During this year's summer forest garden tour and wine-tasting I managed to get a few decent photos of my portable fig orchard.  Being in Wisconsin, all my figs come out of a semi-heated basement around May 15 and stay outside until around November 1st, after they have dropped leaves and have started going dormant.



I began this project in 1991, here's a pic of the oldest trees from the first year or two.

 
Each year I tell myself I'm gonna get a automatic watering setup going.  There is over a hundred trees, around 40+ varieties. Of those varieties, 7 or 8 ripen fruit in Wisconsin without a greenhouse. I'm in southwestern WI, so don't get the benefit of lake effect.



It always seems like there is something new to worry about.  Lately, it's been that the chickens and ducks have developed a taste for perfectly ripe figs.  & just be glad that you're not the strong young man that has to drag all of these in and out of the basement twice a year.

Nice setup! I've been wondering about the possibility of a potted fig orchard. You'd get the benefits of no dieback & potentially faster ripening. The drawbacks would be the need to repot, the cost of pots, and the cost of mixing up batches of soil. Plus the need to find a place to store all of those pots in the winter. I'm thinking of putting in a cold cellar this winter to hold all of mine.

I'd highly recommend a drip system. I have one setup on all of my potted trees and it saves me at least an hour a day, and the trees grow really well with it. For those larger figs I'd recommend "spot spitters" for watering on a drip system. Mine come on twice a day for 8 minutes at a time. I may up it to 3 times a day once it starts getting really hot.

By the way, what do you use for a potting mix? I've been trying to dream up something that excludes the use of synthetic time-release fertilizers.

I run a small nursery so I get a truckload of organic compost from a company that harvests manure from organic dairies and composts it.  I mix some peat and phosphorus in with that and if need be (especially for smaller plants that have become one solid rootball) some perlite.  I use pelletized chicken manure for fertilizer.  It all works pretty well.

Is there a brand of drip system that you use and how do you set up watering points for each fig.  Is the drip tape attached to the trees or separate posts. I dream of a permanent installation that I can just move the figs under each year.

It looks like you still have fig fever. 

LSU Celeste Improved ripens just about every fig on its trees.  The rest of the varieties are somewhere over 50% of the figs ripening.  Hardy Chicago, Conadria, LSU Gold, Atreano, Celeste, English Brown Turkey, Excel & Kadota.  A bunch of my varieties are only a couple years old, so hard to say about them.

Looks great! In the last picture, it looks like comfrey growing around the pot in the foreground. Do you use the comfrey to make liquid fertilizer?

I have made teas in the past.  Mostly I use comfrey for pollinators and for mulch..  not for figs but for plantings in the forest garden.

Nice photos, looks great.  Guess I hadn't noticed you posting before.  I bought your Black Lebanese on eBay earlier, doing well.

I'm not so young but do a lot of lifting on my farm.  Just made the decision to buy over 17,000' of aluminum sprinkler pipe for my alfalfa which I'm going to try moving myself, 4 times in one week.  Should be fun!

I'm fortunate to be able to grow in the ground but have a lot of trees in 5 gallon pots until they are large enough to go into the ground and some stay in pots as backups.  I water by hand which usually isn't too bad of a chore but I am going on vacation next month for 7-9 days.  I use drip and micro-sprinklers in my various orchards but for my pots I had used some pot stakes before that worked out okay and just ordered a bunch from eBay (Hong Kong) to see if they work out okay.  It's mostly a temporary solution for me so I didn't want to spend too much and it was cheap enough.  If they work as stated, they should be a good solution for you also.  A drip emitter won't spread out over a large enough area in lighter potting soil so you would need several but this product should cover the entire pot.  http://www.ebay.com/itm/321303687740

Harvey, I've been a member of NAFEX for 20+ years.  We've corresponded a bit about chestnut questions some years back on the NAFEX list...  Those stakes look like they might actually work for my setup.

Thats the way to do it. You have some nice looking trees there.

Very nice - I assume you sell fresh figs/fig products, and are not consuming all the harvest in house?

Very Nice, Thanks for Sharing. My friend Eduardo told me that Chicken Manure can be to strong for some trees. He said Cow Manure was better. I have not tried any fertilizer in my potted figs.

These poultry pellets are composted before they are pelletized.  It's not hot, like it would be if you took chicken sh*t out of a henhouse.  Also because it's pelletized, it's pretty easy to figure out measurements.  The NPK is 4-5-3.

Ah ha!


 

Looks like a great setup.  Enjoy it!

Look great!!  (Now, geographer that I am, I am going to look up the coördinates for LaFarge WI and learn about where you live and grow figs)   :-)  Joe, in Georgia

Your orchard looks great...happy to hear that you are getting ripe figs for all your efforts.

That's a great looking arrangement!  (Except for the young fella :>) who has to haul those in and out each season!)

He gets paid handsomely. And it's actually more strenuous than I've described so far since the basement entrance is a mud slope down into the basement and the basement door is very low.  All the big figs have to come thru the door sideways, and it takes both of us to do it. By no means ideal, but if nothing else, is the measure of the passion I feel for growing figs.  I usually just take a bunch of ibuprofin before I do the twice yearly move and figure the following day is a rest day.

If the doors allows you could build a frame with a pulley / winch attached to raise and lower the containers.

Great set up!  Looks phenomenal.  Thank you so much for sharing!

I would love to see your food forest... your figs look very happy.

I, too, love comfrey. I am learning how to use in the garden, mostly it is food for my chickens.

beautiful trees you have, I wonder how their roots are.. do you ever prune their roots?

In the ideal world they would get root pruned every couple years but I would have to clone myself or pay someone to do it.  Also since I mostly use 5 gallon pickle buckets which I can get for free, which are not tapered, getting them out of the bucket usually destroys the buckets and is fairly time consuming. 

There's a few photos of our forest garden at http://facebook.com/driftlessgrove.

I have a drip system utilizing spot spitters on my larger pots. They spray a specific pattern over a decent portion of the pot (almost like a mist).

Here are the spitters I use:
http://www.dripirrigation.com/drip_irrigation_categories/115
The 1/8" poly tubing listed on there is stuck directly into my main water supply line, which I have hooked up to a timer on a hose bib. There's a few tools on the sit for poking holes into the main line.

Here's a link to the poly tubing (my main line):
http://www.dripirrigation.com/drip_irrigation_categories/86
I use the stuff with .700 OD, it's pretty standard, and there are lots of fittings to convert it to connect to a hose bib or existing sprinkler system.

You could leave the stuff sitting out all year in the same spot as long as you flush the lines before winter. I leave mine out all winter and haven't seen it degrade (yet). It'll probably hold up a number of years before needing to be replaced.