Pinching, does indeed help in getting fruit to ripen faster. Plus, it starts the bush/tree to start hardening off earlier.

By late summer, the pinched Marseilles Black VS plants have already converted it's green branches to branches that have started to harden off with wood more like maple virses branches that look like celery stalks.

Pinching is a must with the English Brown Turkeys we have been growing and testing. If you don't pich them and remove all the green fruit before frost, they will look like celery with hundreds of green fruit, going into the fall. Fruit that will never ripen. But, will make the bush more likely to sustain winter damage.

This is one of the reasons why some of us are so excited about LaRadek's English Brown Turkey. The owner in the Czech Rep., does not pinch or remove the green fruit going into the fall. Yet this English Brown Turkey is able to produce a breba after lows of minus 18 degrees Fahrenheit.

For us fig growers in the north, pinching is one of the things that really help us to have figs to ripen before first frost, in the north.

Bob Connecticut Zone 5b/6a