Caring for Fig Trees After Planting

Hey fig lovers this is Ross the Fig Boss. Did you just plant your fig tree in the ground, in the soil? Well I just did the same thing here in the Philadelphia area. I planted about 50 trees this year, not just in the spring but also some in the summer, not too long ago right before July 4th and I wanted to bring you guys through a lot of the details, the finer details that I go through when caring for these trees after the fact. There are certain things I think you can do that helps your fig tree get established faster. I mean that's really the name of the game. We waste, I find, a lot of growers I talk to and help on a regular basis. I find a lot of you guys waste a lot of time because you're missing something in particular. So let's go through some of these trees and we'll really walk you guys through some of the problems I've faced. The main message and the main thing you should be trying to get your fig tree to do is to grow. We want our fig trees to be putting out new leaves. We want every single branch to be growing and we want these branches to be growing continuously throughout the duration of our growing season. So there are a couple things that have already kind of went wrong with some of these trees like this one down here. We got a pretty bad case of rust after I planted this. This tree, we had a ton of rain that came in that day, sort of after the fact, which actually is not usually a bad thing. You can see there's actually rust down here on the neighbor tree right next to it. It's not terrible, but if the rust is bad enough, obviously it's going to defoliate your tree. The less leaves we have, the less energy the tree is going to have. So obviously it's not going to grow as quickly. So the same thing can be said for fruit set. When you have a lot of fruit set on your young tree, well the fruits take away energy. The leaves produce energy. So we want to have the right balance. It's not that we shouldn't let our fig trees fruit when they're young. I recommend though removing most of them, especially if it's not growing. But you can see because of this large Brava here that's on the tree, and also because this tree was in a container for a longer period of time. This was like a three or five gallon size pot that I planted rather than the one gallon trees that I sell you guys on the website. This tree is more likely to and as a result I've left one main crop on here and I removed the rest. So you can actually kind of see it right there is where I removed that fruit. There's kind of a little bit of a scar that's left over. So here's another really good example. This is a young white Madeira number one. And you can see it's got little figs down there, all the way down there at the soil, and also going up the branch. And this will probably produce figs all the way up the new branch here. Ideally what you should do here, no matter what, is remove some of these. I am going to come in here because they're not going to taste very good anyway. I'm going to remove some of these. So we're just going to break this off, break this one off. Be careful of the sap. You can even come in here really close where the fruits are just forming and break this off with your thumb before the fruits really get that big. And that's going to get your best bang for your buck. One of the things I really see a lot of, especially for you guys down in the south, is that your soil is not just, it's just not very good. You know, if you have sandy soil, maybe you're on the coast, you know, here in the Philadelphia area we're rather lucky that we have actual soil. When you start to go into Jersey, especially central Jersey, you start to get a lot of sand and the soil is just nowhere near as good as it is here. And so as a result, you can end up having trees that are just not fed enough. They have some deficiencies. So this tree, actually not that long ago, you can see this paler leaf down here was even more yellow than this, I promise you. And the whole tree looked like that. Now this is shortly after I planted it, and clearly I did not do a good enough job feeding this in the pot that it was in before I planted it. This is one of the mistakes I mentioned in my planting video, the demonstration that we did. You can see the trees greened up nicely. You can see also how lignified this new growth is. This is proof that it hasn't really been growing all that much. And finally, only recently, do we have some new growth that's coming here at the very top. But the trees will not grow if there's deficiencies. And until those deficiencies are corrected, you're going to have a tree that's not doing what it's supposed to be doing. So you really want to look for lush green growth. When these young trees are in their pots for just too long, you know, they don't really get the nutrients that they need. So having a pot, a tree in a pot for too long is also not good. But having said that, I would rather feed the tree, make it really nice and healthy in the pot it's in before planting it. It's way easier to correct the deficiency and get it really nice and strong and growing again, rather than planting it and hoping it fixes the problem. Another reason why your tree may not be so lush and green, you know the