Orchard People

Back in the 1980s,
there was a really fun film called
Raiders of the Lost Ark, and of course, it was starring a young and handsome
Harrison Ford. Now, in this film, archeologist, Indiana Jones is looking for a sacred artifact,
and this treasure was supposed to have incredible . Power.
The problem is that bad guys wanted to get the treasure first. Adventures ensue, and I won't tell you what happens in the end,
but let's just say Indiana Jones doesn't give up easily.
Now, this is a radio show about fruit trees. So why on earth are we talking about Indiana? Indiana is not the only one who enjoys a good adventure, and so my hero on the show today, oh, sorry. My guest on the show today is Sam Hubert.
I think of him as an Indiana Jones of the plant world because each year
he sets out on trips into the wild to find unique fig trees and native plants that he can propagate in his test garden.
Then he and his colleagues will choose the best of the best and offer them for sale in the
one Green World Nursery in Portland, Oregon.
And I'm gonna talk to Sam in just a moment,
but first I wanna hear from you, send in your questions, comments, or just email us to say hi, and we will enter you into today's contest.
And this month's prize is a
gift certificate from the One Green World Nursery for $50 U S D. You can use it to buy plants or trees or gardening supplies, whatever.
So to enter today's contest, send your email to instudio101@gmail.com. That's instudio101@gmail.com. And do remember to include your first name and where you're writing from.
I look forward to hearing from you soon. So now, Sam, welcome to the show today. Hey, thank you for having me. Sam, am I the first to call you the Indiana Jones of the plant world? Yes, definitely . I'm surprised. I wanted to know, how often do you go on trips to look for fig trees and other plants in the wild?
It's sort whenever we can find time to do it, you have to really carve it out because otherwise the nursery, plants don't really take a day off. But lately we've been able to do a lot more and more of it. And it's essentially whenever I take a trip anywhere,
because my trips for pleasure and my trips for, finding new plants , aren't exclusive at all.
So yeah, definitely a few times a year we, I try to make dedicated,
trips with certain spots we wanna hit or,
certain things we're looking for or
places we want to get back to that we want to go look further at, or, have just a few more hours to hike a little further or whatever it might be.
But how do you research locations? Do you just go out into wilderness and just hope you're gonna find something? Or is there some sort of network that they tell you, Hey Sam, we saw some cool fig plants in this wild place. How do you know where to go? Yeah, that's a great question and it really depends what you're going for.
Like when we're looking for some of the more unique west coast native stuff, there's certainly field guides that can help you along and push you in the right direction and show you where not to go as much as where to go. But I think that's the thing that a lot of people forget about is that there's just like endless hours of wandering looking for these places before you actually find the good ones.
Just this last weekend I was down in southern California and often up in the mountains, in the creek drainages and things, you'll find fig seedlings or you'll find, just some of the cool native floor up there. It's always exceptional too. But sometimes you go and find stuff and or you go and don't find anything.
And those are helpful trips to go on as well because knowing where things aren't is sometimes just as helpful. But with the wild figs in particular, I think we gotta, add a little bit of context.
The figs are one of the few edible plants we have not a west coast native that have naturalized along the west coast.
And so they've escaped from the orchards and things where people brought 'em back a while ago when they imported the pollinator and have escaped to the wilds. And, some people are not fans of this, the state of California is actively removing some of them. But nonetheless it makes for a very interesting sort of wild breeding program where these seedlings of good varieties that people were growing of course.
And they're scattered around mostly California. I've seen some in Arizona seedlings popping up and I've heard about ones in southern Oregon, but so far haven't found anything on our side of the border. So we just got an email here from Oscar, from New York. Oscar says hello Susan. Just wanted to write in and say hi.
I've been listening to this show via podcast, but it's my first time listening live. Very excited for this show. Thank you, Oscar. Yeah, you were talking about these these fig plants that somehow escape cultivation. How exactly can that happen?
the FIG is a really versatile, resilient plant.
It's arguably one of the oldest human cultivated food crops, and so it's exact origins.
People can point to Mediterranean areas or Western Asia, but it's been grown and cultivated in climates with, fairly dry summers similar to ours for a really long time. So it's really well adapted to the West Coast in particular.
But people on the East coast, people even in the northeast all over are finding varieties well suited for their particular climate. But it's just an easy one for here, one of really one of the easiest ones we can grow.
And I wasn't actually. Particularly on the hunt. I'd had, this was many years ago, a good grasp on the fig wasp and pollination, which is its whole rabbit hole we could or could not go down.
And how that all works, but didn't really have a sense of how many wild seedlings were all over the state until one time
I was going on a road trip. Down to Oakland, California
to see this girl who I just met who I was quite smitten by
and I'm, on this big road trip and about to do the final stretch down to Oakland.
