When, Why And How To Pinching Fig Trees To Force Early Fruiting

good morning everyone today I wanted to discuss the technique of fig pinching it is June 8th today and I'm starting to see a lot of people start discussing pinching their figs and this is one of those techniques where I think there is a lot of confusion centered around fig pinching a lot of people are not sure when to do it and what it does and and why people do it the first thing I wanted to discuss is that fig pinching is not like pruning Tomatoes the reason why you prune Tomatoes is multifaceted you prune Tomatoes for increased vigor and fruit set along the main stem you prune Tomatoes for increased fruit size you prune Tomatoes to promote airflow and reduce the instances of disease in your garden pruning Tomatoes is something that every single gardener should do but this is not the case for figs pinching your figs is only something you should do if you absolutely have to do it and there are only a handful of times where you should actually be pinching your face it's very important that if you're watching this video for instructional purposes you stick with it all the way until the end because I want to discuss timelines for fruiting your fig trees via pinching there are only three reasons to pinch a fig reason number one is that you want to accelerate the timeline at which a fig tree will naturally set fruit every single common female fig tree will naturally set fruit provided that the growing season is long enough the reason why you would pinch your fig tree is because you don't want to wait until August or September or October for that fruit to set and ripen fully you would pinch it to accelerate the natural timeline at which it would set fruit anyway reason number two is because you are growing a fig tree that is a variety that has a fruit ripening period longer than your growing season so let's say you live up in the Northeast and your frost free period is only a hundred ninety days and you were growing a notoriously long a growing season fig like a black Madera or a cold 'adam Blanc these fig trees are known to take a while to set fruit and once they do they have a ripening period of about ninety to a hundred days so if the natural timeline in your climate is so these fig trees don't start making little fruits little fig 'lets until say the middle of July well now you're just not going to have enough time you're not going to have ninety to a hundred days of heat and frost free period left in your season for them to ripen so if you are growing later season varieties then your climate can accommodate you will have to pinch your fig trees reason number three is to shape your fig tree if you were to go ahead and pinch this fig tree right here this growth pattern is going to stop growing straight up the way it is now what's going to happen is the energy of the fig is going to go up here it's going to realize that there's no growth point left it's going to come back it's going to head backwards and then it's going to go to one of the nearest nodes and it is going to branch out in all directions I would strongly recommend against this practice I would not recommend pruning your fig trees during the active growing season I would suggest just letting them go and then pruning them when they are dormant and you'll get a better shape and a healthier tree overall instead of damaging it and stressing it out during the growing season under all other circumstances you do not want to pinch your fig trees and I'll explain to you why all of the figs that you see here are first-year cuttings with the exception of to the tree that you see here is a call to DOM Noir what you will notice is that naturally it is exhibiting a very very nice growth pattern it has two main stems and they're growing up nice and straight and they are getting nice and thick and this tree is going to once it goes dormant make fantastic cuttings for me these cuttings are nice and thick will come nice and thick they are look how nice and straight they are they are going to be great they are going to be good quality wood for me to root and for them and for me to propagate this tree into many many copies now I want to show you what will happen if you pinch your fig tree during the active growth phase this tree right here is my V lat de Bordeaux fig now I bought this tree last year it's one of only two trees that I own that is not a first-year cutting and what you'll notice here is that it's very very bushy and the reason why it is like that is because I pruned it while it was born and I want to show you what that looks like so here I let it get frosted last year and you can see down here where I went ahead and I cut the tree about 18 inches from the base in in the middle of the winter and now this year it is growing out in all different directions because I'm trying to grow them all my figs as a single stem tree that sort of goes like this that will have three to four multiple main growing stems coming up 18 inches from the base and it is doing that however you'll notice how ugly and spindly this wood is you'll see it's pretty thin you'll see it's kind of scraggly a lot of these branches are going to have to be pruned off next year and they're not good fruit setting wood and I'm well aware when you prune a fig tree the second year or the the very next year after after the main decapitation at the