Are you interested in hand pollinating your figs or breeding different varieties?

I had seen a written procedure somewhere (possibly O'Rourke's) but for the life of me I cannot find it.

I would also add for anyone planning to do this. You will have a much better chance of producing a good edible-fig tree if you breed the mother fig with an "edible" male fig (caprifig).  I had gotten an edible male caprifig a few years ago that was known as "yellow pollinator". It supposedly produced edible figs in early June in my area......part of the reason I got the tree.  I lost the tree and haven't bothered to replace it.

Dan
Semper Fi-cus

Bass,
Thank you for this breeding article. It should be of interest to those
posters younger than I. If I was younger I'd try it myself, just for fun.
Its concise and easy as you discribe it.

It is very nice of you to take the time to share your knowledge with
the rest of us.

Peg
Z6, CT 

I'm curious if any on this forum have actually done this.

Producing any new varieties?

I was wondering if anyone had figured out what a good pollinator might be, is it available from someones collection or is it from Davis, or just a chance tree?  I'm kind of curious for a Calimyra crossed with a madiera.

When I see the complexity of what it takes to breed a new fig, I thank God for the wasps and the birds. The wasps do the crossings and the birds eat the figs and disperse the seeds as they travel.
I was fortunate to find wild trees in California and selected the best out of several seedlings. Now I have to ensure that among those which is a smyrna, san pedro or Common fig. Most of the varieties I selected have figs on them now, Once they ripen I will share my findings.

nypd,

I have done it, sort of. Some of mine are naturally pollinated, and is trial the seedlings. Haven't actually played sex-therapist to my figs.

Paging Dr Ruth...Dr Ruth!

Thanks Bass for sharing,
last year I've actually posed this exact breading Question

" Breading figs:
This question is directed to Jon and other fig-head connoisseurs 
out of curiosity do any of you ladies & gents know how fig are bread for new variety?
we keep hearing Ira Condit , LSU & UCR varieties yet no idea what was done to achieve those variates.
was it manual pollination, grafting ..... etc !!
what was it?
Have you tried anything like that Jon? and is there reading material on this subject?"

So I'm so glad we are so early in the season that I can put this method into trial. who knows in few years with toooooooons of luck :)

Thanks again Bass.

I'd be tempted to try this with my English Brown Turkey and Chicago Hardy.

I have a question though - can the same variety be used to pollinate or does it have to be a different one?
Most cultivated fruit can't produce fruit let alone set viable seed without pollen from a different variety. Like apples Golden Delicious apple tree can't pollinate another Golden Delicous because they're clones.

But figs are self-fertile aren't they? So could Brown Turkey pollinate Brown Turkey?
I'm interested in breeding cool climate fig varieties that ripen easier. I suppose the process would involve years of trial and error though.

Is it possible to be sold a caprifig by mistake? I have this one tree that never produces edible fruit, just green figs that never ripen. How can you tell if a fig is a caprifig?

They would look dry, like this, inside:

Thanks for replying to my question. Mine look very similar to this, very dry like you said. Mine don't seem to have those seeds. I hoping it just needs more time to produce fruit. If it is a caprifig I wouldn't know what to do with it.

Tom on this forum pollenated figs last year and sent me some seeds,I have 100 seedlings going into 2nd summer. Tom used Saleeb and Enderude, pollen producers used by Ira Condit. He got the trees from davis.Tom has been kind enough to seed me 2 young male trees. I hope to do some crossing this summer. Rex.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge, it would been awesome if you had made an instructional video :)

Did he pollinate them by hand following the method mentioned earlier? That's good to know it worked. I hope you get some good figs from these seedlings.

Thanks so much Bass. I would love to try this out in a few years. 

I have encountered such a fig nearby.   All dry inside and looked just like that.   Worse tasting fig ever.   So now I know what that is.  Is this usually harvested in the Spring?  I could hand pollinate.  I don't think any wasps around here.   Would it be possible for people to harvest the pollen and ship it around to people who are missing the fig wasp to get certain varieties to ripen especially if it keeps for 120 days. 