And I was like, oh, I'm like a dirty camping road dog. I need to like jump in some water and Freshen up and got the butterflies and all that. And so, I stopped at this place called Whiskeytown Lake, which is I guess technically a national park just south of Shasta Lake, if you're familiar with that area.
Mount Shasta in Northern California and scrambled down some rocks.
I'm not sure if I was supposed to be swimming there or not, scrambled down this little drainage and then jump in and it's really beautiful and I'm just swimming and there's like Toyon, the Heteromeles arbutifolia.
Anyways, native manzanitas and different things. And I'm looking back at the shore and I see this plant texture that I don't immediately recognize. And I said, that doesn't look like a California native. So I swim over to it and it was this fig growing right out of the rocks there where the rocks meet the water.
And I was like, no way. This is incredible what I mean, did somebody throw this out of a boat? Did more likely a bird fly over and drop it in just the right spot?
And so it was able to grow. And so that was the one that sort of sparked this you know, fascination and search for other ones. And we've since found many more in that area.
I'm sorry, I was, I have to know Sam. What forget the plant. What happened with the girl ? Oh, we live together now. Oh, good. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm really, it worked out. I was worried about that. Okay. That's good to know. So it was a nice start. Okay, so you discovered that fig plants are growing in the wild.
Oh, we've got an email here. Hang on one second. From Olivia in Brooklyn, New York. Olivia writes a new fan. Excited Mu for my first live listen. Oh, thank you very much, Olivia, for writing in. Okay, so we've got, oh, we've got a couple more, lots more hellos. We've got a Hello from Madden. Hi Susan. Love that introduction of your guest.
I am familiar with Sam's work. I live in Indianapolis, Indiana. Thanks for having him on. Great. Thank you Madden. And who else have we got here? Lisa. Hi Susan, how are you? I'm listening in today and very interested in growing figs. I know Lisa, she's from Toronto, and we've got an email from Tim. Hello Susan, listening to you today from a friend's home in BA in Boston, Massachusetts.
Peace. Wonderful. Okay, so we got lots of friends listening in here. So you're out hunting for fig plants. Can you find some, what do you then do? Are you taking seeds? Are you taking cuttings? How are you gonna label things and bring them back? What happens next? Yeah, so typically we'll you know, grab a cutting off it and we'll occasionally collect seeds from the From the figs, if nothing else, just to test if they are what's called common or serotypes.
So this is where we have to jump into the anatomy of the fig and the fig wasp and everything.
The The pollinator for the fig is a unique thing. It's not like apples and pears and plums
where a bee just goes flower to flower. And it could be any bee, it could be a honey bee, it could be a mason bee, it could be whatever you got.
They have a very particular, and this is true with the genus as a whole, pollinators that are these wasps that will go from male figs, which are called caprifig figs, which basically means goat figs. Cuz back in the day they saw them as only fit for the goats to eat. They will go from that caprifig to a female fig and.
Carry the, the pollen from the caprifig to the female fig, and you'll get viable seeds. It doesn't mean that every fig you eat has a wasp in it. Like some people will say, you can't eat figs. They're not vegan because the, this wasp in it all. The ones that we grow in Oregon, or if you're growing 'em in Canada, in greenhouses or outdoors on the west coast of Canada are what's
called "common" or "parthenocarpic figs".
So they'll make a fruit even without a viable fertilized embryo seed inside of it.
So those ones that we grow are all common types and when we're out there looking for different things or stumbling upon them or whatever it might be we are always after the rare gem, that will be one that is. Both a really tasty fruit will ripen in our climate and will be common, so will not require the fig wasp in order to ripen in our climate.
So what that means is that most of the ones that we bring back are for fun and a novelty and for nostalgic purposes, of course, especially for me in this particular instance. And so we'll keep them around and it will take many years before we can see whether or not they are a common fig or not.
And even if they're common, if it's worthwhile for us to grow here, besides it's just a fun, unique novelty or if they are like actually a great addition to our fruit world. So for that reason, many of them end up never being released or being released to the compost pile. . Oh dear. Yeah. We have a good question from Mike.
Mike writes, hi Susan. Are any of these wild figs poisonous. Poisonous. Yeah. No. So they're all, everything we're collecting is PHUs keka the common fig. And I've never heard of anybody even having like an allergic reaction of figs. Maybe if you had, maybe if you were allergic to figs, you'd be allergic to these ones.
But it's all the same species. And so it's like if you found a wild apple growing, it wouldn't be a poisonous apple. It would just be another wild. So essentially because you're taking cuttings from various plants, I guess you don't really have to label them because you don't have names, you don't know what they are.
