Two years ago I radically pruned this Hardy Chicago fig tree, taking it from, maybe, fifteen or twenty feet tall to about six feet tall. Previous pruning had given it good scaffold branches, which were low and well spaced.
With such a radical pruning, it didn't bear the first year after that pruning, but bore heavily the second year. I should have pruned it after the first year of growth, to create more, lower, branching, but was not able to until now.
I pruned again today. Most of the 2-year newer growth branches were six to ten feet long, up to 1.5 inches in diameter.
Here it is after pruning.
Here it was before pruning. I had pruned a few branches on the right, before it occurred to me to photo-document my progress.
I left most of the one to two year old growth, about a foot long. But I didn't think too much about it. I also removed a couple of large scaffolding branches that were in the center. I want a low-branched, bowl-shaped tree to let in sunlight and make harvesting and later pruning easier.
This might have been too radical to have a crop this year. Trees can fool me, so we will see.
Hardy Chicago is one of my best and most productive fig varieties. They are truly delicious figs. While it makes the buds for brebas, they usually fall off. Then it sets an early crop of main-crop figs, entirely on new growth. So nothing is lost, pruning in the spring. The other side of that coin, however, is that a radical spring pruning might result in over-vigorous vegetative growth that might not make fruiting buds.
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