Figfinantic - where are you located with the caprifig?

Shipping already harvested pollen would be easy. The thing is figuring out what sort of attributes a given male fig is going to give to the females we have. Meaning, how do you know you aren't using pollen from a male that has underwhelming fruit lineage similar to say..California Brown Turkey. You might just be diluting your females greatness.

Maybe we could get some pollen from some place like Portugal and make some really interesting things happen. Then again, the factor I mentioned above is still present, no matter where the male comes from it's fruit lineage potential is no guarantee. Unless you know what female it came from. Maybe if you took a cold hardy male and bred it with an outstanding female, sprouted those seeds and grew them out, take the pollen from your favorite males you produced and use that to hybridize other great females. Now were on to something.

So lets recap.
Pollinate a few figs, grow a few hundred seedlings or more, and about half of those would be males so you could toss most of them(after what 3-5 years?).  Keep the females and grow them for at least 7 years to see what you get. In the mean time you start a whole new process of pollinating a few figs on all the great varieties of females you have with the pollen your favorite male(s) produced...
I would need a bigger yard and garage.

Or you could treat it like a lottery and just grow a few and see what happens.  You never know.
Black Calveira or Figo Calvo, BatCalvia Green, or oooh the Cal de Dame's  :)

Could it be possible to use this methold to breed sycomorus, afghanistanica, palmata and carica ?

so you collect pollen from breba and put it into main crop? i wouldn't mind crossing Black Madeira with Genovese Nero to see what comes out of it.

The first post in this thread by Bass has some inaccurate information. You don't take the pollen from the same tree's breba crop. Ficus carica is a dioecious plant species. That means that the trees are either male or female and not both at the same time like apples and peaches. So, the pollen only gets made on the male trees which are commonly called caprifigs. You could get pollen from the profichi crop of a caprifig and put it back onto the same trees next crop if you wanted to self pollinate a male tree. You would then get seeds that would be about 50% male, and 50% female and each of those groups would each be half common fig and the other half smyrna. That is if your male tree was a 'persistent caprifig' which is equivalent to a common fig female tree. If your male tree was the male equivalent of a Smyrna type female, then none of the offspring would ripen fruit without pollination. All of the seedlings would be either smyrna females or non-persistent caprifigs.

Anyway, I am going to be trying for more variety of early ripening, cold tolerant figs. I hope to luck out and get some even though I can only grow out a limited number of seedlings. This year I plan to do a cross onto Hardy Chicago, and possibly onto Native de Argentile and I will try any other figs that seem to be cold hardy like those as I get the opportunity. I hope that some of my seedlings will be male figs with better cold tolerance than the ones I now have. These are NCGR at Davis catalog numbers DFIC0008 and DFIC0010 and have the names Enderude and Saleeb. Both were used during the UC Riverside fig breeding program in the 50's that gave us such figs as Deanna, Tena, Conadria and more.

If anyone is interested in growing some seedlings, let me know and as they get ripe this fall, I can send you some.

What I plan to do with trees that I dont want to use for breeding or trees that make poor figs is to bud graft them with other good figs, Rex,

HarveyC:  This fig that I found is in Phoenix.   It is in the back of someone's house, but it's branches hang way over a parking lot.  Anyways, I took one off and was taken aback by how dry it was and how it looked inside and threw it away.   Then, back around say October, it had actually decent sweet ripe yellow fruits.   So I was reading about the different types of fig trees and totally confused, not sure what this is.

Any updates?