So you're bringing back a bag filled with cuttings, do you keep them in? Oh no, we're cooler. How does that work? We're quite meticulous, even neurotic about labels. We often say that a nursery is, almost nothing else besides, like, besides our labels and keeping plants organized. In the nursery, if a plant uses its loses its label, it usually gets thrown into the deeply discounted or free pile because once we don't know what it is, we're then not able to, we're, we can sell it as a mystery plant, but that's not that worthwhile for most folks.
No, they all get labeled. With collection numbers for our own use, and usually just like a description of where we found it or the road name or something like that. And everybody has their own ways of doing this but yeah, so that we can keep 'em all separate. And so they come back sorted and labeled and then get propagated out and that label sticks with it for the entirety of its life as if it were another one of our typical nursery plants going through the whole system.
Interesting. Okay, so you label them up and you are going to bring them back and plant them out. So these don't need grafting, I guess. Do you root them in some way? How do you plant them out? Yeah.
Figs are unique and part of why. They've become, such a
collector's thing. There's a whole collector's realm for the fig world of people who love to trade them and grow them.
And part of it is, I think, the amazing diversity of form. Part of it's how easy there is to, they are to grow how quickly they fruit. But the fact that they don't need grafting and that they root so easily is also a big one. So they, we've, I've often been on trips where we'll collect 'em and it'll be hot and warm in the car, and this will even be on like, current years, only semi hardened growth.
We'll cut all the leaves off so they're not desiccating and they'll have already started making roots in the very humid Ziploc bag before I even get back home to do anything with them with them.
Wow. For that reason, they're,
extremely easy to propagate. Sometimes there's some variability by variety, but especially with these wild seedlings, they haven't been propagated out for decades and decades, so they have this seedling vigor to 'em and it makes it so they just are it.
They have explosive growth frequently too. We've actually used some one I found growing out of a rock wall in Bisbee, Arizona. We just called it Bisbee for the longest time, and it had such extreme vigor that we just started using it as a rootstock when we wanted to boost the vigor on different things wow.
Fantastic. Okay. Email here from Francis. Susan, you are so funny wanting to know about the girl. I would've asked the exact same question. So funny. And Francis is from Orlando, Florida, and we've got an email here from Sharon. Hi from Ottawa, Ontario. Interesting show. That's all. Okay, so they root easily. I'm curious, you said that's very interesting that you need to cut the leaves off.
So why would, what would happen, on the one hand when you cut the leaves off, aren't you le leaving a little wound or something, a pathogen can get in. What's the advantage of cutting off the leaves of these little cuttings you're making? Yeah, so this is a thing with it's sort a broad thing that applies to rooting any type of cutting and frequently will leave.
And it varies species to species, but Sometimes we'll leave a few leaves on or people will leave partial leaves. But essentially where you have a leaf surface, the leaf is still trying to dry out moisture. The plant wasn't really planning on being cut off from the source and having to do this whole thing.
And so the leaf will still be trying to transpire and pull out water and do the whole photosynthesis thing, but it's also sending a symbol or a signal. Sorry, I have my sick brain, so it's a little foggy. , the leaves are still sending that signal and this hormone oxidant, all these different things to the rest of the plant to like, oh, quick, we need to make roots because we've just been cut off and this was not part of the plan.
So we need to become a new plant like asap. So that could be one reason the leave leaves on when you're doing figs. They typically have so much energy and carbohydrates stored in the fat twiggy cuttings that you get that we just removed the leaves entirely because they'll just dry out and desiccate and could dry out the wood very quickly.
And it makes it too so that we have more room in all our baggies. Otherwise, we couldn't fit , all the cuttings in our bags. So different techniques for different plans than I've seen people root. A friend that just texted me was rooting cuttings and he had the leaves on his figs totally leaved out, and I think they still rooted really well because this plant just has such a high propensity to root.
So it's often one, when we do propagation classes, we give people fig cuttings. The worst thing is you try to root something and it doesn't work. But if you have great success, then people often get inspired to be like, oh what else can I root? And then suddenly the whole world becomes rootable.
Rootable, exactly. Yeah. . Okay. So once you plant you, you've planted the plants, obviously you are going to be looking for the quality, the flavor, the taste of the fruit. Are there other qualities that you're looking for when you're going to choose the best of the best, which are the ones that one Green world is actually going to sell to the public?
How do you decide? Yeah, some of it is vigor and disease resistance. We don't have like a whole lot of real fig diseases here. There's like, fig rust. We don't have a lot of pests or pathogens that bother them. There's a mosaic virus, but it's pretty benign and in most things, although most wild collections won't actually have it.
