How to Grow a Fig Tree from a Cutting | Propagate Figs for your Garden

what's going on growers it seems because you only coming to you live from Jersey if you're anything like me then you're obsessed with buying plants and fruit trees the only thing is they can get a little expensive when you add them all up so today I want to show you how to easily get your own free fig trees by propagating them yourself let's figs are one of those fruits that don't continue to ripen after you pick them so it's tough to get truly ripe figs from the store if you want those truly ripe figs like I always say one of the ways you're gonna have to do it is to grow it yourself or either know someone who does grow them if you know someone who has their own fig trees you won't have to pay for their own you can easily propagate them that's what I'm gonna show you today first I want to give you a peek at one of the fig trees that I propagated this year so this right here is the end result a brown turkey Fig cloned and propagated from what I already have so today we're gonna go through the steps that are necessary to get you to this point so you'll be able to grow your own figs for free nothing like saving money and getting fruit while you're doing it if you're new to propagating and cloning your own plants a fig tree is a great place to start because it's one of the easiest fruits to propagate also when it comes to propagating it you're not gonna have to graft it onto another root stock you could just take a cutting for the plant root it and plant it into the ground when it comes to timing the best time to propagate your figs in my opinion is gonna be in the winter when you're pruning them for me in New Jersey zone 7a the time to prune best is right before you wrap this victory because if we don't wrap this victory we're gonna have some winter die off so on this fig tree right here I'm gonna show you how I prune that one and how I propagate it because this obviously was already pruned back here I'm not gonna unwrap it so this is a fig tree that I bring indoors and outdoors which is one of the easiest ways to do it if you live in a location like me where the winters get very cold when it comes down to it fig trees do better when they're tip pruned in the winter so tip reading basically means when I have this tip right here I'll prune that top off that terminal bud and what I'll do is encourage more of that lateral growth that's important for fig trees the only thing is when we cut these tips buds off we don't want to just get rid of that would we want to propagate with it so the best wood to propagate is basically gonna be your hardwood cuttings that are one two or three years old you want about nine inches you want a good size you also want it about half inch to 3/4 inch thick which is to be some of your best cutting wood so what I'm gonna do is cut a piece of wood show you how I'm gonna do it and then we'll move the next step knowing all those requirements we're gonna choose this branch right here so we've got a straight vigorous piece of wood about nine inches long and what we're gonna do is cut it right below a node so you've got a node right here basically about it we're gonna cut right below that the reason we're gonna cut below that is because that's most likely where the routing is going to come from so this looks dormant it almost looks dead but you can see the green in it this is still quite alive this is a good candidate for routing if I had more branches I would prune more of them but I'm not gonna really prove too much because I've already routed some so this is a great candidate there's a few different steps we can take to getting routing from here but first I'm going to show you how I did it and then I'll show you a couple different ways after I want to mention that we have a winner for the Felco pruners I'm gonna announce that at the end of the video so stay tuned now that we're at this point where we have the branch already to be cloned now I'm gonna make a mixture and a medium that we can put this into and let it root so when it comes to creating a medium what we want is something that is able to retain water but can also drain it because we need to retain some order but we can't become supersaturated that there's no oxygen so what I'm gonna be doing is using a mixture of 50% coarse sand and 50% peat moss so what first thing we're gonna do is put those together I'm just gonna get some sand and mix that into here and this is coarse sand which is lard which is gonna really help us with drainage but then we're gonna also have some peat moss which is great for retaining water I only have peat moss here I'd like to use coco coir but the peat moss is what I have so that's what we're gonna do so first we want to get about a 50/50 mixture I'm gonna add some mortar and let that absorb all of it so it's wet but not super saturated we want this to be pretty damp we've got this added together I'm just gonna put some water in let's add mini a little more sand when it comes to rooting these big trees it's gonna be basically mainly humidity that's gonna be your most important thing humidity of the soil the moisture in the soil but also how humid the air temperature is so if it's too humid and the soil is too wet then you're gonna get rot and fungus and if it's too dry you're gonna dry out and it's just gonna basically not be enough moisture to survive so having that balance between the two is very important so I'm just gonna get this peat moss ball mixed and you can see it's a little oversaturated but I'll drain that out before I put it