Originally Posted by
GreenFinQuote:
Originally Posted by chrisw
I have decided on a Celeste and an lsu purple. I will be buying one of each from wellspring based on what I have learned here.
I strongly recommend against that. It's a waste of your time, money, and yard space imo. Sort of like how starting an avocado from seed is generally a waste of time compared to starting with a good grafted tree.
TC (tissue culture) figs, which is what they sell, are notoriously poor fruiters, especially in the early years, since tc's revert back to juvenile wood. Most people get no fruit or only very sparse fruit for the first several years or more, far less than what is to be expected from cuttings or air layers from established fruiting wood. Even the occasional people who claim 'success' with tc's only get like 6 figs in 2 years. That's pretty bad compared to what you can get if you start with cuttings from good fruiting wood. For example, I've gotten 50-70 figs each from my 1st year Hardy Chicago, MBVS, and Celeste that I started from cuttings 9 months ago, whereas I got 0 figs total from my Green Ischia, LSU Purple, and Black Mission tc's from Wellspring after 18 months.
The stories of good productivity from tc's at an early age are very rare, whereas such stories are very common with cuttings and air layers from good fruiting wood. In the great majority of cases you can find mention of on the internet, tc's produce few fruit (and often no fruit at all).
I wish someone would have clued me in when I was a noob so I wouldn't have wasted my first year devoting my space and efforts to tc figs from Wellspring.
The difference tends to be pretty extreme, so why start with crappy unproductive stock when it's so easy to start with stock that will be 10 or 20 times more productive from the get-go?