Hi, I am new here and I need to let me people know what I think is going on as I am a PhD plant breeder and one of the top experts in the world on diecious (mostly hop and Cannabis) and the related range of hermaphrodites within diecious species like hop and Cannabis and suggest this may be happening in fig too! One more thing as far as credentials, I got my PhD in Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State in 2007 with an emphasis on hop genetics, plant breeding and plant pathology as it related to hop downy mildew disease and breeding for resistence to this fungus. My dissertation is one of the few in the third floor conference room in the OSU Crop and Soil Science building so Crops students have access to it! For my written exam for my PhD, I wrote an NSF grant for using marker assisted selection to breed for mold resistance in industrial hemp. I went to Cornell for a post doc in 2008 analyzing high dimesional DNA data sets for the USDA Barley Coordinated Agricultural Project (CAP), restricted maximum likelihood mixed models to ID superior lines for yield and other important using a technique called association mapping. I am not back in Oregon, studying Cannabis and working on a new theory of physics.

Anyway, back to fig...I have to assume, based on being an expert on dieoicious and hermaphroditie plants that ALL FIG ARE HERMAPHRODITES! Yes, you are reading this correctly and EVERYONE ELSE IS PROBABLY WRONG thinking fig has all female flowers and here is why.....

In diecious plants, its a bell curve. The range of hermaphroditism goes like this.....staminate hermaphrodite----->hermaphrodite<------pistillate hermaphrodite. Staminate hermaphrodites are plants with mostly male flowers and a few females mixed in. As we progress along the 'hermaphrodite bell curve' we get the the most abundent, the true hermaphrodites. Then as we progress further along the bell curve of hermaphrodites to the far-right outliers, we have what are called pistillate hermaphrodites. Pistillate hermaphrodites produce almost all female flowers with a couple male flowers mixed in. This is VERY COMMON in landrace strains of plants that are predominately diecious, but have hermaphrodites! In Cannabis there are pistillate hermaphrodites. Trainwreck is the most famous example. In the best batches of 'wreck', you will find the occasional viable seed and/or anther (bananas in Cannabis..:) Also, ALL THE RESULTING PROGENY ARE FEMALE!!! The pollen produced by a pistillate hermaphrodite is ALL FEMALE pollen! I bet this is what is going on in fig! My guess is there are landrace fig that are pistillate hemaphrodite. You DO NOT need apomixis to explain what is going on in fig. A lot of 'FIG EXPERTS' say that fig is Gynodiecious. I do not think that is correct! NO! Although I am no expert on fig, the above story on collecting pollen from edible breba, MIGHT BE CORRECT!!! If fig is 'NOT' Gynodiecious, but rather ALL HERMAPHRODITE with common edible fig just being a 'PISTILLATE HERMAPHRODITE'....the problem is SOLVED!!! You DO NO need apomixis or chance pollination to explain the occasional viable or few viable seed in Breba figs...Breba figs are pistillate hermaphrodites...WHICH MAKES ALL FIG HERMAPHRODITE with edible fig the far right 'outlier' in the 'range of hermaphroditism' given above. There are seeds availble on eBay for a self pollinated fig...actually a couple varieties from Cananda. My guess is the seeds are viable as they are listed as viable. How can this be? The SIMPLE answer is that this guy in Canada is collecting viable seed from landrace strains of fig that happen to be Breba crop pistillate hermaphrodite. When I get the seeds and germinate them and they are all female and all look like a clone, that is very suggestive of pistillate hermaphrodite or apomixis and if I had to choose a mechanism, I GO WITH MY EXPERT EXPERIENCE WITH DIECIOUS PLANTS AND WHAT THEY DO and it looks to me like ALL FIG are hermaphrodites and some edible fig (the ones with breba) produce an occasional viable seed a few and that is because the Breba crop from these landraces are pistillate hermaphrodites. Gynodiecious means that there are edible fig are all female flowers and that may be the case for the summer crop, but the Breba is probably pistillate hermaphrodite. You may not see the anthers, the anthers may be deformed and only produce a little pollen. But ALL THE POLLEN poduced will be female and genetically like the mother. You are making clones in seed form! Given what I have read on this subject and reading the above 'suggestive evidence' about edible fig breba containing pollen, I just had to let people know what I think is going on. I will have an update when I get the seeds from that guy in Canada and this French des duex variety that looks inbred. Anyway, let me know what you think about this pistillate hermaphrodite idea when it comes to fig. I bet I am correct!