So it's mostly looking for, yeah, those things ability to ripen here. If it's a common fig, if it's part in the carpet, and maybe more than anything is flavor, because if there's some I've collected there. The tastiest figs I've ever had, and one in particular probably it keeps dropping its figs.
So what will happen is it will form these little green figs and they'll get to about the size of, oh, I don't know, a quarter or a half dollar. And then you'll get really excited and be like, I finally, I got one, and this one's gonna ripe. And then it will break your heart. And one by one just, they'll start to turn a light yellow and then they'll all fall off the tree.
Which is quite heartbreaking. But those often Could be useful for growers in California, say, who want a new variety. And I should also say there's a lot of people who are doing this, especially recently, it seam and the folks who are lucky enough to live down in California in what is often called the WASP zone, are doing far more collections than me.
There's a guy named the Fig Hunter David Birken, his family down in outside like Redding, Northern California. Other, I don't, I don't know the names of the other folks, but they're not coming to mind right now. But a lot of folks are collecting these, so sometimes we can find things and send them to these other people who are able to have their figs pollinated.
And then the collection was still worthwhile in a. Fantastic. Okay, we've got a question from Nika and let's see, Nika from Eugene, Oregon. Hi Susan. Just writing to say I'm really enjoying the show so far. How long does it take before you can tell if your collected fig varieties are worth pursuing?
Yeah. It's typically three to six years before you know, and it'll usually be, our oldest collections are only five years that we've done, so it's a pretty recent thing that we've been doing, and I think that's been happening as a hole in, on the west coast of North America in terms of people documenting it really well and keeping track of everything they're doing.
So, Yeah, most of, we've already, we usually will still hold onto 'em, not just throw 'em away because people have argued that plants can learn part in the carpi and in the process of, or of being outside of the zone with their pollinator for long enough, they'll start to produce edible fruits.
And a quick aside, that's just a plant's way of maintaining the populations of things that eat their fruit and spread their seed even if there's not a pollinator around. So that's where that adaptation comes from. But I've yet to see a plant switch from dropping all its figs to suddenly deciding that it would like to ripen figs in that area.
. So it's, typically that range before, you know, Re ripening time reliably. If it's part in the carpet. And there's so many factors, especially with figs and why they fascinate me is they're so, expressive of, what vine growers call terroir and their ability to express different soil types, different rainfall patterns different climate situations through the plant and through the figs.
So it takes a little while. So they're very adaptable, that's what you're saying, that they can really survive in a lot of different conditions? Yes, absolutely. Which is I think why they're so, widespread in all these really very different climates. Oh, interesting. On that note, we have a few Facebook comments here.
Kyle writes, I've found fig seedlings inside canyons of the Grand Canyon. Now there's one climate. We've got bass from Trees of Joy Nursery in Pennsylvania who says, I've collected many varieties, some from the wild, but mostly from unknown trees. Michelangelo says, I have a few ounces of seed from half a dozen different cultivars.
I sprouted a few hundred a couple of years ago, but the young seedlings died while I was sick with Covid . They take a long time to germinate and grow at first, going to try again. Ooh, interesting. So here from seed, Katherine says, I have some friends that have that discovered a wild fig while hiking. They said it was delicious and they took cuttings.
Oh, and we have one email here from Don. Don writes. Hey Susan. P isn't it easier and cheaper just to go and buy figs at the grocery store? Wow. A lot of things done packing that one. Alright. First of all bass from Trees of Joy is a pretty legendary fig feller and I guess I should say the three different ways you can approach this is like what he's doing is collecting old homestead trees.
Cuz people have been moving plants for as long as we've been, people arguably. And so all the immigrants who came over from Europe and other places and brought these old trees with them a lot of those ones were planted in climates like Pennsylvania that's really on the edge.
And so that's some really valuable germplasm for cold hardiness and early ripening. And so anyways, three things is like finding all these old trees cuz there's certainly no shortage of that. And finding the ones that are unique and different from what's already there. Selecting things from the wild, which is just like the.
The hikers breeding program where you're just like going around tasting and then like actively making selections, which is like what Ira Connet was doing and Louisiana State University did. And now people again, and we're in the process of doing this, of making controlled crosses. So you say, I really like the quality of this and I'm gonna take this capra fig, and that has, persistent qualities and is likely to make a common fig and we'll cross these and get something that's hopefully really good.
So those are the three different ways you could go about it in my mind. And each, has its own merits. Each has different timeframes and different amounts of effort that go into it. And I think they're all valid and help to create this sort of unique storyline, but also introduce all these valuable.