soils has a problem. And you also have to consider things like soil moisture. This tree, I think, is getting plenty of soil moisture. We come in here, you can see this clay is very moist. It's been raining a lot. That's really helped establish these trees. But if the soil is too wet, you have your plants, your fig trees planted in a bog, wetland area, places that don't drain well. They're going to have imbalance of life in the soil that's going to prevent your trees from uptaking nutrients. The nutrients may be in the soil, but if it's over watered, you're going to have a problem. So if you know the drainage is good, and it's in the middle of the summer, it's really, really hot outside. Like the chances of you over watering your tree is slim to none. In fact, I'd highly recommend you water, water, water. Water is going to be the fastest way that you get your fig tree to grow. A lot of people think about fertilizer, but as long as the nutrients are there in the soil, it's covered. There's no deficiencies. Water is your best bet. Heat and water. So if you can irrigate these guys, you can come out here and make sure you're hand watering, whatever it is. Every single day or every other day, water your trees. One of the things people really get bogged down about is fig mosaic virus. You can see that there's some deformity and also some spotting. Obviously, this is not good. It interrupts photosynthesis, and the trees are not going to get as established. This is usually a sign again of some nutritional deficiencies, but I would not worry too much about this. What we need to do is just prune these trees back next year. So this wintertime, try to encourage this thing to grow as much as possible, and then in the wintertime, we're going to prune this back to a really low height. That's going to encourage some nice healthy growth to form down here, maybe even some growth below the soil, and then we're going to get our trees off to the races. So one of the best tips actually that I can offer you guys is to do some pinching. I know a lot of people are against pinching for whatever reason. I don't necessarily use it anymore for fruit production. I get it. I use it to train my trees and establish them faster. The idea with pinching, you can see down here on this particular tree, it was one branch that turned into two. There is a little bit of a delay once you remove the apical bud by just coming in here with your thumbs, your pointer finger, and breaking this apical bud off. There is about a 10 to 2 week delay in terms of the tree resuming growth, but it's well worth the effort because if you don't have a whole lot of shoots down here at the base, you just have one single stem, we want our tree to start leafing out and have multiple branches, especially when it's in the ground. I know some of you guys, you want to have that single stem trunk, but the bigger, the more trunks that you have down here at the base, the wider the base is of your tree, the more sunlight it's going to capture and the more established it's going to get faster. This is really critical. I've done it to a number of trees already. I do it to all the trees in a container. There's actually another one down here that we've already pinched. You can see some new branching forming there. That's basically just the gist of it. I will wait. I think it's a good idea to wait a little bit until the leaves are about the size of your hand or larger. I think it's better to wait a little bit longer for some of these small ones. Here's actually a tree that took a lot of winter damage and we don't have a whole lot of growth just yet from this. So this is something, a tree that's really weak and not established. We definitely want to try to get this to have as much growth as possible. Same thing here with this panache. It was very similar. It took a lot of damage this winter. There's not a whole lot of growth coming down here. So I did let it grow though a little bit longer just to get it a little bit more size so we can get multiple growth points here. Basically the bigger the tree is before you pinch it, the more branching it's gonna have. Here's actually one down here. This is a tree that I'm really trying to establish quickly. You can see one branch turned into two, but ideally one branch turns into three or four. So the bigger it is, like this branch right here, you can see the leaf is bigger than my hand. If I remove the apical bud here, we're going to get three or four scaffolds on this one and that's going to be beautiful for getting this thing established fast. So one of the things a lot of people overlook here is actually wood chips. These wood chips will break down, provide so much life, conserve so much moisture. It really will make the nutrients that already exists in the soil available to these trees. You will have trees established much quicker with the help of mulch. Thank you here guys for watching this video. I hope you learned something. I know you're going to use some of these tips. Every single one of you, I think, can use at least one of these. So thanks for watching. Hit the like button for me. Hit the subscribe button. Check out my blog figboss.com. I definitely have some fig trees there for sale, so if you're interested, check it out. Thank you.