Did I cut too much? Not enough? Just right?
I mentioned going up to Bennettsville over the weekend. The house up there where my grandparents lived when I was a kid, and where my uncle lives now, had a couple of fig trees that used to bear fruit bountifully all summer.
And I never saw anyone prune them. Maybe they did it when I wasn’t there, but it looked like it grew natural and wild — a fluffed-out explosion of long, tall branches that almost gave each tree the profile of a gigantic tumbleweed. A lot of the figs were beyond my reach, although I guess that doesn’t mean all that much from the perspective of a kid.
But now, figs don’t seem to grow the way they used to. Not the ones I grow here, anyway. Some years we get no figs, sometimes we get a few. Last summer was a sort of bounty year for us — maybe a couple of dozen figs from each, all summer long. Maybe that brick wall is bad for them. Maybe they’re not at the right angle to the sun. One of those in B’ville had grown on the site of a former chicken coop, which is an unfair advantage. We don’t have chickens. I don’t think they’re allowed in our neighborhood. Anyway, I dunno what the problem has been.
I love figs. I want more of them. A lot more.
We have a couple of different varieties. There’s the unfamiliar (to me at the time I bought it) cultivar you see above. I bought it, potted, from the State Farmer’s Market way back when the market was where it was supposed to be, maybe 20 years ago. I forget the name of it. Some Greek variety, I think. When we have figs, they get pretty big, but they never turn color — they’re still green when they’re fully ripe.
The Brown Turkey (I think) that my uncle gave me.
The other, smaller one at right is of a more familiar type — Brown Turkey, like we had in the Pee Dee. Although the figs do grow bigger than I remember. And they bear better. We have some every year, and usually more than the other tree bears. This plant was a gift from my uncle who died in 2016, so I really don’t want anything to happen to it.
But yesterday I undertook the plunge, hoping that I could make these plants healthier and more productive than ever. I think I chose the perfect time to prune — a cold day for South Carolina, but not as cold as the next few days would be.
I hope I did right. Mainly, I hope I didn’t kill them. Having them do better than they have been thus far would be a bonus.
Any experts out there? What do you think? Did I do the right thing?
An extreme closeup of one of the wounds I inflicted. I’m worried abou that green tinge around the edge. Was it really dormant?
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