My Fig Tree Looked Dead... But It Wasn't

[00:00:00]And I did something that a lot of people say you're not supposed to do. I did some mid-season What's up, Lazy Dog fam? Hope all y'all having an awesome day. It is Wednesday, July 15th here in South Georgia. And on today's video, we're going to talk about what, if anything, you can do if your fig trees start looking rough during the summer months. So, I'll explain why a few of the trees in our orchard right now look kind of rough, why we shouldn't panic about that, and what we can do to get them looking good again. I've got some real good examples we'll walk around and look at. So, this is the time of year we usually get a lot of messages from people that live in climates that have a miserable summer just like ours.

[00:00:47]They maybe have a fig tree that looks a lot like this Peter's Honey tree right here.

[00:00:51]It's lost all its leaves. And just because this tree has lost all its leaves, doesn't mean it's dead. It may look a little dead from way back here, but if we're getting a little closer, we can see it's indeed not dead at all.

[00:01:05]It's just kind of taking a pause or taking a break. So, that tree as I just showed you is definitely a worst-case scenario. That's probably the worst-looking tree in all of my orchard at the moment. Most of them look much better than that, but I want to show you that one before we look at some better ones. So, what caused that Peter's Honey tree to lose all its leaves? Well, that's our old friend Mr. Fig rust who likes to visit us this time of year. So, fig rust is extremely common in hot and humid climates, and we have a huge variety of figs growing in our orchard here, but it seems to target some of these honey figs more than others. I'm going to show you some other honey figs a little bit later in the video that have also been targeted not quite as bad as that one. For whatever reason, some of these honey figs seem to get it worse than others. Not every honey fig variety in our orchard gets it that bad, but you know, for whatever reason honeyfigs seem to get it worse than some of the other flavor profiles. So, down here during the summer we experienced this rust cycle. It gets hot and humid, the leaves on our fig trees get rust, they'll fall off, and the tree may kind of just pause for a week or two or maybe a little bit longer, and then it will start putting on new growth. And as I'm sure will happen in the comments of this video, there are a lot of people will tell you that the reason you have fig rust is because you're doing something wrong.

[00:02:32]They'll tell you, "Well, the reason you got fig rust is because you got sorry soil. You need healthier soil, or you're not watering enough, or your fertility is way down, or you need to be raking away those leaves around the base of the tree." And while all those things may be true, not all of them are necessarily practical for me and my orchard. So, yes, I do have very sandy soil on my property. It's even more sandy on the back end of the property where the fig orchard is compared to the front end of the property where my vegetable garden is.

[00:03:06]Secondly, yes, it does get very hot and dry around here. Even though we've got an irrigation system on all our fig trees, sometimes it's hard to really keep a decent amount of ground moisture there if we don't get a lot of rain and temps are as hot as they've been lately.

[00:03:23]Yes, our soil is probably not as nutritious as it could be. I do have a fertilizer injection system now on my fig orchard, and we'll talk about that on a future video. I can't really go and add compost, or I don't really want to add compost on top of my mulch around these trees. I added a decent amount of compost when we plant the trees, but you know, that probably runs out or burns up at some point. And lastly, although I know it would help, I just don't have time or resources to come blow out all these leaves from underneath all these fig trees. So, while there are some things I could probably do to help my situation, and we'll discuss some of those on our next fig video, in my climate and on my scale, rust is pretty much inevitable. And that may be the case where you live, as well. That's why you shouldn't feel bad about it. You try your best, but sometimes rust is inevitable. So, our goal here is just to try to prevent complete defoliation. We know we're going to lose some leaves to fig rust. We're just trying not to lose all of them. We want our trees to keep growing during the summer, even if it's just a little bit. We know in the fall they're going to pick back up and start growing fast again. But, you know, we want to try to keep them going during the summer, if at all possible. So, let's take a look at these LSU Scott's Black trees here again. We can definitely tell we've lost some leaves on these. We can look at the tree and tell, and we can see all those leaves down there. Despite that, though, these trees are absolutely loaded, and these figs are starting to ripen. These figs will ripen just fine, even though this tree has lost a significant amount of leaves. The good thing, though, is we've got new growth here already. So, we never had complete defoliation here.

[00:05:17]We're continuing to get new growth.

[00:05:20]That's what we want to see. Now, on the Peter's Honey here that I showed you at the beginning of the video, like I said, we're starting to get some new growth on it, but we did have a period there where complete defoliation, or almost complete defoliation, and no new growth showing.

