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Fig breeding steps

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

These are steps taken from an older book on fruit breeding. 

The first attempt to improve figs through pollination began in 1908. Before that time all fig varieties were selected from wild or naturalized trees (maybe mutations of known varieties too?) and propagated by cuttings. Dr. Ira J. Condit did extensive fig breeding in the 1900s, he might have some interesting research papers.

The breeding work starts when you decide on two parents you want to use in a cross. One will be the "male," and supply the pollen. And one will be the "female" and form seeds.

The only crop on a fig tree that produces pollen is the crop that is produced on dormant wood, from buds that over-wintered in the fall, also known as Profici. To harvest pollen from these fruit cut them in half long ways, and place them in a warm, dry place with little air circulation to dry and release pollen. It is recommended that you dry the figs on top of some kind of paper.

After several days they will begin to release pollen which you can shake out by tapping the fig with your finger or a pencil. This pollen can be put into containers with sealed lids, like vials, pill bottles, or mason jars, and stored in the refrigerator (around 8-10 degrees C, 46-50 F) for as long as 120 days.

Also note it is best to dry different varieties of figs in different rooms as their pollen is so light that cross-contamination can be a problem.

The figs that form on the currant season's growth are the ones that you pollinate with your extracted pollen. These fruit are your "female" fruit and do not produce pollen. They only produce pistols, the female part of a flower which receives pollen. To pollinate them take an ice pick, nail, or similar instrument, and make a hole halfway through one side of the fig, followed by another through the eye or in another location on the side of the fig. This second hole allows for air circulation as you blow pollen into the fig. Take a pipette or syringe and puff the pollen into the fig through one of your holes. You are blowing pollen into the inside cavity of the fig which is covered with receptive female pistols. Any way to get pollen into this cavity should work well. There is even a report of a breeder who cuts a fig almost the whole way in half, pollinates it, and it still forms a mature fig.

Carefully mark the crossed fig to keep track of the cross. When I breed other types of fruit I like to cover crosses with a small bag made of floating row cover for vegetable production (brand-name "agribond" or "reemay") which lets light and air circulate, but protects my cross from weather extremes and hungry passersby, animals and people!

After the fig matures it needs to be fermented to remove the gel surrounding the seeds. Cut it into several pieces and drop it into a jar with water to ferment for several days. It will need to be shaken several times. The process is the same as saving seed from tomatoes. It might also work to scoop out only the gel and seeds from the cross and exclude most of the flesh of the fig. That would make cleaning easier. After fermenting, the seed can be washed with clean water and dried or germinated immediately.

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.

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