i know high temp and full sun gives good Black Madeira. some say temp in 80s is good enough. unfortunately, our temp here has dropped to 70's of late. this yr's really p'ing me off. anyway.. what is chance of Black Madeira ripening in 70's? it's only sept., and still have month of oct. left and already 70's.. it's strange to say the least.

Pete, same here. Today, low 70's and light rain on and off. Tomorrow, heavier rain and 70's. I have put two of my three BM
on the driveway looking for all the heat I can find but this weather isn't helping. We can only hope for more sun in the coming days.

Thanks Pete for posting this question. Has anyone grown the Black Madeira tree in the ground in zone 7a?  

Best,
Tam

In this video you will see John demonstrate the technique for getting unripe figs on a tree to ripen up faster

I'm not quite desperate enough to strip the leaves of my Black Madeira. I fear that may cause the tree to lose some energy and possibly weaken it before going dormant. As leaves yellow and fall off naturally in the fall, the tree is transporting nutrients from the leaves to the stems and trunk for spring growth. On a huge in ground tree, removing leaves is less of an issue though as shown in the video. 

true

you may remove some unripe figs now, in order to divert the plant's energy into the remaining figs.


fruit thinning is highly effective and plant friendly

there are ways to speed ripening process.. oil in the eye.. taking leaves off.. but they all have some down side to them. the figs are not as tasty as naturally ripen figs. let mother nature take her course. only problem is she's too damne slow..

couple of months ago, all the leaves on my VdB dropped. mainly due to lack of watering while i was off camping and the drip line didn't work properly. the figs ripen faster for sure, but they didn't taste any good. then again, the taste might have been due to too much rain this yr.

Fig thinning is definitely a better idea, but it's so hard to do on the precious Black Madeira. If I don't see any signs of ripening within a week, I will have to try that. 

hmm.. fig thinning.. i might go for that. i know few will never even get to swelling in this weather.

I oiled all of mine, so far only 3 are almost ripe naturally, I would recommend oiling some and seeing what you think, I didn't find too much degradation of quality when I oiled the first one.  Mine are huge this year so I am thinking they will be a bit degraded by that to start though.

Did the tree do the fig shuffle, whats the pot sitting on , how many days old are the figs, where the small figs pulled of accordingly to your climate early in season,where the branches pruned for figs all these things effect what happens later in season
a great deal.

Low 70s not a problem to ripen madeira here in my zone and still taste wonderful if picked at right time
this i know first hand .

Last year I picked until 15th of october, they were ok, now we are getting below 50s, for this I oiled my figs to ripen them before the time comes.  Mine are all over 100 days old and were just waiting for heat to swell.

How big is your tree? I recently bought a tomato green house for about 20 € and put it over my unknown fig to maybe get the main crop to ripen up faster.

 

after reading the posts on this thread, i moved mine to front of the house facing south. now it's getting more sun and turning nicely dark. i took off handful of figs that i know won't have any chance of ripening this yr also. then found a sparrow yesterday staring at the fig... so far bird damange this yr has been minor. but if that bird start to peck on my Black Madeira, it's going to go its way in Ortolan Bunting way.

I decided to try out oiling this year with figs I never thought would ripen. It actually worked out pretty well and I'm pleased with the results. Is it as good as a fig ripened in 80 or 90 degree weather? Probably not. But it's a heckuva lot better than all those figs sitting there and not ripening!

Oh, and I used Bass' method of a cotton ball soaked in olive oil. It went quickly and I was able to do quite a number of figs in a short period of time.

the other day, i made a tuna salad using corn oil. i couldn't eat it. usually use olive oil. so what oil is best for the figs? i might try on one of the figs just to see what happens.

As long as the sun is still sharp we can try oiling them. It works well. 

Olive oil is the only one I have tried, you don't need much, I used a q tip and it worked well.