Welcome to the forum congatom!  I look forward to your posts although this one is a little above my head! :-)) 

Suzi

That is some useful information Thomas. I will have to read it a couple of times to fully understand you ideas. Your work sounds interesting, I'm sure there are many folks who would like to see some mold resistance bred into medicinal or recreational Cannabis as well. Mike in Hanover, VA

Hi Tom, welcome to the forum.

I think I follow what you are saying, but in figs pollen ripens long after the female flowers are receptive. The pollen needs to be carried by the fig wasp to the next crop in order to produce viable seeds. Edible caprifigs cannot host the wasp because all female flowers are the long style type, transfer from one crop to the next is not possible. So unless the male flowers ripen pollen when the fig is still a large embryo self pollination is not possible. Please correct me if I have misunderstood.

Knowing eBay and figs you may end up getting seeds from dried Turkish fruits, I hope you are right though.

Can you tell me anything about using GA3 to induce male flowers? I read this was accomplished recently in Japan. 

All you are saying is that there is a TEMPORAL sterility and NOT GENETIC!! Smell the Breba cut harvest it, cut it open and collect the anthers/or pollen. You can make synthetic ALL FEMALE hybrids that ROCK using this techique! You may only get a few seeds produced...so? It's a synthetic hybrid of two really nice females you choose. Now I am not saying all breba make pollen, probably not, like with Trainweck Cannabis, environment plays a huge roll in male flower production in pistillate hermaphrodites.

I will say this TO ALL PLANT BREEDERS....THERE ARE NO DIECIOUS PLANTS!!! I'M THE EXPERT AND GO ASK OREGON STATE CROPS AND THEY WILL TELL YOU! There is only a range in hermaphroditism in plants that show separate male and female flowers.

The range goes: 100% male flower/ no female parts ----->Staminate hermaphrodite---->Hermaphrodite<-----Pistillate Hermaphrodite<-----100% female flower/no male parts

In truth, THERE ARE NO DIECIOUS PLANTS, ALL DIECIOUS PLANTS FALL INTO THE HEMAPHRODITE BELL CURVE!!!

I bet fig is the same and just add the fig wasp for fun...:) Now, not all Breba, all the time will produce viable pollen, but it appears to happen quite often and it's not apomixis. Under certain conditions, landrace strains Breba can produce viable pollen...Its no big deal and happens quite often in Cannabis....Trainwreck and landrace Hawaiian both are pistillate hermaphrodites. Will you get viable seed set in Trainwreck? Well, it depends...:) I bet it is the same with fig. Plant breeder...PLEASE GET RID OF THE NOTION OF DIECIOUS AND GYNO DIOECIOUS AND RELATED DESCRIPTIONS! There are NO DIECIOUS PLANTS IN REALITY...PLEASE LOOK AT THE ABOUT BELL CURVE PLEASE!!! The GA3 thing I was going to comment on as they use GA3 and silver thiosulfate to induce male flowers in Cannabis...nice going on that thread....:)

Tom, welcome to the forum.
You know, some real scientists have studied this.  Not guesses or conjecture based on other plants.  Fig sex has been pretty conclusively worked out.  Maybe read about it?

Pistillate hermaphrodites are the best plants to have as you never lose the strain! It clones itself in seed form and its virus free...:) All the inbreds that this guy in Canada has seed for, all produce Breba crops...YEAH..GO FIGURE...:) Let me go to eBay and post the list on his dwarf inbreds...Smaller size too...Yeah, he is line breeding Breba pistillate hermaphrodites for seed and selling them...:) VERY COOL...:) I could be wrong, but I am getting the seed and will germinate them and then I'll  know pretty much for sure just looking at the all female plants...well...all pistillate hermahrodites....:)