into the cup a nice 50/50 mix here now that we have our mixture all made I'm just gonna take some of this I'm gonna drain a little bit of the water out place a into my cup push it down just a little more okay that's our mixture next what we're gonna do is grab our stick or our branch tuck looks like you found something you dug it up whereas I was starting but next what we're gonna do is this isn't 100% necessary but it will definitely help I'm gonna add a rooting hormone this is clone X I'll put a link to it in the description so what I'm gonna do is just take this and dip my plant into it you could you know pour it into a separate thing so you're not mixing all the plants up together all the different hormones and everything but we're gonna take this we're gonna dip it in the rooting hormone and then before I actually even push it in actually we dip a little more we really want we really think the roots are going to be coming from the buds so like here and there where the nodes are so I'll just leave it in there for a minute and then I'm gonna want to create a little space not not a too thick but just a little space going down to there because I don't want to push all the rooting hormone off as I'm pushing it down so we'll create that little space then we'll take our our branch nice and dipped in the rooting hormone we'll push that right in we want to keep it a couple inches off the bottom but we want to make sure you've got enough at the top we've got a number of buds that can root that's why you want I'm a number of buds that can leaf out that's why you want about 9 inches so that's all you got to do right there now we're not gonna really water this again because it's retaining moisture until we feel like it needs to so most like we won't have to order it to all because we've got the peat moss in there that'll help retain moisture now we want to cover it and control the humidity level looks like Chuck wants to interrupt things a little bit have some fun this guy's always down to play old grapevine just loves snapping them it's fun to keep some of the sticks in here get every ste yeah days like this he just goes not so much fun and we have this thick it's in the medium right now something I wanted to mention was first of all you have to have to have drainage holes at the bottom you'll notice I took a razor and cut drainage holes down here when you need to have a drainage we don't want that water sitting and becoming anaerobic without oxygen we need oxygen in this medium that's one of the reasons we use this and to make sure we can drain the water another thing that I want to mention is this is peat moss and sand there's no fertilizer in this we want like in inert medium because we're not going to be feeding anything because there's not even any roots left it just needs to be a high humid environment for those roots to actually excel now to create a humid environment we can't just leave the plant like this or it'll dry out and die we can either take a bag and put it over the top to create a small little hoop house for a humid area just for its own cop or what I did was simple I mean this isn't rocket science I took ten or twelve of them that I had potted and then just stuck this over the top on a piece of wood this created a high humid environment and then if I needed to lower the humidity at all I just stuck something underneath of it so again it doesn't have to be pretty it doesn't have to be rocket science these aren't very hard to propagate these fig trees now after your fig trees have been sitting for a couple weeks maybe even a couple months you might start to see some growth like I had on this one don't let that fool you at first because just because you're seeing a little growth doesn't mean that there's roots growing down low so you may have roots growing down low and no green up top really you may have green up top and not really that many roots down low so you want to make sure you monitor it and be a little patient you should see some roots coming out the bottom corners I've seen people even use plastic see-through cups clear plastic cups so they can see when the roots are growing that's a good idea too I just use these because I already had them on hand so you'll see some roots coming out the bottom again this could be a big a big trick another thing to mention is after they have rooted and they've they're so used to this high humidity mid environment so you can't just take them out right away you've got to slowly introduce them a new environment so if you have this over the top of it once you see that they're rooted maybe you take it off halfway for a couple hours and then maybe the next day you take it off the full way for a couple hours and then just slowly reintroduce them to a normal environment that's not super high humidity all fig trees and varieties are a little different so be patient it could take even a couple months for this to root now that's the way I like to do it I've had success with it but there's also another way that I've seen a number of people do it and I'm sure it works so if using a plastic bag what we do is before we do any of these steps will just take this cutting and before it has any rooting hormone or anything we'll take this cutting and we'll just wrap it in a paper towel around the base you want to dampen the paper towel just a little bit first I'm not gonna do it here cuz I'm just showing example and we want to wrap some of the bottom not too many times just just to keep that moisture level up and then we'll put it in a bag and you could do with these 10 15 20 cuttings