How to Prune OVERGROWN & TALL Fig Trees

all right fig lovers this is Ross the Fig boss today we're going to actually be pruning fig trees it's that time of the year here in the Philadelphia area first of all we've had a few frosts actually rather early this season those frosts and the colder temperatures have set the trees into dormy and that's usually what happens the trees will kind of do their thing they may even have fruit on them they may even ripen fruit after Frost but the frost comes in and sets them in a dorcy or the colder temperatures if you don't have a dormy period or Frost where you guys live you can still grow fig trees but what you want to do to actually set your dormy period so you can prune your fig trees is you actually you want to defoliate the trees remove all the leaves be very careful wear wear gloves wear long sleeves and if you're going to be pruning them at all definitely wear long sleeves and gloves the sap can be costic to people's skin everybody's a little bit different every fig tree is a little bit different um I've got burned many times and uh just be careful of that so that's when we're going to be pruning our fig tree is actually during dormy now you can prune them during the summer I have talked about in other videos how you can actually prune them to encourage them to put out a second flush of growth in the summer that then also produces another crop of main main crop figs that then ripen later in the season it's a really awesome technique if you have a long enough season however we don't normally prune them in the summer because that's where the figs are the figs grow or as the tree grows the figs form so if we remove the growth during the active growing season we're removing our fruits and that's the whole point of even growing a fig tree well this branch is roughly 2 and 1/2 3 fet in length if I bring this back by a third or a half or even 90% this section of the tree will just really want to grow and grow and grow next year this part of the tree may even grow 7 to 10 feet in one season because we pruned it so hard and we head back the branches so you don't want to head back the branches if you want fruit instead instead of taking this Branch back by a third a half or 90% we want to take it back 100% we want to bring it back to as low as the point that we possibly can now that's called a thinning cut not a heading cut so all the cuts that I'm going to be doing here on this video are going to be thinning cuts a lot of you guys have a tree that's too tall so as an example if we take the tallest point on our fig tree which on this tree is this Branch here and this Branch here if I follow that back I trace that back to the lowest point it's going to then go down to the soil line so one of the tricks and things that I like to do is get a saw actually not pruning shears very little pruning is done with pruning shears on fig trees and most fr in trees you get a saw this is the perfect tool and we actually come in here down at the base and we remove one of the trunks so if you guys have a bush rather than a fig tree figs naturally want a bush unless you train them into a tree you're going to have multiple Trunks and you could potentially come all the way down to the base and remove a single trunk every year we took out one of the scaffolds right back there it's a pretty thick branch we brought that back in its place is now this growth here but also what has come up is this watero all the way from this from the base we call these suckers in the world of fig trees and guess how tall that water shoot is it's almost taller than any of the other scaffolds on these on these trees so if I really wanted to let's say I could take out this scaffold right down here so this guy that goes up we follow this all the way up to the top of the tree I could remove that if I wanted um because then this other one here is going to take its place cuz if you remove a trunk then something else will grow up in its spot and you'll eventually have this recycling process I don't see a great reason to remove any of the trunks down here at the base I think the tree is low enough low enough in height now the same thing happens on a tree we have one single stem that comes up and then it branches is out and forms scaffold so instead of you know if I wanted to follow back the highest point like on this tree all the way down I could find the scaffold which is this one here that it's attached to and remove that now that's a little drastic for certain situations uh and certain people maybe you don't want to remove that much generally the more growth that we remove the less fruit that we're going to get The Following season certain people have trees that are just too massive so what we're going to do is we're going to come in here and we're going to make a cut right here I'm going to follow the largest the tallest choots and I'm going to cut them all the way back to a lower point and I'm going to use a saw cuz that's all that's really necessary all right so there's the tallest growth now gone we'll put that aside we'll sell that as cuting we also have this point of growth right here that was the tallest point on the tree as well now if I were to keep this there's nothing wrong that's going to happen and also fig trees I want to say this they don't require annual pruning to be productive the following year that is just a general like myth I've heard about with all Fring trees you know until the tree that you have has been in the ground for like 30 years 50 years it's it's been in the ground it's so old and decrepit that it's really struggling to grow quickly and it's not producing a whole lot of vegetative growth and you want that to happen or maybe it's really not Fring a whole lot then you can say all right well I want to FR it a lot more so I can rejuvenate the tree I want to remove it at its lowest point possible I don't want to remove this uh leaving some of that growth behind every cut I make is flush with the trunk of the tree so that's one I'm also going to remove this we're going to bring this back as low as possible there's no reason to to really keep that because I don't want anything growing out in this direction anyway all right so now we have another tree we're going to look at this is called Nino or Moro de caneva you can see it's got a a main Shunk down here at the base and it's splits off to multiple scaffolds it's the biggest tree the tallest tree at this moment in the art what's also happening because I have so many fig trees in this plot is that we have a lot of shading that's going on behind the caneva Fig Tree and also if I don't reduce the height of this somewhat uh the tree will probably reach 25 maybe 30 ft in in the near future we're just going to follow some of these branches up here here back to a much lower point we're going to leave this this Branch here because this is smaller and this is going to fruit for me next year and this is going to help aid the structure of the tree going forward but I'm going to take this out flush with the tree and that just took out a lots a lot of growth because again I brought this growth flush back to this growth here that will then replace what we just removed okay the same thing is going to happen with this growth up here follow this all the way down and we bring it back to its lowest point now it's unfortunate we don't already have a growth like this that can replace it but maybe at some point in the future we will flush and there it is and that's how you per a fig tree with as very few Cuts as possible that's the key you want to take one lesson from this video that's a good one to take this Branch here and so what I'm going to do is I'm following all this down and again we're going to use our saw and we're going to remove this growth as low as I want flush with growth that's already existing and there you have it so now this tree if we just look at it really closely it's still got a lot of branching in here it's still going to be very productive we have a lot of fing wood here for next year we actually have a lot of braa buds on here but we've dramatically reduced the height so we also have some suckers back here these are just growth that's really healthy really vigorous that's coming up from the base these are water shoots typically these don't fruit I'm leaving a little bit here down here at the base but ideally what you want to do is remove as much of this sucker as you can because the more you leave behind it'll continue to sucker in the future