I ordered three trees form Burnt Ridge Nursery.

 



The one on the right is a King fig. I paid extra for it because it was a 5 foot tree. I have never seen such a fig tree. It has a trunk size of a pencil, has no branching and can't support itself at all. It's like a whip.

I am not sure what the best thing to do for it is. Should I live with it and just stake it when I plant it in the orchard or is there something I can do to get a better form?

I would air layer it at the halfway point . In 5-8 weeks you will have 2 trees and the bottom section will be forced to make multiple branches .
Otherwise stake it . I guess it depends what tree shape you want .

John

i would also air-layering it to force it to grow thicker and side lateral growth.  

Thanks for the air-layering idea.

I didn't think of that. I have never done it before, but I guess I don't have much to loose.

It depends on what you want. If yhou want it to be low growing, prune it, air-layer it, etc. If you want a tree, stake it and let it grow to the trunk height you want, then top it and force branching. I have trees that look like that because some customers want taller trees. Others want to grow more like a bush. There are reasons for both styles.

I got my pencil from Burnt Ridge as well and it can't support itself either. It was going gangbusters even taller so I broke off the terminal bud in a moment of anger. Yes, I'll own it, I threw the damn thing after I did it. That was just a few days ago after I was admiring a cutting I had gotten from Tim fatnsassytexan  and grew myself. The cutting cost me about 1/10th what the pencil did and it is beautiful. I like it so much that today I took it out of it's 1 gallon and put it into a 15 gallon beside the pencil. Perhaps it will embarass the other one into becoming a proper tree! They are both Violette de Bordeaux BTW.

Some people have said how much they like this nursery but I certainly won't buy from them again.