main stem you're not going to get a lot of production and that's fine I'm okay with investing time into my trees to get that perfect shape but if you were just going around and pinching your your fig trees to get them to set fruit they are all going to do this you're going to take away that nice straight beautiful pattern that might call the DOM noir and all my other figs are naturally growing in and you're going to snap off the tip just to induce fruiting and then at all of these different growing tips we're all going to start pushing out in all different directions and growing the spindle growth that is not particularly useful and it's not even generally speaking good quality wood for cuttings you're not going to get nice thick cuttings and they may not even fully lignified of the year and you'll end up with green wood that you can't do much with so the only reason to pinch your figs is to force fruiting along an unnatural timeline and if you're a growing season is long enough to let that fig tree naturally set fruit you do not want to do it and I'll give you a few examples of that now this tree right here is my Italian 2:58 it's the furthest along of all of my cuttings and you'll see that it's absolutely loaded with fruit at every single node and it is rapidly setting fruit even at the new nodes you can see them all forming here they're there I have a dragonfly protecting my plants for mosquitoes so it's doing an absolutely fantastic job on its own it's only June 8th and these figs at least the figs at the bottom are already at about their mature size so they are going to have absolutely no problem ripening in my climate I have a fairly long growing season of about 250 days and our first frost usually isn't until the middle end of November it takes an Italian 2:58 fig about 90 days to ripen they're a longer ripening variety and we're probably about sixty days out from ripening so that means naturally they're going to ripen about August 8th for me sometime around their beginning middle of August worst-case scenario if we get a lot of cloudy cool weather maybe the end of August so there's no reason for me to pinch this tree and up top and for me to force any kind of fruiting because all it's going to do is ruin this perfectly compact growth habit that it's doing which is going to give me all kinds of great quality hardwood lignified cuttings for the end of the year and it's going to take the top of that tree and make it Bush out in all directions there is no reason to disrupt its normal growth pattern so I'm just going to let nature take its course because it's going to be a very early fruit er for me in my garden I do not want to touch this fig here's my olympian fig tree you'll see this one is loaded up with figs as well this is operating along a similar timeline that my Italian 2:58 is I fully expect these figs to be ripe and ready for the picking at sometime in August maybe the end of August and you'll see up here on this branch it's setting fruit as well in every single corner every single node you can see them starting right here so this is another tree that I'm not going to disrupt its natural growth habit doing a little walk around here this is my lateral Italian honey you'll see it is naturally setting figs they're all over the different cuttings so this will be another tree I'm not going to touch because of this these figs are naturally fruiting and ripening in my growing season they're all pretty early let's take you over to my Chicago Hardy this is another tree that is pumping out figs and Chicago Hardy is a pretty early ripening variety so maybe this will only take sixty to seventy-five days so it's possible that I'll have figs off this tree at some point in August as well you'll see all of the different nodes are covered in figs I wouldn't want to touch them here's my Smith tree you'll see this guy is absolutely loaded with figs as well this one branch is being very prolific this one branch down here has a really nice size big fig in it a big fig on it if you can see it it looks beautiful they're all over the place there's another one so this is another tree where I do not want to disrupt its natural growth habit are you getting the point if your setting figs naturally do not touch your trees do not disrupt what is working for you all right now that I've given you many examples of when you don't want to pinch your figs let's actually go to an example as to when you do and here we arrive at the notorious black Madera KK plant this is one of the most coveted plants for fig collectors it's regarded as one of the best-tasting figs on earth the problem is it's one of the slowest growing figs it's not particularly vigorous and prolific and it grows very slowly on top of that it has a very long ripening season ninety to a hundred days from when the first fig let's start appearing now very recently I noticed I'm starting to get the initial bumps of fig 'lets on my tree and this is a very important concept to note look at each node and you will see bumps right here you will see on my plant two bumps when you see two bumps one of those bumps is going to be a leaf node the other bump is going to be a fig wait until you see two bumps you are not guaranteed that that fig will produce fruit along that node so even if you were to pinch with one with one bump there it's not guaranteed that that will be a fig here you can