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Old December 8, 2019   #3
zendog
Tomatovillian™
 
Join Date: Jun 2015
Location: VA-7a
Posts: 121
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From the look of your trees, it seems like you had a lot of vegetative growth on all of them last year. It looks like all straight, long shoots. So I would guess your trees are growing too strongly instead of fruiting. Just like if you are giving too much nitrogen to your tomatoes you get big plants with fewer tomatoes.

Generally speaking, winter pruning, while all the sugars are stored in the roots, will lead to more growth in the spring and summer since you have all that stored energy pushing back out into new growth, so it is probably not the best way to make the trees more productive. Winter pruning should be for structure/shape and you can do that any time between now and when they break bud and it will have the same effect. Or you can wait until it is pushing new growth and do the significant pruning then and you will be taking away some of the energy at that point as well which may help with getting it fruiting instead of just growing. Figs are very forgiving. And then in the spring/summer, pinch the growing tips out of the shoots as soon as they've put out 5 or so leaves. You may need to pinch them again after they start regrowing and put out more leaves, but basically you are trying to help the tree redirect some energy to fruit instead of just vegetative growth. If the shoots are all close and shading each other, it may also help to prune out some shoots in the early summer to open it up more.

Other things that can reduce your fruit set are lack of sun and too much fertilizing which just leads to more vegetative growth. All the photos show the trees in shade, but that may just be the time of year and the time of day you took the pictures, but if they don't get much sun it will always be a struggle. Figs in containers need fertilizing, but in the ground, with reasonable soil, established trees don't need much if any fertilizer or you are just growing a bigger tree and less fruit. If you fertilize, do it just in the spring, but I wouldn't at all if you do much winter pruning and just see how they do without it. Also, if you are fertilizing your lawn they are getting that as well, so consider not fertilizing the lawn around the trees.

Celeste won't really have any early (breba) figs, but if you are trying to get both the breba and main crop figs from the brown turkey, you will also have go be careful to leave some of last year's growth with the dormant breba fig buds. But my experience is that if you aren't netting the figs, the breba crop is smaller so you are less likely to be left any by the squirrels and birds. I just worry about the main crop figs, which grow on the current year's growth.

I hope this helps.
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