Valuable things to the world. And as, as for Don's question as well, it is definitely easier to buy figs from the grocery store, but I'm guessing the diversity of flavors will be very different when you're developing. Yeah. So yeah, new flavors, those are ones, and this goes with so many fruits that we can grow in the home orchard where the quality you'll get growing 'em in your backyard just can't be matched in terms of ripening time, in terms of what varieties you're able to grow that you would never see in a grocery store.
Because what makes it to the grocery store is what is most uniform and ripening time you know, easy to grow. And what ships best and holds up well in transit. And that usually, almost always does not correlate with really good flavor and quality and figs in particular because they're not even actually a fruit.
There's this weird inside out flower that is incredibly fragile when perfectly ripe, when they're like, really, I think at their best you can tell, you can knock on the branch and it'll like droop a little bit and it'll just be like a ball of jelly. And it's hard enough to transport it to, the kitchen table, let alone from a , California fig orchard all the way to wherever you might live.
So yeah, in my experience,
I've never had a good grocery store. Fig. They'll have good varieties like, panache and brown Turkey and things that
if you grew in your backyard they'd be excellent. But in the grocery store They kind of taste like cardboard. And I think it's also why people say, oh, I don't like figs.
And it's because they don't, what they mean is they don't like the grocery store figs that they've had. And the, the same can be said for a lot of different things. People say, oh, I don't really like plums. I'm like, I don't know, try this, perfectly ripe green gauge plum. It's like candy.
Yep. I would love to go into more detail about fig growing and propagating fig trees and lots more stuff like that. But first we've got a few words from our sponsors. Are you okay holding the line for a couple of minutes, Sam? Yeah, of course. Okay, great. So you are listening to the Urban Forestry Radio Show and podcast, brought to you by the Fruit Tree Care training website, orchard people.com.
This is Reality Radio one oh one.com. And I'm Susan Poizner, author of the Fruit Tree Care Books, growing Urban Orchards and Grow Fruit Trees Fast, and we'll be back right after the break.
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Welcome back to the Urban Forestry Radio Show with your host Susan Poizner, right here on Reality Radio 1 0 1. To get on board right now, send us an email. Our email address is in studio101@gmail.com.
And now right back to your host of the Urban Forestry Radio Show, Susan Poizner. You are listening to the Urban Forestry Radio Show and podcast, brought to you by the Fruit Tree Care training website, orchard people.com. This is Reality Radio 1 0 1, and I'm your host, Susan Poizner. In the show today, we've been talking to Sam Hubert, nursery manager of One Green World Nursery in Portland, Oregon.
Sam is a passionate fig hunter. And he goes out into the wilderness to find unusual types of fig trees that he can propagate. In the first part of the show, we talked about how fig trees have come to be in the wild in North America, but I wanna go into a little bit more detail about propagating fig trees, and we'll talk about that in just a moment.
But first, I would love to hear from you. If you're listening to this show live today. You can enter today's contest To enter the contest. All you have to do is send an email right now to intu 1 0 1 gmail.com with a question or a comment, or just to say hi. Be sure to include your first name and where you are writing.
The prize for this episode is a gift certificate from One Green World Nursery in Portland, Oregon, valued at $50 USD. So if you wanna enter the contest and win the prize, send your email to intu101@gmail.com. And now back to Sam. So Sam, oh, we've got a couple of emails here. Let's see who's writing us.
We've got an email from Carrie in Bend, Oregon. Carrie says, hi Susan and guest, I came late. Where is the guest growing fig trees. And do fig trees produce figs every year? And what kind of climate do fig trees prefer and soil needs? Those are great questions. That's from. Yep. Hi Gary. We're just over the mountains from you in Portland and grown in Portland and in the surrounding area.
In terms of where they grow best, I always happen to think that the West Coast is particularly well suited. You know, the northwest is a little cooler, but you can find, and I should share this with you Susan, so you can put it out old historic documents of the Willamette Fig Gardens going back to the early 19 hundreds.
Touting the fig is a perfect climate adapted crop for our climate if you have the right varieties. There were commercial fig orchards on Vasan Island and still some remnants of that. So there's been commercial fig orchards up and down the West coast, especially back before, the lovely Green Revolution when we stopped growing as much of our own things.
So. , I typically think they're best suited to some of the same places that like, you know, vis Ferra the wine grape is suited to, which is places with drier summers because wetter summers often cause the fruit to split and you get a more concentrated flavor in drier summers. But having said that, people have found all sorts of wild tricks and techniques for getting it fixed over winter.
On the East Coast, there's a, staggering amount of growers there. The folks in Pennsylvania finding the old, homestead neighborhood trees like we were talking about. And they're either finding selections that are really hardy and work in their climate or ones that, maybe die back but then are so vigorous they come back and produce a fruit the next year.