This guy in Canda has Madeleine des deux saisons, blue Brogiotto, Petite negra, Dessert King, Green Ischia, Rogue de Bordeaux, and Panache. Interesting as he lists Panache, but I thought, no Breba, but I was wrong as a guy here has a beautiful picture of Panache Breba. So yeah, all these produce Breba and I bet some of these are pistillate hermaphrodites. He may be spraying with GA3 or something, but my guess is he does not have to do that as he lists some of them as inbred...a selfing and the plants are dwarf. I bet they are pistillate herm., and I will find out as I am getting the Madeleine seeds and germinating them. I will also be looking at Breba that form and smell fragrant....that is wasp time and time to harvest for possible pollen, again if more than a few of these are pistillate hermaphrodites....The fact that he is only offering those with Breba crops and the above reference to pollen there-in, suggest pistillate hermaphrodite. All you people can check too...:) When the Breba fig is fragrant harvest is and open it up and take a look. Interesting for sure. Doubtful it is apomixis, now it is just 'HOW' are the male flowers forming in the Breba? My guess is, it is a natural thing and some landraces are natural pistillate hermaphrodite. That is the simple answer that question posed by 'others not that eBay possible GA3 guy' on 'HOW DID THAT VIABLE SEED GET IN THERE'?  This is too common a phenomenon for apomixis and looking at other 'diecious' plants that do the same producing the occasional all female seed, well, the answer is simple....pistillate hermaphrodite on the hermaphrodite 'bell curve'...:)

Sounds like some interesting ideas, congatom.  Do you mind giving us your name so that those of us who are interested can look into some of your writings?

When the 'EXPERTS' use the wrong term....DIECIOUS...THEY ARE NO EXPERT!!! THERE ARE NO DIECIOUS PLANTS, JUST A HERMAPHRODITE BELL CURVE WITH ALL MALE AND ALL FEMALE PLANTS AS THE FURTHEST OUTLIERS!!! Oh and I have read some of the papers and in some of those papers they do talk about male flowers in common fig. Mule flowers as they are called is WRONG TOO! Mule is GENETIC STERILITY!!! There is NO GENETIC STERILITY IN FIG THAT I AM AWARE OF....GET RID OF THE NOTION OF 'MULE' ....THAT IS WRONG!!!

TEMPORAL STERILTY...., BUT THE POLLEN IS VIABLE!!! HOW DO YOU GET AT IT? Bass reported on this old report and it probably is correct, you just have to harvest the Breba at the correct time and get some pollen if it is there. But calling fig flowers mule? IF THE STERILTY IS GENETIC OK, BUT RESEARCH SAYS...NO!!! So, WHY KEEP THE WRONG TERM 'MULE FLOWER? IT IS NOT CORRECT!

Yeah, it is TOUGH FOR PEOPLE TO ACCEPT THAT SOME 'OLD SCHOOL' DUDE IS WRONG, BUT EXPLAIN MULE FLOWER WHEN IT IS NOT GENETIC STERILITY!!!

ALL I am doing is giving you people INFORMATION based on the fact I AM A PHD EXPERT ON DIECIOUS PLANTS....FIG IS A DIECIOUS PLANT!!!! Well, THERE ARE DIECIOUS PLANTS, BUT I ALREADY CORRECT EVERYONE ABOUT THAT ONE...:) NOW COMES MULE FLOWERS AND I WILL FIND OUT IF FIG BREBA ARE PISTILLATE HERMAPHRODITE!!! Again, I BET THEY ARE.....I DON'T CARE WHAT 'YOUR EXPERTS' SAY AS IT LOOKS LIKE THEY COULD BE WRONG AS THEY ARE CLEARLY WRONG ON NUMEROUS TOPICS, LIKE 'MULE FLOWERS'...:(

It is funny as I did read that in papers that male flowers have been found in common fig. THAT MEANS THEY ARE NOT GYNODIECOUS PEOPLE!!! THERE ARE NO DIECIOUS PLANTS!!! These EXPERTS need to get rid of the 'MULE FLOWER' and start looking at the possiblity that fig are actually ALL HERMAPHRODITE with edible fig having a good number of landrace pistillate hermaphrodites. It's REALLY THAT SIMPLE...:)

