Here they are, right after I planted them Tuesday.
Some of you may wonder what happened to those fig trees I was trying to grow from some cuttings I got from our friend Scout.
OK, so maybe none of you have thought about it except Scout, and maybe not even her. But I have. Unfortunately, for about a year all I did was think about it. Yesterday, I took action.
It was more than a year ago that I got the cuttings — four of them — from the bountiful trees in Scout’s yard (with her permission, of course). And I went through the myterious procedures needed to get those twigs to sprout some roots, and then planted them in small pots.
But then by May, two of them had given up the will to be fig trees. But I put the two viable ones into larger pots, and for a while they produced leaves with great abandon.
Another angle.
Then, I came to a standstill. I couldn’t decide where to plant them, and I got conflicting advice from different folks. One credible source told me I shouldn’t even THINK about it until they’d gotten a lot bigger, which could take the rest of the year.
So I hesitated. Next thing you knew, the weather turned cool enough that I saw the need to bring them in. But I think it was before that that the leaves fell off. Anyway, for months, I was back to sticks that were just somewhat longer than the cuttings I had started with.
Then, a month or two back. Leaves appeared on one. No leaves on the other, but the tip of the dead-looking gray was green — for weeks. Finally, leaves there, too.
My wife told me it was time to plant them in the ground, and she wasn’t planning to use her raised beds this year. (You have to have raised beds in our yard; it’s all hard, red clay.) So I had a place.
So there they are, looking… hopeful. As soon as I see some definite growth, I plan to fertilize. Chicken manure, of course. When I was a kid, my grandparents had this fluorishing, abundant fig tree. They always told me it was growing out of where the chicken coop used to be, before I was born.
Anyway, that’s what’s happening with the fig trees. Yeah, they’re pretty small, but very green. And they’ve got loads of room for growing roots…
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