My 11 year old son usually has a firm grip on reality, but sometimes he does imagine that he is a pirate on a south sea island fighting off hordes of cannibals in search of buried treasure. He conducts this delusional activity in our neighborhood, which has lots of avocado and citrus groves, overgrown ravines, creeks and ponds.
One day he came home from an adventure with a bundle of fig twigs that he snapped off a tree he found. He stuck them in a glass of water. I didn't want to interfere with his fig'xperimentation, so we watched them on the kitchen counter for a month. The twigs all developed little root initials, but they were so weak that just swirling the water in the glass would cause some of them to fall off. They never grew more than 1/4" before falling off. They looked more like nodules than hairs. I told him he needed to get them into cups. So, he got Mom to buy him some cups and he helped himself to some of my leftover cup mix.
So he's got 9 cuttings like these. Three have little leaves like this one, and all but one have green buds breaking. I didn't help him at all or tell him what to do, except when I told him the cuttings weren't going to do well if he left them in water too long. He didn't do anything right. They twigs were broken off, not cut. He didn't use a humidity bin. The cups are just sitting outside by the back door being ignored. He got almost a 90% success rate (maybe 100% if the last one takes off). He has me totally beat. Mold killed more than half of my cuttings this year.
He told me the reason he needs to get these fig trees started now is so that by the time he is in high school, he can sell them to the other kids at school. I think I need to get this kid a television or an XBox or something. He's turning into a weirdo like you people.
