Pinching has been discussed many times here but a while back someone mention removing leaves to hasten ripening. On my LSU Gold (not) tree I decided to experiment the processes because I was left with so many unripened figs last fall and not so many of the earlier ones ripened. This year I took 1 of my 2 trees and pinched ever tip on it and on the other I stripped all of the leaves off of one branch to compare. The one with the pinched tip and starting to ripen fruit while the other tree has not done anything yet except on the branch that I stripped the leaves off of. My conclusion is that both methods work but I'll stick to pinching because the tree looks a lot better with leaves on it and I'm not sure what would happen to a tree that was stripped of all of it leaves. Meanwhile I went back to the unpinched tree and pinched all the tips. Today, 6 days later,  I noticed a lot of fruit swelling and starting to turn yellow.
"gene"

ps: as a footnote. I've compared the taste of my LSU Gold (not) to Conadia, Flanders, Lattarula and Celeste this morning. The Celeste wins but only because it's the standard. The LSU Gold (not) is superb. It's large, sweet, slightly figgy, doesn't split and very creamy feeling in the mouth. The Flanders and Latarulla can't hold a candle to to it but I will give them at least another season to age before I make the decision to get rid of them. The Conadria fell somewhere in between. Now I've a belly ache from eating too many figs off the tree for breakfast.....(do y'all think that the forbidden fruit could have been a fig instead of an apple)

The branch with stripped showing the first ripening fig on the tree.



The tree with pinched tips.

Thanks for the experiment.

I was going to try it next year to compare.

Dumb ?: Any clue to what the 'not' is?

The only thing I know about it is that it came from Lowes and it is delicious.
"gene"

Interesting experiment--thanks for telling us about it.

Good test Gene. Thanks for the summary and the photos. I will keep pinching also.

This is an excerpt from a study that Malli at Davis sent me (for a different reason and subject):

"To accelerate the development of the mammoni and provide receptive figs at the right time, the tips of the new-growth branches of Caprificus were lopped off in May (see Condit, 1947). As a consequence of pruning the mammoni figs on these branches appeared earlier than usual and reached the receptive stage while numerous profichi were still present on the trees."

Mammoni are main crop figs. Profichi are breba crop figs. As I said, the article was about an experiment about a different subject, but the ability to pinch, and thus accelerate the formation of main crop figs is apparently well known and documented.

@Jon thanks for this info.  @Gene, thanks for bringing it up.  I wasn't aware of this until this thread started. 

It's I who owe everyone here a lot of thanks. Noss you're welcome to drop in anytime to help keep me from having a bellyache.
"gene"