start to see the initial formations of figs this will be a fig light you can see the little fig let's starting in this and all the different nodes here so I was initially thinking I was going to have to pinch this to force fruiting within my climate but it looks like I will not have to they are just starting right now let me see if I can zoom in for you those are the starts of figs those are little fig lights I initially thought I may have to pinch this fig to induce fruiting because it's so far behind in terms of growth so I'm very happy to see that they have little fig --let's forming now what you have to do is you have to work forwards about 100 days with this variety to approximate when these fig lights will be ripe edible figs and if I add a hundred days to today's June 8th date that gets me around September 18th now you want your figs to ripen when the temperatures are comfortably in the mid-80s so what does your temperature in your climate look like in around the middle of September luckily I'm still in the mid to upper 80s so this is going to ripen during a very high heat period still and figs need high heat to make their sugars and be very tasty so lucky for me I'm in a good position where this tree can fruit naturally and it I don't have to disturb its growth habits so I can get this I can get this wood right here to keep growing up up up up and I'll get some nice cuttings off this tree because if I had to pinch these little branches to induce fruiting now I'm left with these little scraggly cuttings and I'm not going to be able to do much with them so that's what you have to do if you are in the Northeast and you see your first frost in mid to late October and the 80 degree weather starts starts leaving you around Memorial door starts leaving you around Labor Day you're going to want to start pinching your black maderas now because if you do not pinch your black maderas now if they don't show any any fruits that are starting there is not going to be enough growing season left for you to have enough time for your plants to go ahead and make figs and then adequately ripen under heat here we have a cold 'adam blanc tree this is a very immature tree I bought this from Big Bill so I just got it about a month ago so it's just starting to really grow and this is another late season variety this is another roughly 90 days till ripening variety so here you can clearly see I have two bumps at these nodes there it at this node if you can see that there is one the left and one on the right see if I can turn it for you there is one bump on the left and one bump on the right so I know for a fact that if I pinch the top of this tree right now if I break that off the tree is going to put more effort into its fruit and within about seven days or so one of those bumps whatever represents the fig is going to turn into a little fig lit for me so if I were knocking if I go 100 days in the future and I were knocking up against the end of my 80 degree weather I would want to pinch this tree if I want to have fruit off of it in the season but luckily for me it looks like it's going to make its own fig what's naturally so the end of my 80 degree weather is somewhere around the middle of October about October 15th so any tree that I want to ripen is going to have to be about a hundred days before that eighty degree temperature for me to pinch because you need about 10 days for the initial fig with the form and then 90 days in a variety like this for it to age and for it to ripen so if I go back in a hunt if I go back in time 100 days from October 15th that is going to take me to about July 5th so if I don't see this fig tree actively producing figs by July 5th in my climate I'm going to have to pinch this at the top or it's not going to happen for me this year there's just not going to be enough growing season left for them to ripen properly with enough heat so I'm going to keep an eye on this tree on this tree and I'm going to hope that I start seeing little fig --let's forming and it looks like they may over the next couple of weeks and if I don't see them by I may go forward in time a little bit I may be conservative and go by June 30th so today is June 8th if nothing happens within the next three weeks I'm going to start pinching this tree at the expense of cutting wood for next year because I want to fruit this variety and make sure it's true to type and taste what's supposed to be one of the greatest figs in existence now I'm going to take you to see my raspberry latte Maya raspberry latte they were the easiest cuttings for me to route all of them were incredibly vigorous the mother tree is just it must be an incredible grower this is just the most vigorous bush it's absolutely enormous I have to water this more than any of my other figs because the the root system is so advanced but the problem with raspberry latte is its notorious for taking two or three years to really produce fruit it's a very shy bear and as vigorous as this tree is it's almost completely void of figs I should consider myself very lucky because I have one fig forming there I think it's unusual to have a raspberry lot a fig its first year the other troubling thing about this raspberry latte is I have looked all up and down at all of the different nodes and all of the different nodes only has they all have just one bump one bump one bump and when it's one