Greetings All

Usually I am on here posting pictures of my tastey, just picked Hardy Chicago figs, or showing off my over-wintering cover techniques, and most recently my pretty good success at starting various cuttings, and successful air-layering......BUT, today, nothing to show off.

So, let's back up about three or four weeks to early March. My wife surprises me with a nice 1 gallon Black Mission fig from Lowes. Although she would rather I don't have 40 fig trees in various stages of growth scattered about our house and bath, she aims to please. This new tree was solidly dormant, no buds, no growth, no green, in fact SO dormant, it looked near death. On arrival I quickly watered with nice tepid rain water, placed in our sun room, and within a week it had pushed out buds. In the next two weeks, these buds all pushed out nice new growth, a perfect young tree.

The weather here, mind you, has been fickle. Moderate winter, a snow fall here and there, some cold temps, but nothing catastrophic or terribly bone freezing. But, the last week or so things have changed. A large trough of cold air remains in upper Canada and continues to push cold temps our way here in the Northeast US, especially during the night time hours.

Fine....all new plants and cuttings have been in the house, and carefully exposed to nice sunhine on weekends when temps had been in mid 50's. The new fig tree had pushed nice leaves and was enjoying it's exposure to unfiltered real sun.

Last few nights, unseasonably cold.....in mid 20's, of course all plants inside, a no brainer. BUT, weathermen calling for nice sunny day today, with temps in mid-50's. So on my way out the door to work, I think, ogh, put figgie out or nice clear, sunny day.

WRONG....

Eight hours later, I check our back deck to find.....disaster. And now i recall the weatherman saying on the way in to work this morning that it was about 22 and colder in the outer areas. So, I'm not sure how long it took to warm up, but figgie did not like at all. Live and learn. I'm sure it will recover.....

Picture is worth a thousand words.....I rushed mother nature, and lost.

Funny, I was just earlier today how you were doing with having your figs outside.  I still haven't moved mine out but will probably put the still-dormant ones in larger containers out on saturday when the warming trend is supposed to arrive. I'm not sure what advice to give other than to baby it for a couple weeks to ease along the recovery.  I'm sure it will snap out of it eventually.

I am guilty as well. I was doing the shuffle. The younger more tender leaves turned silver/white. Another observation, I have an LSU with a bad case of FMW. Almost all leaves were affected and had started turning brown/rust where affected. With the cold today, the affected area has turned powdery white. The portions of the leaves that were green remained green, completely unaffected by the cold.