Or even doing wild things like bending them over and covering them in soil and. Insulating 'em with Earth that way, or bringing them into their garage and growing 'em in pots. So there's no shortage of inventive ways people have grown them, which, essentially means you can grow them almost anywhere, which is amazing.
Even here in Toronto Steve Biggs has written a book grow Figs where you think you can't. It's a wonderful and very popular book. So even in cold climates we have an email here from Lisa in Toronto. Can a fig tree be divided for propagation? I, I think she's thinking like a raspberry bush, how you can link, divide out a cane.
They don't really sucker that same way. The will often be like shoots coming up from the roots and you can usually. If you move some soil away, cut those off. And you'll see, especially you do it in the dormant season, it's really easy. You'll see that roots have already formed where the soil was. If we want to get into talking fig propagation, we could do that.
Some people like to do the air layering thing. I've always found air airing to be a huge waste of time and pain in the butt. But it's where you put media around a branch and wrap it in sar wrap or something that holds the moisture to get a big thing or roots while the tree's actively growing. You can, you layer it by putting a branch.
Down on the soil and covering it, and it will then start producing roots. Or you can just take a cutting and stick it in you know, a moisture retentive. But oxygen filled media, we do like a 50 50 coconut cuir per light mix with a, with a washed choir. So the pH is a little higher and it's been really great.
But you can, pretty much, when we've been traveling and trying to set up and other places like South America, rural parts of Chile, where you don't really have access to all this lovely stuff that we have especially here in the Willamette Valley, we were just, coming up with different mixtures of native soil and rocks and trying to get the moisture to, to drainage, to oxygen content.
Right. And they still rooted just fine. So you can do just about anything and they'll root. Amazing. Olivia writes, hi, Susan and Sam. Exciting show so far. I see a great deal of common figs around here in New York City that people are growing in their yards and gardens. Do you know if there are any wild varieties that would thrive here with the seasons?
So in a cooler climate? That's a great question. These wild varieties that you are finding, would they survive in a cold or climate? That is one where they would have to be on the frontier of it. I know New York, new York's not that cold of a climate. Are they zone seven, six B six a or something?
So I know there's a lot of figs from New York. We have one called Brooklyn White. There's a Brooklyn Dark. There's, last time I was at Brooklyn Botanical Garden, I actually saw they had a bunch of figs planted from our nursery, which I thought was pretty cool. And So there's definitely ones that will work there.
You still are going with slightly shorter season figs. But then there's also just this huge community of northeast figure growers that could probably give you many dozens more better recommendations than I could having grown in that area. As we mentioned earlier, at Trees of Joy there's a feller who runs off the beaten path nursery and just tons of other folks who are really passionate about growing figs that are really well adapted to ripening and also not splitting.
And being plenty cold, hearty in that area. So it's a whole different list of constraints that they have that, you I don't know as much about having not really grown figs there, I love how you're pointing out that we can all, so many of us can enjoy this delicious fruit and this amazing plant, but it is wise to find the plant that will thrive in your unique environment.
So many people say, oh, I have to grow, for instance, I don't know, honey crisps, apples, or something like that. And maybe they're very hard to grow or they don't survive in your climate. So it's better to start looking at what survives well in your climate, and then choose the many cultivars that would be.
I've well adapted. We have an email, another email from Carrie and Ben. Thank you Susan, for your program. Do figs have scions like apples? Do they need to be grafted with favorable branches? We mentioned that earlier, but we can talk about that. So do they need to be grafted with favorable branches?
And where is a good place to get fig tree cultivars? That's Carrie and. Yeah. So we mentioned the grafting thing earlier, but essentially you don't need to graft them. A scion is sort just a word for vegetative growth that you can use to propagate something and they can call it scion, you can call it budwood, you can call it cutting, refers more to how you're gonna use it typically.
So yeah, and you can get it from, get cuttings from either your neighbors who are growing it or I don't know how many local nurseries in Ben would be selling figs, cuz it'd be like selling citrus there at least most ears the way Ben goes. Or you'd have to bring them in. Yeah. Great. Quick email from Tony.
Hi. Looking for different varieties of fig trees. What kinds do you recommend in colder climates? I know that's not your expertise, but if you know of any in particular. We still look, relative to where, if it can be grown, we still are considered as somewhat cooler climate even with the toasty hot summers we've been having.
So we still look for things that are best adapted to northern climates in shorter growing seasons. Cuz it often takes us a while to warm up here and we have cool nights and we want our figs to ripen before the rains come back in the fall because then the quality of them really goes downhill.
