Hello All,

 Lately I've been picking any sickly or dried,rusty looking leaves right off.My thinking is why have my trees expanding energy on a dying leaf and instead concentrate on more pressing issues like growth.Am I causing my tree harm by doing so or am I doing the opposite because my tree now has to heel herself.Any reply would be appreciated.

Regards
Geo

The tree does not need to spend energy to keep leaves, they are it's energy source. Before leaves drop, in normal situations, the tree will have pulled nutrients out of the leaves before they fall. There are not many reasons to leaf prune, one is to allow more light to hit the figs, another is to reduce the water needs of a cutting or transplant. I would think you are not going to help the tree much by removing any, the tree will drop them on it's own time. It might help with rust but I don't have much of that and don't do anything but rake leaves once at the end of the year, maybe someone else does it. Figs can bleed for some time if the cut is made with a very sharp tool rather than one that does a little crushing as well, so look out for that, that is not good.

If you can't stand looking at  deformed leaves due to FMV,then by all means remove them.
Dan Abadie also proposed a new  method,of  boosting the fig to produce better production,and that is by removing the base leaves on new branches,leaving only 2 top leaves and removing the rest on every new branch.
I did it and I see no ill effect,but no gain eather at this point!