Thursday, November 15, 2012

Fig tree maintenance!

Time to prune the fig tree back.  I cut it back by 1/4, which is the advice that I'm reading across the internet, and also trimmed off a shoot from the bottom of the plant, leaving three main branches.

Then we circled the tree with a plastic netting, and filled it in with oak leaves to protect it from the winter weather.  As you can see from the photo, I still need to haul a few more buckets of leaves, but it's almost done. That's it!

I also took the trimmed pieces and stuck them in potting soil.  I'm hearing that fig is one of the easiest plants to propagate from cuttings....we'll see! I have some milk carton cloches to put over them should it get terribly cold.  So far we still haven't had a killing frost....still waiting.

4 comments:

  1. Hey A.Pat - can you send me which articles/blogs you have found about fig tree pruning? We need to prune ours as well...the leaves have all died and there is still some figs on the branches.

    Thanks!!

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    Replies
    1. Here's the article I followed for protecting the tree, recommended for young trees. http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Chicago_hardy_fig/
      These people are farther up north, I think region 6, so I may not even need to do this, but since this is the first year with the fig tree, I wanted to be sure it survived.
      Here's the article on propagating the stems that I cut off: http://www.gardeningknowhow.com/fruit-gardening/fig-propagation.htm

      Em, do you Pinterest? I have a huge garden board on there. I love Pinterest!

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    2. I forgot to mention that I sprayed the original tree where I cut off the stems with a black pruning spray to be sure no disease got in that way.

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  2. Thanks!! I'll look at those articles. Hopefully we won't kill them! HA!

    I don't do Pintrest, but that's a great idea! I'll look into getting an account.

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