing right a hard frost will set them right into dormancy and on their way to it to going to sleep a light frost isn't going to do that but some of these trees like even this long to oot has pretty much already started going to sleep it's not growing anymore it's getting ready for winter the branches are really well lignified I do actually have one fruit up there but this ripened a full crop and now it's done and it's time to go to bed and so the nice part about this drought is that the trees grew to a certain length and then stopped and so now the the growth here is extremely well lignified very brown very hard and so I actually for most of us are going to have a better ability to withstand something like a hard frost and a much hardier trees this year and so I'm actually hoping that instead of maybe bending these trees over and covering them there's a few in here I'm sure I could just let them go I don't have to protect them probably the same thing with stallion and long to oot and azores dark maybe even this campanile looks pretty decent anything that really survived it didn't grow like crazy this winter or this year maybe I could get away with this nerino the same thing and so that's you know that's kind of most of the things there that we have to worry about it's all in a way kind of good we're just getting through the motions of what normally happens every year and so I thank you guys for watching this one I hope you enjoyed it hope you gonna have a good fall here and your season doesn't end so abruptly the worst thing that could happen is if we get a really hard freeze very quickly and so that would be like a temperature of 20 degrees very soon we need to have a little bit of a slower progression let's see 25 of a hard frost then let's see 20 then let's see 15 when we go from you know 25 or 32 degrees all the way down to 15 that's disaster so we'll be all right I'm sure a lot of us will be fine throughout all this and so yeah guys I appreciate it hit that subscribe button check out the blog figboss.com we'll see you for the next one all right take care