How Do I Save A Dying Fig Tree? (growing, insect, spring)
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As the title suggests, I have a dying young brown turkey fig (about 3 years old) that appears to have had most of its roots eaten by gophers. All the leaves are shriveling and I am afraid it might be done for. Does anyone have any suggestions? Could pruning and replanting deeper in a raised pot help? Thanks for any ideas, would hate to lose it!
Also, if the tree is already gone, any suggestions for saving the unripened fruit?
Figs start easily from cuttings. You might try cutting that tree back almost to the ground and see if whatever roots are left can support it.
Pot up some of the cuttings. They root best if you lay them on their sides with only the tip showing. Then keep watering. It takes a couple of months for them to root.
Nothing will work if you don't get rid of the gophers.
Okay then it's small enough you could try pruning and replanting it deeper (only a little bit deeper) in a raised pot and see if that helps. Certainly you can't just leave it where it is to let the gophers finish it off. Just don't count on repotting it to be successful, it will be a 50/50 thing that the plant will survive.
So take it up out of the ground, knock off the excess dirt so you can inspect the roots for signs of other damages besides being chewed on. For example, root rot, insect infestation, fungus, weeping gelatinous fluids coming from bark, or girdling. Girdling is when all the bark has been chewed off in a complete circle around the entire trunk - if you have girdling then the plant is done for, toss it because nothing is going to grow and it's going to die. If there is no girdling and everything else checks out to look okay to you then transplant it into a pot.
One thing though that's important is if you're going to plant it deeper you need to be careful to not plant the crown that the roots grow out of too deep under the surface or else being too deep can kill it too. The crown is usually best when the top of the crown is level with the surface of the soil. So when you repot it deeper this time the height of the new soil going up the trunk should not come more than two inches above the crown or whatever level that it was at before. So, before you plant it, to encourage some new roots to try to come out just immediately above the crown take a piece of steel wool or a wire brush and very lightly roughen up the surface of the bark on the trunk from the crown to 2 inches above the crown. Lightly, don't cut through it down to the cambium under the bark. And definitely no more than a couple of inches in width around the surface. Then plant it so that only the 2 inches of roughed up area is covered by soil, no deeper than that.
Water it in well. Expect it to go into a deep, sulking, pouting shock and drop more leaves everywhere (because it's a fig and they HATE being repotted) but aside from keeping the soil evenly damp, leave it alone for a couple of weeks and watch it carefully to see if it starts to produce some new growth. If it doesn't go into shock that's a bonus.
You can't do anything about ripening the immature fruits on it. And if you want to try to save the plant you need to remove all of the fruits that are on it now so that the plant doesn't expend any more energy on the fruits. It desperately needs to devote all of its energy to healing itself and growing new roots and leaves, not fruits.
I learned this by watching some TV program a long time ago. Figs shouldn't be planted in the ground because it encourages root growth and they will be happy to grow roots right down the block through your neighbors' yards, at the expense of fruiting. More roots = less fruits. Figs grow best in shallow soil on limestone cliffs in places like Greece, so they like lime and warm roots. You should therefore grow them in black pots on a cement slab or your driveway and protect them in winter (if you have winter where you live).
Take that tree and cut all the branches and stick the ends in rooting hormone and then a black pot of dirt, sprinkle with lime, see how many root. Most is my guess; they're easy. The woodier the branch, the more likely it'll root.
My inherited fig was unpruned, overgrown, and the more I tried to work with it, the worse it got. The roots were everywhere (still are), it had borers, it made piles of leaves and no fruit, had so many branches that all the new ones grew out sideways and you couldn't walk around it, etc., etc., so I gave up and hacked it all down and stuck one piece of wood in a small pot on the driveway and left it to its own devices. Imagine my surprise when the next spring it began to grow buds that are becoming branches. So I gave it a slightly larger pot and if it comes back next spring, it's going to get a good dark pot and I'm going to keep it pruned.
Then I'm going to have to work on the many-tentacled stump left behind and all the suckers that keep coming up. I have a different type in another location and I'm going to root prune that one since it responded to a good top pruning by producing a heavy crop of figs this year. I'm going to top prune it every fall.
Just wanted to thank everyone who provided some advice here and offer an update for anyone interested. I had good luck moving the remaining fig stem to a pot and keeping it well-watered. The stem regrew and is thriving again despite basically having no roots left at the time of potting. Probably have another year or two for it to get back to its prior size and have fruit again, but at least it was salvaged!
Just wanted to thank everyone who provided some advice here and offer an update for anyone interested. I had good luck moving the remaining fig stem to a pot and keeping it well-watered. The stem regrew and is thriving again despite basically having no roots left at the time of potting. Probably have another year or two for it to get back to its prior size and have fruit again, but at least it was salvaged!
Great, and thanks for letting us know.
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