If you have an all female flower, it is JUST AN OUTLIER ON THE HERMAPHRODITE BELL CURVE!!! Just because you are a fig 'EXPERT', that does NOT make you a good plant scientist!!! I am just here giving you information, you don't have to listen, believe it or anything, but I WILL POINT OUT WHEN OTHER 'EXPERT SCIENTISTS' OR SO-CALLED 'EXPERT SCIENTISTS' ARE CLEARLY WRONG!!! Does fig have an ODD CHROMOSOME NUMBER? NO, DROP THE 'MULE FLOWER' PLEASE!!!

Any evidence of apomixis....Whew...NOT REALLY!!! Any evidence for pistillate hermaphrodite? HECK YEAH....:) It's really that simple...:)

Again, just because you are a 'FIG EXPERT' or even a fig breeder PhD....YOU HAVEN'T DEALT WITH ME!!! Go ask Russ Karow about me, he is the Dept. Chair of Crops at Oregon State! I was #1 in Crops while there and went to Cornell as a post doc. What about you PhD FIG EXPERTS, YOU GO TO CORNELL AS A POSTDOC? NO? AH HUH...:)

I bet if I went in to Russ's office and talked to him about fig and my theory of it being pistillate hermaphrodite...Russ would most-likely agree that it is a STRONG POSSIBLITY and may even say I am correct!!! IT JUST MAKES SENSE!!!...:)

I am getting some of those inbred line figs and I will find out. Too many have reported male flowers in Breba for this to be anything but pistillate hermaphrodite!...:)

No just male flowers, but VIABLE SEED TOO! It happens way to often for it to be apomixis and diecious (man I hate that word!) have common 'systems' to deal with stess and ensure reproductive success.

Wow! That is a boat load of information, requires a PhD to comprehend!

I was napping and the computer shouting woke me up :)  Geez…

As Ed mentioned above, there is a number of papers published and research done, you can check them out.
They do not claim to be the fig experts though, so you can read  what has been written and write back to the authors .

Diecious plants have common systems for reproductive success under changing envirornment or stress. Producing one or few male flowers in an all female plant is 'typical' within the 'hermaphrodite bell curve'....A genetic response to stress to ensure reproductive success in plants within the hemaphrodite bell curve extreme outliers...all female...needs that pollen

The pics that seller is using do not belong to them... No evidence they have any trees themselves.

The strains of Cannabis that show strong pistillate hermaphrodites are equatorial strains as there is a contant environment and no need for genetic diversity...So, plants clone via seed with the bel curve, some having more male flowers than others. Fig is from equatorial regions with constant enviornment. It ensures reproductive success by cloning itself via seed in the Breba.

The fig 'EXPERTS' all talk about what I am talking about as they have seen it happen, but THEY DON'T CALL IT FOR WHAT IT IS??? Fig Breba are SCREAMING PISTILLATE HERMAPHRODITE THERE IS EVIDENCE FOR THIS AND NO EVIDENCE FOR APOMIXIS....PISILLATE HERMS OCCUR ON OTHER DIECIOUS CROPS AND MOST-LIKELY ALL DIECIOUS CROPS AS A REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS MEASURE. SO, IT LOOKS LIKE EDIBLE FIG ARE PISTILLATE HERMAPHRODITES, SO??? I am NOT SAYING ANYTHING the 'FIG EXPERTS' have not observed and recorded...THEY HAVE MENTIONED IT, SO CALL IT FOR WHAT IT IS PLEASE...:)

But it is the 'MULE FLOWER' is the one that makes NO SENSE AT ALL! Fig does not have an odd # of chromosomes....THEY ARE NOT 'MULE FLOWERS'.....

Flowers that are temporally sterile but with viable pollen that is ALL FEMALE and not that much if any...YEAH, CAN ACCEPT THAT EXPLANATION.....HEY, WAIT A MINUTE, THAT'S PISTILLATE HERMAPHRODITE!!!