bump there that bump is usually just going to be a leaf node and this variety is so vigorous in its growth habit that it clearly wants to put out leaves so I can't find any instances on this plant where I have two bumps which signifies that if I were to start pinching that I would get figs so I'm not a hundred percent sure I'm going to have any significant harvest off of this tree this year now luckily because this tree is so vigorous I have all of this spindle eastside growth so here is a good example of a piece of side growth that wouldn't necessarily make a great cutting it's kind of spindly it's kind of throwaway wood so this is one example where I am going to go ahead and I'm going to pinch that see I just pulled the end of the stem off and now it's using this this liquid which is a caustic latex like liquid you don't really want that to touch your skin so I'm going to take a risk and I'm going to hope that if I cut that if I if I pinch the tip of that then I will induce fruiting along this branch and it's not a big loss because I'm not going to disturb the for growth of the really nice wood so I'll still get nice cuttings off this tree but now I have a few additional chances to fruit on wood that's otherwise nuts not such a not such good quality here's another spindly branch right here then I really can't do anything with if you can see it so I'm going to snap the tip off of this as well and hope that I get some kind of fruiting there and then this other spindly piece of side growth that's growing out of control you can see here not really good quality wood so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to pinch that off too so what I'm going to do is I'm now I have three examples of wood that I pinched off in another week I'm going to start snapping some of the other funny-looking side growth to let it get a head as well so I'll keep an eye on this tree and I'll check to see if the branches that I just pinched yield any kind of fruit over over the next week or so or to see if all I did was induce more branching and these already ugly funky branches start branching out in even more directions if that's the case I may cut them back even further here's another example of a spindly branch that I'm going to pinch off and that's all there is to it I'll monitor it and I'll check in seven to ten days to see if I'm getting any fruit formation or if all this is going to do is induce more growth that is going to push out in all directions I can't guarantee I'll get a fig off this branch because all they have are single bumps on it there are no double bumps so that's one of the cons to this variety it tends to just require a few years for it to fruit vigorously so again just to recap and summarize if you are going to pinch your fig trees in order to induce fruiting earlier than they would otherwise naturally fruit you have to take the end of your reliable 80 degree temperatures and you need to work backwards a set amount of days and those days should be about 70 to 80 days backwards for the earlier maturing types like your Chicago hardy types your celeste types the other Mount Etna tight that are similar to Chicago Hardy that tend to ripen earlier and then for longer season varieties like your cold add-ons your black madera etc you want to work backwards about a hundred days from your last reliable 80 degree temperatures so if that is September if that's sometime in early September you need to start pinching your trees about now or you are not going to get ripe fruit and the conservative thing to do is if you don't know how long it takes to ripen just assume ninety to a hundred days and of course of course of course if they are setting fruit naturally that will ripen within your growing season do not do not do not pinch pinching is only something you should do if you absolutely have to and that ladies and gentlemen is most of what you need to know about the technical concept of pinching your figs now there's a lot of information in this video so if you have any questions feel free to write comments and I will respond to them as best as I can I just want to let you know that I'm learning figs along with you guys too most of these cuttings are first-year trees so I don't have a long history of figs like some of the other figures around YouTube and the internet do so I'm not a huge expert I'm just well versed in the technical side of things and I hope that I outlined this in a way that is easy for you to digest and understand and like I said if there's anything you don't understand feel free to ask the questions and I'll get back to you as soon as I possibly can thank you all so much for watching this video if you haven't already please subscribe to the channel for future updates and I hope to see you all again next time

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 776,920

Keywords: fig tree, fruit tree, pinching fig trees, how to pinch fig trees, fruit trees, pinching figs, growing figs, growing fig trees, fig, figs, when to pinch fig tree, growing figs in containers, pinching your figs, pinching, fig growing tips, fig growing time, fig ripening, fig tree growing, fig tree pruning, pruning fruit trees, growing figs from cuttings, growing figs in cold climates, organic gardening, backyard garden, gardening

Id: xjLeIr5Wo4Q

Length: 23min 53sec (1433 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 08 2019