So if he's looking for specific varieties, it depends on what, if you're in like a cool mild climate, like the northwest, typically we've grown figs that are referred to as San Pedro figs, which means that they're making a big crop of figs on last year's wood. And so you'll have to consider that when pruning and all that, and.
Things like Desert King, Grantham's Royal Norman's yellow. Those are the ones that, the big ones that, that come to mind for San Pedro type figs. If you're like on the East Coast or somewhere where it's too cold for the that breba crop to over winter, then you're gonna have to go with figs. That ripen a really early main crop, which is the figs that ripen on current season's growth.
And that's why most of those folks are going with those types of figs. Cuz if they're cutting their figs down and covering them or burying them, or potentially having them winter killed off and resprouting, they're gonna need ones that are ripening on current seasons wood, because there is no more second year wood.
And those ones would include things like Ren de Bordeaux is a really early one. LSU Tiger. Campan improve Celest Chicago Hardy, and all of the various ones that people call Mount Etna Figs. Brooklyn White is pretty good. So, but there's, this is off of the top of my foggy brain right now.
, it's an endless list of ones. That sounds great. And on the cold theme, which seems to be our theme right now, Michael, I love it when our listeners write in from Alaska, we've got listeners all over the place, Florida, California, and Alaska, so I love it when our Alaska listeners write in. Hi, Susan and Sam.
Greetings from Anchorage, Alaska. Because of our climate in short summer zone four, I'm assuming that container grown figs are our only option. Are there cold, hearty varieties I'm not aware of. That might work up here. Any tips to share on getting the best success in container growing? Thanks from Michael.
Yeah nothing that would be hardy to zone four. Unfortunately, at least nothing I've heard of that really goes much past zone six B. But people definitely grow them in containers. I have a lot of friends in Vermont who are growing 'em in containers and those folks again can probably give you better advice.
The problem I've found is that figs being as vigorous as they are, will like quickly fill the container. And as what happens with many container ice plants, there won't be a lot of fine root hairs left. And so their growth becomes like really stubby, which is actually can be a technique for growing figs.
And many people have used that in the past to actually limit the vigor of its vegetative growth and get stockier. Stuber shoots so that you get more figs. So you can imagine a two foot branch of figs, and if the inner nodes, that space between buds is like six inches, which is entirely possible, or if it's like two inches, then you would have many more figs in that same span.
So you can have really good results growing them in containers. It's just that you have to really watch the watering and watch the composition of the media they're in, because if it's too moisturey, tentive or too water logged all the time, you'll get these really watery figs. And we'll often taste those, especially in greenhouse environments where we're trying to boost things for you know, harvesting wood off of them or speeding them up so we can get them the fruit and see what the quality of the fig is like.
And we always treat the greenhouse figs with a bit of an. Asterisks because they're a lot more diluted than something grown in ground in a drier season would be. But it's entirely possible. And if the option is that or no figs, then you gotta go for it. Would you need to root prune them at all or just leave them be Yeah.
I think part of the secret to doing it is people are actively group pruning and then also actively pruning back the plant so that it can maintain some vigor and top dressing and making sure they're still fertilizing it and all that. Mike writes from Hammond, Ontario, when is the best time to take cuttings for propagation?
People have different opinions on this. A lot of folks will do it in the fall right after they lose their leaves, when there's still a lot of sap in the woods. So the sap contains sugars, carbohydrates, minerals, all of these essential nutrients plants need to thrive. So people often take 'em in the fall when it's like supercharged with, with sap I typically am taking them from late November through to March almost because we are going through the various trees as we have time to do them and root 'em and have pretty much similar success no matter, what timing, time of year we do it.
And we've even taken 'em in the middle of summer. Cuz that's often when we're out in the field looking for things and we try to just. Even if you can't find current season growth that is really hardened off, you can go back and find older wood and figs will pretty much root off of anything. Or you could find, like we were talking earlier, something that's sprouted but got covered with soil.
And so it's already got some roots and then you got a bit of a head start. So the short answer is fall through winter and the long answer is anytime it sounds like they're so vigorous that they just want to be propagated. They just want to they wanna survive. And do well we only have a few more minutes, but propagation seems to be something everybody's really interested in.
And so for instance, if I have a friend who has a fig tree what are, what are my options in terms of, propagating that, just nipping off a cutting, any old cutting. Is there anything we need to consider before rooting? Yeah, it's one that we get lots of questions on too. And sometimes I tell people, just try stuff.
I think you might be overthinking it. There's no magic to it. It's just a combination of, stored energy and dormant wood humidity surrounding the plant and heat, you and plant hormones and all these other things. But in terms of what you need to do keeping it not too wet is one that I've found pretty helpful.