[00:05:40]Now, it's kind of popping back out again. We want to try to prevent this from happening. You know, we lose a few leaves, okay, we want to try not to lose them all.

[00:05:51]Now, here's another honey tree in my orchard that tends to get rust pretty bad. So, this is a variety called Mary Lane, and usually this time of year, its leaves, or the tree in general, might look a lot like that Peter's honey tree.

[00:06:06]Now, we have lost some leaves. You can see a few of those down there, but still got quite a few green leaves on this tree. It still looks like it's growing pretty nicely, and we're getting some decent fig production as well there. So, what did we do different with this tree?

[00:06:22]Well, I had some extra ammonium nitrate laying around, and I sprinkled a generous amount around the base of that tree a couple times. And that improved fertility, seemed to help keep this thing growing even during tough times, resist that complete defoliation, and as a result, we got a better-looking tree.

[00:06:44]And the last example I want to show you is another honey fig variety that has definitely lost some leaves to rust, but it's on the rebound now, and I'm going to talk about what we did to get it on the rebound. So, both of these trees right here is a honey fig variety called Tina, a very, very fast-growing variety, but because it grows so fast, it doesn't branch very well. And as I've told you in the past, the way to get a ton of figs is to increase your surface area on the tree. You need to promote more branching. When a tree grows really, really fast and just produces a bunch of long, straight limbs, that's not advantageous for a lot of fig production. Those LSU Scott's Black trees I showed you earlier that were loaded had a lot of branching on them, a lot more than this tree here does.

[00:07:29]So, just a few weeks ago, this tree here was completely defoliated, looked a lot like that Peter's honey tree I showed you earlier.

[00:07:38]And I did something that a lot of people say you're not supposed to do. I did some mid-season pruning. So, for every limb, and they were long and straight, a lot longer than you see now, every limb on this tree, I pruned it back to just two nodes. You can see one node there, one node there. Same thing with that one. All these little limbs poking out, I pruned them back to two nodes. There may be three on some of them, but most of them just two.

[00:08:06]And in just a couple weeks, what that has done is stimulate a lot more branching on this tree.

[00:08:12]Give us a chance to have more surface area on this tree that's going to give us an opportunity to have more figs.

[00:08:20]So, that little trick of doing some mid-season pruning is something I learned several years ago with another honey variety that I showed you earlier, the Mary Lane variety, that's right behind me here. It also grows really fast, and you get a lot of long, straight limbs. I learned that I had to prune that one aggressively, even if it means pruning in the middle of the growing season to get more branching, to get more figs. Now, it should be noted, you shouldn't do this mid-season pruning like I'm doing unless you've got time for that new growth that is generated to grow out and harden off. If you live somewhere where you have a relatively short fig growing season, you wouldn't want to do this because that growth isn't going to be hardened off enough by the time it gets hit by a frost. But, here we've still got plenty of growing time left. We've got the rest of July, August, September, October, and we usually get our first frost at the end of November. So, at least four good months of growth left. So, if we take all those examples and try to put a bow on this, what I wanted to show you is example of a worst-case scenario when you get complete defoliation, and also help you understand that the tree isn't dead, it's okay, it's just taking a break, it will start to grow again. I also wanted to show you how some fig varieties are more susceptible to rust than others. Like I said, it's not every honey tree in my orchard. My LSU Gold tree that's way over there, I'm not going to walk over there at this moment.

[00:09:46]It looks absolutely beautiful. But some of these other honey varieties do look a little rough. And if you've got a fig tree or variety that's just kind of growing these long straight limbs, you're not getting a lot of surface area and you've still got plenty of growing time. It's okay to prune during the middle of the year to stimulate more branching, increase that surface area over time. That's going to give you a lot more figs. So, I hope you enjoyed that explanation. I hope you enjoyed seeing some real life examples. I'm not just going to show you the prettiest and most productive fig trees around here.

[00:10:20]I'm going to show you some that look rough as well so you know what to do if that happens with some of yours. And like I promised, on our next fig video in a week or so, we'll talk about our new injection system, some things, some modifications we've had to make to the orchard to get that to work, how it's working for us so far, water running through it, all that good stuff. And if you are doing any midsummer pruning or shaping on your trees and you want to use that material to grow more trees, watch this video right here. We'll show you this little fig pop method we've been using this summer, step-by-step how to do it and why it's been working so great for us. Check that out and we'll see you next time right here at Lazy Dog Farm.