Originally Posted by GreenFin

Unfortunately they don't sell rooted cuttings, they'll sell tc (tissue culture) plants.

The bad thing about tc figs is that they have generally reverted to juvenile wood and won't fruit much (if at all) for a number of years.  You'll mostly just be growing a lot of sticks and leaves instead of fruit. 

Cuttings from fruiting wood are 100 times better than tc's.  It's like the difference between getting a good grafted avocado/orange/etc tree versus growing one from seed.  I wasted 2 years growing a bunch of 10ft wide x 7ft tall tc's that produced zero figs, and almost totally quit the hobby because of it, before thankfully trying a few cuttings instead.  It was a night/day difference.  Almost all of the cuttings I root from fruiting wood set fruit right away from the ground up.

Oh how I wish someone would have told me this when I first started, so I wouldn't have wasted 2 years growing unproductive tc's from Wellspring.

Originally Posted by SuperMario1

My experience with tissue cultures has been completely different than yours apparently, so I must disagree. To be fair though, I up-potted carefully, fertilized, watered, and live in an area that has good weather and long summers.  My plants were carefully provided for.  I have 5 Tissue culture plants, and all 5 grew like weeds and 4 of them produced over 20 figs each in their first year.  The other is a "Black Mission" variant that grew like a weed but produced no figs. It has a bad case of rust so maybe that is why... can't be sure... We'll see next year.

The trees were delicate little bean sprout looking things when I got them, but boy did they grow vigorously once they became acclimated to the new soil and sun.  It is really amazing how much they grew, and I didn't even pinch a single fruit the first year. TC plants were an A+ experience for me. Sorry you had a bad experience with yours.

Originally Posted by GreenFin

I'm very happy you had a great experience, but you're not really disagreeing with me.

I never said ALL tc plants revert to juvenile wood; that was a curious misrepresentation of my position by another poster.  You having a good experience doesn't contradict or even disagree with my assertion that rooted cuttings from fruiting wood are "generally" (i.e. "on average" "tend to be" etc) more productive than their tc counterparts during the early years.  Sort of like how knowing a bunch of women over 6' tall wouldn't contradict an assertion that men are generally taller than women.

I also want to be very clear that my position is NOT based solely on my experience or even much on my experience at all.  My personal experience is just one tiny data point, just like yours.  My position is almost entirely based on the overall group data that I got from searching the archives for every tc reference I could find, and then reading and tallying members' experiences.  If you do the same, you'll find a whole lot of people who have reported their tc's tending to be less fruitful or outright barren, whereas on the flipside there aren't any reports of people claiming that their tc's are more productive than their cutting counterparts.  Heck, it's relatively rare to find people who claim that tc's and rooted cuttings are entirely equal in their early productivity.  I admit that I haven't done much forum reading this year, though, so my position is just based on the many years of archives leading up to this year.  I strongly recommend you all just do your own reading and reasoning on it.

I furthermore want to nip in the bud any possible swelling notion that I'm anti-Wellspring.  On the complete and total contrary, I have often recommended them as a nursery.  I generally only recommend them for their bananas, though, and take care to note that they sell tc's and the general pros and cons of that.  But even for fig folks, they're still worthwhile if you can't get cuttings, and if you're aware of the risk of weak fruiting that many people have reported.

I'm sure you've all had instances in your lives when your position has been misrepresented by other people, so I'm sure you can understand how frustrating it is.  I have meant this as a polite clarification of my position, and I hope it is taken that way.