A lot of people like to, a lot of people like to root things in water, which I've never been a big fan of because it gets to be like a little bit anaerobic unless you're changing it out every day and even then. So I wouldn't recommend that though people have done it and have had good results, so you could try it.
But finding a blend of something that's moisture attentive so that like you're keeping that humidity high, but not so soaking wet, like straight peat moss, that the fig wood goes all anaerobic and the bark rots off is a good thing. I also always stress the point that people that cutting cannot uptake nutrients.
There's no roots yet. And so putting something that has a whole lot of nitrogen in it, like people try compost mixes and things like that. And while I've heard arguments of beneficial microbes and things there's just anything that's really high nitrogen I really try to avoid because those are the kinds of things that lead to rot and decomposition of the wood when we have it in.
In a really sterile no nutrient media. It can sit there for months on end, even in cooler conditions and just slowly begin the rooting process. So that's a big one. And then just heat and humidity, they root really fast. When it's warm. I've left them on a dashboard and a Ziploc and a car on accident, and I would come back, three, four days later and they're already making roots.
So the heat and humidity thing goes a long ways too. And I'm assuming you need to focus on new growth only. You don't want to get an older, more woody branch. You want this past year's growth, something like that. Yeah, typically like vigorous growth, will have the most energy in it.
Things with a little thicker diameter as opposed to the ones that are little tiny offshoots that come off the plant. Those are gonna have a lot more energy. , but also we've just as a joke taken, things that we were having to hack down to, to move them or because they needed to be brought down and have taken, little mini stumps with range diameters and thrown 'em in a gallon pot with media.
And they sure enough root and wow, it looks pretty funny. But that's, incredible in a way. Oh, and then the other thing is don't grab a piece that has too many buds on it. People always wanna giant fig tree immediately, or something, but we usually just do cuttings with two buds on it.
And that makes it so as those buds are waking up, there's less of a leaf surface for the roots to have to hydrate. So, I always tend on the side of a little bit smaller cuttings as opposed to like a one or two foot stick that people jam into something. That makes a lot of sense because the more buds you have, the more these buds are gonna need support and nutrition.
And so what you're saying is, let the roots come first so you have two buds a little bit up top and let the roots establish themselves first. Wow. Interesting. Okay, guess what? It's almost time to find out who won today's contest. Very exciting. But first I wanna say hello to some of the listeners that wrote me this month.
Hello, back to Brian and Nathan who told me that they enjoyed last month's show on AppleTree root stocks. I wanna say hi also to Monica who wrote to wish me Happy Family Day and to Kyle and Tim who wrote to send me some funny gardening me. And to all my show listeners, if you would like a shout out during an upcoming show, I would love to hear from you.
It would be great if you could go to Apple Podcasts or your local podcaster and post a review for the show Urban Forestry Radio Show. If you post a new review, I will be sure to share it on an upcoming show. That would be awesome. And it helps me also to promote this radio show to other people who have not yet found it.
Okay. It's time for our contest, and so Gary in the studio is going to help us with that. Are you there, Gary? I am, yes. Okay, Sam, here's how we do this. You are the guest. I have the bucket. I'm going to shake the bucket. You will hear it. Tell me when to stop and then I'll pull out a piece of paper. Are you ready?
Okay. Sounds good. Here we go.
Stop. All right. Let me grab one here
and let's see who we have here. It would be Mike from Hammond, Ontario. Yay. Right. Oh wow. Big studio audience today, folks. Lot of people in the studio. Thank you everyone. That's Mike from Hammond, Ontario. That is so fantastic. That studio audience, man, I didn't even know they were there. Oh yeah, they're loaded today,
They're, we've got a big studio. That's awesome. Th congratulations, Mike. That's a wonderful prize. So you, your prize is a $50 gift card from the One Green World nursery in Portland. So we are going to contact you with more information about that. And I wanna thank everybody who sent in emails today and participated in the conversation.
You guys make this show so much fun to have the participation. And I really wanna thank our special hero today, Sam Hubert, thanks for being today's hero. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, and coming on the show to be our Indiana Jones of figs or one of them. It sounds like there's a lot of you, Indiana Jones guys with fig trees.
So thank you so much. So that's all for the show today. If you guys wanna listen again or if you wanna download other episodes, all you have to do is go to orchard people.com/podcasts. And if you wanna learn more about growing fruit trees, go to orchard people.com where I have lots of detailed articles and I also have online courses on fruit tree care grafting and all sorts of other great topics.
So that's all for now. I hope you will join me again next month when we are going to dig into another great topic. I look forward to seeing you then. Bye for now.