Hey I didn't say anything.

I have ordered and received good cuttings from James in the past.  I am willing to wait for my order as I am confident he will deliver.  He has good records and sent them on what I ordered.

My suggestion to James would be to ship as many trees as possible in the next two months even if that's partial orders. Primary reason is that shipping figs during winter, esp green ones, will not be a viable option. Shipping those trees out of KS Nov thru March will just be another headache if not disaster.

I would have to agree that partial orders, esp. for easy varieties would be a good idea.  He can get them off his plate and also buy some goodwill from the buyers.  There's no reason orders have to ship at the same time.

I appreciate that James posts updates here. With the number of people who ordered the $7 trees for him to deal with each person privately would be too time-consuming. This is a better way of reaching a large group of people about the orders and keeping us informed. The negative posts are minimal compared to the positive. I was interested in this message thread because I ordered for 2017 and can see it might be impacted by the 2016 orders. Had this post not existed I'd possibly not have known there is cause for concern until the middle of next year. Knowing this now I won't worry if my order is late.

Well, I sincerely hope that all the accusers got their answers.

Now let the man finish his project and be quiet, please!

I would never want to be in James's shoes.

Shame on you all.

Looks to me like James was trying to do all of us a big, big favor with his generosity and got in a little over his head but not so deep he is not going to be able to swim out.

Perhaps on some of the rare varieties and varieties that are known to be hard to root he could have placed limits as in like limit purchase to one only.

James may want to consider airlayering some of the varieties that are hard to root. I follow asian fig growers on fb and often times see where some growers have multiple airlayers on a single stalk, like maybe 4 or 5. This should work well in a greenhouse where the trees are pretty much always in a growth mode.

Anyway this is just my take on the situation at this point in time.

I'm with the majority of posters and thankful for James' offer.  Falling behind schedule is understandable considering the undertaking of this project.  I seem to remember uncertainty in the original offer with phrases like:  "I will try" and "If everything goes well".  I also understand people's excitement with receiving a large quantity of in-demand trees.  I volunteer to go to the end of the list as I am struggling with what I currently have.

If I understood correctly, the "easy" varieties won't all be ready until about 10 weeks from today.  I think part of the issue is, if he ships things early, it reduces the amount of mother trees to propagate into new trees.  The method seems to be:

tree -> 10 trees -> 100 trees

But if what happens instead is (at 50% success)

tree -> 5 trees -> 25 trees -> 125 trees

He will have to do an extra cycle to get to 100 trees.  As a result, he cannot ship many from the 25 trees or his next cycle will be compromised.  According to his last update, the easy one are on target to be put in their shipping containers soon (2 weeks), but won't be shippable for 6-8 weeks after that.  So those aren't an issue, but there are also 8-10 weeks before they ship.

Thanks for the update, James.  It's still a great (although monumental) project, and I just placed an order for 2017 trees a few days ago.  No big hurry on my end, it's still pretty warm here and will probably be until the end of October.    Thanks!

To ensure everyone is understanding what James posted. You are looking at a minimum of 10 weeks for "easy" varieties, which is only half of the orders. Your plants do not exist yet. Being realistic, odds are they will not ship until 2017, as in 10 weeks it will be too cold in many places to ship a live plant ( mid November). This means, by his own admission, that 2017 orders will also be delayed since greenhouse space for them does not exist if 2016 orders are kept over winter. With the cutting presale also occurring, I imagine that cuts into stock for 2017 production as well, leading to further delays. In essence James is receiving interest free loans with no set time to make good on it.

Best of luck, hope you get your plants. If I have this wrong, please correct me.