A robust and healthy fig found in the wild sporting unusual heart shaped leaves mostly.
Good and tasty fruit ripening somehow a bit late.

   
 
 
 
 
 
 






Francisco
Portugal

Must be,really nice to have the wasp and access to explore new varieties. Thanks for pictures.
Richie from louisiana

Thank you Richard for commenting
I agree, wasps are very helpful but if left uncontrolled they can make a big mess !

Francisco
Portugal

Very nice, Francisco!
I agree with you , every squirrel or a bird stolen ripe fig is a bunch of potential seedlings in the neighborhood.
It is hard to deal with them, the seedlings grow way too fast and push the other vegetation aside.
It is good to have many fig trees with tasty figs but I realize this comes with some environmental responsibility.

The open eyes are not a problem in your area?

Igor,

Appreciate your reasoning but you have to take some other factors into account.
In the collectors backyard, agree that after you plant those many seeds they grow very fast and may push other vegetation aside (?)....but here you are blocking Nature to perform its share !

In the wild things happen much differently,..
Only a very small percentage of the dropped seeds germinate for lack of the minimum conditions of soil/nutrients/humidity, etc..
- not surprisingly the great majority on the north sides of boulders, walls, ruins, ravines -
(the last drops of rain we had here happened in March ! and still waiting )

Of the few figs that manage to shoot up a tiny trunk, many are sooner or later eaten by herbivores - rabbit, goats, deer, cattle, etc.

Only figs growing in inaccessible places, voiding the approach of those herbivores may eventually reach adulthood, if minimum conditions prevail ..the majority being caprifigs.

I cannot see a fig in the wild, push competitive vegetation aside.. but right the opposite..
Old fig orchards left alone for years by their owners were completely taken over by the more aggressive shrubs and are slowly disappearing engulfed by their dense canopies.

Francisco
Portugal

Great find Francisco,looks like a great fig.

Nelson

Thank you Nelson

Francisco
Portugal

Francisco you are a master of ficus carica!

The only problem I see is that with you and others discovering amazing new figs how can anyone's fig collection ever be complete..LOL

Jaime,

Nice pictures. Quite illustrative.

As regards to that stubborn fig, if you agree I may talk to my friend Daniel and he will dispatch a team of his most efficient 'mowers' and that problem shall be solved overnight ! they shall leave a clean fence !

http://media.jrn.com/images/660*413/b9918099z.1_20130526224833_000_gvsss2k.1-1.jpg

Thanks, Francisco.

I also have some of those teams of "mowers" over here. A few years ago they managed to enter my orchard (i didn't have a wire fence then) and in just a couple of hours, i lost my vegetable garden and some fruit trees that never regrew properly. They are very efficient as you say.

Nevertheless, i think i will let some of those fig trees grow (the ones that are growing outside the fence). They have figs this year and maybe they are sweeter than the ones on the shaded side of the cedar fence that don't receive enough sun.
   

Also, they are already well established in a very difficult soil (very hard clay and rocks) and i can always use them to graft a few more of your wonderful varieties from Algarve. :-)

By the way, the ones you send and i grafted this spring are developing nicely, thanks again.
I hope the chips i grafted this week are also successful.

  
 

Hi Jaime

Yes!.. where they bite, better forget ! That's what grand dad always said!

You are a lucky man with all that free 'material' for practicing all sorts of grafts and buddings, air layers, etc.. Looking at those pictures I envy your climate with so much green, very healthy and robust trees.

You may even uproot a full young tree complete with its rooting system to grow somewhere or,  early  March cut those shoots still dormant, 10CM from the soil and side-graft single buds from selected varieties without the hassle of rooting sticks (cups/media/water/temperatures ..etc plus all the traditional  mistakes we always do)  !!
So much fig energy ready to be taken for free, entirely to your will

watch this fellow, assisted by wife. He is doing it on blueberries but it will work same on figs! Simple!
No Japanese speaking needed.

Hi Francisco,

Yes, i'm very lucky to have a few well established fig trees, quite healthy and green, that produce lots of suckers. I also pruned quite heavily a couple of them, to have new growth this spring where i can graft the new varieties. 

  

It's a good idea to use some of the new trees to side-graft buds of selected varieties. The problems start when i plant those suckers in the ground away from their mother.

      

They take a very long time (some take a few years) to adapt to the hard clay soil and they almost dye with waterlogged roots in their first winter. They suffer from lack of micronutrients and their weakness opens the door to some fungal disease and attacks from insects. In these conditions they sometimes take 3 years to give their first figs - their sisters in containers do much better.



Thanks for the video. They are using what we call over here the "asiatic method" of grafting (a type of side-grafting with produces good results). I've used it in several types of fruit trees, not yet on fig trees - maybe next year.

The first time i saw that type of graft was in a Chinese video, in a region where they make hundreds of grafts every year, for each Nashi tree (a type of Asiatic Pear).

It seems they don't have the cold hours necessary for the trees to produce quality fruit, so they buy the cuttings from other farmers in the high mountains (with buds that endure the cold and accumulated the necessary cold hours) and graft them to every branch of every tree, so it can produce fruits that year - they only use flower buds and cut all the leaves that form above the graft leaving only the fruits.
The downside - they have to do it every year!
It's truly amazing the hard work they have to produce these fruits and it seems this goes on for 8 generations !! 

Here's the link for the video:

Hi Jaime,

Thank you for your nice set of pictures and the much interesting Chinese video on the culture of the Nashi pears.
I understand that regarding the hard  type soils, I hear long time ago that before planting any fruit trees there one should brake it somehow.. sometimes fracturing the compact 'slabs' with dynamite.
Believe that Ira Condit recommended this procedure on certain areas of California with hard calcareous types of soil.

Nevertheless found this page on the Internet which could bring up some ideas to soften your clay soil structures and enough new galleries for  your fig roots to grow and multiply.. and apparently does not seem too expensive.

http://www.humeseeds.com/gypsum.htm

Francisco
Portugal

Very interesting information about gypsum benefits for the structure of hard clay soils, Francisco.

I have already located a few suppliers nearby and i will try to add some Gypsum to my clay soils this fall with the first rains.

Thanks,