may as you want put this in a bag and then put it in a warm space for about 3 4 or 5 weeks maybe above your fridge would be a good spot and make sure it's relatively damp keep an eye on it makes you're not getting any fungus or anything and then check back every little while because you see start to see some roots growing at the base once you see some initial roots growing then you could move over into plant to get into a cup and you could even do potting mix because it's gonna have roots by that time so whether you gonna go for this bag method first before you go to the cup or just into the cup to propagate your face look at tuck over here eating some of the bok choy tuck what are you doing boy get into the bok choy so whatever method you go for that's up to you when it comes down to it the temperatures between 50 and 70 degrees is gonna be your best he just dug out the whole bok choy so that's okay between the he's having fun and he's always giving us a good lap so the 50 to 70 degrees is basically gonna be where you want to be the higher temperature is gonna encourage the quicker rooting so again this isn't tough this is easy to do everyone should at least attempt it you've got nothing to lose especially when you're cutting off those pieces just like this now I want to show you this one that's growing really well I want to show you the roots in it and then we're just gonna transfer it into a pot now that it has roots in its growing we have a potting mix in here this is my favorite this is happy frog I'll put a link in the description too so I'm just gonna show you the roots and then put it into the pot we're gonna flip this over just like we would any other plant because I want to show you that we've got some nice roots growing here as you can see look at all those roots that's what you want to see see I'm gonna break some of this medium off because I don't want all of it in there and I want to show you some more of the roots so we're gonna be gentle just shake it a little bit and then I'll wash it off a little bit you can see all the roots growing from that that's what you want to see that's a clone fig tree for free I wash this off with water so you can see all the roots on it when you come close you can see where they're all coming from really well rooted it's gonna be a really healthy plant now I'll transplant it into this potting mix I made a big mistake I accidentally just dumped all the sand right here on the woodchips not smart but I'll clean it up it happens so we're just gonna route it like we would any other plant or pot it get that in to make sure everything's in there nicely just tuck her all in I already moisten the soil this is again happy frog great soil love this stuff light retains moisture well we're gonna add just a little bit more and that's it we're gonna baby this and probably keep it up with hot humidity just has his transplanting but that's how you that's that's it's not rocket science that's how you get three plants and you can share with your friends one of the best things to do is to find someone who has a big tree variety you don't have when they're pruning it take some of those cuttings and get your own there's no point of buying your own when you can get it for free I only prune about five or seven or ten of these and clone them because I don't want too many of the same variety this is brown turkey I already have two I don't need ten ground turkey so the ones I have I'll just share with my friends locally and I'll get some more varieties in the future clone those and just spread them all around when it comes down to it figs are one of those trees that don't go in my zone but I'll still grill them there's not a lot of things that I do that I try to push the boundary but figs are one of those because you can bring him inside bring him outside you only have to wrap them and it's just I have to have them fresh off the plant there's nothing like it before I closed the video off I want to announce the winner for the giveaway of these pruners right here $75 fellow pruners great shape rotating handle so what I did was I had the number one to a thousand you guys emailed me your guesses I put into a random number generator the number came out at 140 I'll show you a picture of it I went through all the emails there was two people one person had 144 which was second I'll put the number in right here you were super close but the winner was Tony s with the guest 143 so I sent you an email just responded back to me if you guys like these giveaways let me know I'm gonna do more if you want to see another giveaway in the next video I'll do a giveaway giving away maybe 50 or something $100 gift card so you guys can get some fresh seeds for the next year if you enjoyed the video hit the like button hit the subscribe button share with your friends don't forget to hit the notification Bell so you can continue to follow along especially for that new tuck video coming out and me and talk we'll be back at you real soon again don't forget to check out the merch down low I want to put some links to the different materials and tools using the video we'll catch you the next one Dean's pre-owned and talk we [Music]

Channel: The Gardening Channel With James Prigioni

Views: 512,791

Keywords: how to grow a fig tree from a cutting, propagate fig tree, fig tree cutting, cloning fig tree, how to, how to propagate a fig tree, how to grow a fig tree, how to fig tree, garden, gardening, blake kirby, james prigioni, david dorbik, logan paul

Id: nsxPINRASX0

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 19 2020