Cindi's question about dormancy and FiggySid's response brought up a question that I have had for a long time and that is whether the length of time for dormancy is built into a plant or purely a matter of growing conditions.

The last few years, I have ended up cleaning out the last of my cuttings from the fridge around late July or August. I hate throwing these out but at this point I either have left overs from my own trees or from successfully rooting multiple trees for the varieties I am adding to the collection. Usually I stick several of left over varieties in a pot and cover the top with a ziploc bag from which I have cut off the corners to allow a bit more air circulation.  I stick the pots in a shady corner, ignore them and most root and leaf out. This means at the end of our growing season, I have a bunch of trees 3-6 months of age which I know are too young to go through a dormancy period of 5-6 months duration. I have been bringing them inside and growing them under lights for the winter. My question is, if I were able to control growing conditions and postpone dormancy sufficiently that I could allow them to go dormant for a shorter period, say 4-8 weeks would they survive and wake up or is it a question of when a fig goes dormant, its sort of genetically built in that they stay dormant for X period of time.  FiggySid's response about dormancy in Hawaii sort of suggests that the length of time that a fig stays dormant may not be simply a matter of temperature and light.

I subscribe to the daylight hours theory on dormancy, with qualification.  The qualification is that I do not know how they would react/perform in extended cold temps even with the lights.

I keep my lights on 24/7 in my pole barn where the temp is, at best 10 deg above ambient.  The trees in that area do not go dormant.  These trees are mostly 1st yr, 1 gal, and well rooted.  The Hibiscus in the same area show some signs of leaf loss due to the temp as they are tropical plants and I don't think they go dormant.  The pepper plants show no signs of being affected by the colder temps.

I tried to keep a few dozen trees from going dormant last winter by using 6500k Florescent lighting. I turned on the lights at 6pm at sunset to 9pm, to see if extending daylight hour prevented leaf loss and dormancy.

All of the trees under the lights continued to grow and form figs. The trees not under lights went dormant even though the temperature was the same and never dropped below 55 degrees at night.