What's up gardeners? Devin is here and I'm here with my Chicago hardy fig, Ficus carica
Chicago hardy. And I'm here in zone 6B, eastern Pennsylvania. And in this video
I want to go through some of the care techniques and cultural requirements needed to grow our
Chicago hardy fig successfully from season to season to season. Now I'm here in the middle of
April. About one month ago, right around the first day of springtime, I went to my two Chicago hardy
figs to inspect it for any dead growth. What you need to do is to determine whether or not any of
the wood has died back over the winter time. Over the course of this last year this guy didn't lose
any of its wood whereas its friend over there did lose a little bit of its wood and I'll show you
exactly what I did. Now in terms of situating these plants they really do best in the absolute
most full hot sun. I planted this guy about two years ago and over the course of the first season
I really did spend a good amount of time bringing out my watering pail and giving it some water
about once every two weeks for the first three months, really for the first summer. After that
I haven't supplied it with any additional irrigation, zero additional fertilizer, and it's doing quite well. What you can absolutely do in the springtime, which I'm about to do
is to give it a nice little layering of some sort of compost or some sort of mulch. I tend to go
with the free mulches like leaf mold compost. And as you can see, it's just now starting to
produce some of its buds right along these stems, which means that yes, in fact, it is still alive
and doing well, and it will start to grow very rapidly over the course of the summertime
Now this fig over here is looking quite bare, I know, and that is because one month ago I cut it
by quite a hefty amount It was about twice his size but I could tell that a lot of the growth had become dead over the course of the cold winter time So I just took my nice sharp shears and cut
it back pretty much at all these little spots. And from here I will just allow it to regenerate new
fresh growth including some new fresh branches. Here you can see it's already producing some new
foliage right here towards the base of the plant. Figs once they have started to grow really tend to
take off. So be prepared for these to grow 18, 24, 30 inches in the course of one season, which is
pretty incredible. So for now, I'm just going to allow mother nature to do her thing and watch this
guy as he grows and starts to produce that iconic, excellent fig foliage. And hopefully I'll get some
fruit here in the middle of summer this season. Guys, look at this. This is incredible. It has grown
over six feet tall. This is a plant that was just a single bare stem and I said it might grow like
30 inches. Try 72 inches. This is absolutely incredible. This is only one year old and
there's no fruit on it at all yet but hopefully it will continue to follow like its brother
in its footsteps which is back there and I'm going to show you the fruit that are forming on it right
now. So it's really interesting because this plant is three years old. It's significantly shorter than
its brother over there that's six feet tall but this guy has some fruit that it's producing. This
is the first time I've gotten fruit on this guy and I don't remember if I mentioned it's September
15th so in the last video it was early April. It's been about five months. This guy has grown out
beautifully nice, branched, multi-branched shrub. And it has one two three four four fruit on it So I think that pretty good for its very first harvest ever And you know when they ripe when you touch it and it nice and soft
Absolutely sumptuous. Let's just harvest it like, oh there's some ants. Make sure you get rid of any ants that might be on there
Let's open this bad boy up. Let's see what it looks like. Oh, that's what a fig should look like
Alright, of course we gotta do a little taste test. It's sweet
The texture is so delightful. The texture is almost like a wonderful watermelon
Just really nice and juicy. Absolutely delightful. And the incredible thing is that I was gone for most of the summer here and the deer ate
pretty much a lot of my plants. They didn't touch the fig
It must be this kind of fuzzy foliage that they have. So this is just an incredible plant
I'm here in Zone 6B. It's doing absolutely fine. It's in its third year producing fruit
It's a beautiful plant, totally unique foliage, has a wonderful upright growth habit
It's a multi-stemmed shrub slash tree, whatever you want. Absolutely divine because it produces fruit at the same time
I'm definitely going to be adding a few more of these to my garden. All right, stay tuned
I'm going to show you how to care for it. in the winter time, preparing it for the winter season
All right, so here we are in the middle of December and in terms of winter care for our Chicago hardy fig
it's pretty low key, especially for me here in zone six B in Eastern Pennsylvania
You can see we've had some frost, the leaves have crisped up
I am just gonna allow them to naturally fall away whenever they decide to You don need to go and manually remove them And I also not going to prune or trim any of my plant material back We remember that we don
like to prune hardwood in wintertime because that can encourage what's called desiccation
which is essentially when if I were to cut the stem, the cold air would enter into that newly
opened wound and that would dry out some of that topmost stem, causing us to lose more of our stems
so we're going to wait and do any cutting back next spring. Now for me really the only thing that
I like to do is add a nice layer of mulch. If you are in zone five this is definitely a must. If
you're in zone seven you may not need to do this but what I like to do so I like to use my homemade
leaf compost which I find is one of the best free mulches out there and I will just add a nice thick
layering all around the base of my shrub. I put a nice four to six inch thick layer of that leaf mold and I've chosen to do a width
that's about 12 inches and the way to determine how far around you should actually be layering
the mulch is basically the extent that your plant creates branches outwards basically wherever those
branches extend to, we call that the drip line. And so, you know, I can imagine the leaves were
out to about this width, so I would come down to that width, and that is the entire area where I
will be layering the mulch, and that's typically where the roots will be growing as well. So we
want to give all of the roots a nice thick blanket of our mulch during the wintertime
And that's about all you need to do to prepare your Chicago hardy figs for the wintertime