What Should I Do To Save My Fig Trees?
Janet in Massillon says, “I’ve got a question about my fig trees. The previous year I protected them, covered them. They did great. And I had tons of figs, but none of them ripened. Now this past winter, I wasn’t able to cover them. So I’m not getting any growth out of the branches that are still there. But I am getting some from the root systems, and they’re both hardy figs. So I’m wondering, should I cut up all of the sticks, and how should I treat them? Should I fertilize them?”
Everything that you’re saying is exactly what you would want to do. You do want to cut off any of the dead, and you want to kind of go back until you see some leaf growth. They should be leafing out a little bit now, so you would want to even scratch the bark, you know, and make sure it’s brown.
If it’s green, there’s still some life to it. So cut out all that dead, and then I would fertilize it with Grow Big or one of the Fox Farm products, something organic. And I would use a quick release. I think that would really help it. You could do like a plant tone or some sort of an organic slow-release fertilizer like into the soil, too. That would help feed it, you could double feed it that way.
There’s a few plants that come late, like the fig, and like Rose of Sharon, and Butterfly Bush, and even the Butterfly Bush did die back to the ground in most places this year. So we’re just gonna start to feed them really heavily next week, wake them up, and get them growing again.
Sometimes these nighttime temperatures where we’re dipping back down into the high 30s like we did, it just slows that progression down. If our nighttime temps stay up in the 50s, our daytime temps 60s, 70s, 80s, then we’re going to start to see regular growth. But at night, only being in 50s or 60s during the day, dropping down into the 30s at night, the wake-up process is really slow on the plants when that happens.
It’s a tough one to have a fig not be protected. There will be some dieback on it. But like she said, she’s seeing growth from the base already. And as they continue to warm up, you’ll see growth come up further up the stems if the stems are still alive. It definitely made it, so that’s a good sign.
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