Fig Trees in Cool Climate

[Foodfarmer]

Hi,
We live in North Canterbury on the East Coast of the South Island of NZ. We are about to plant a fig orchard and would appreciate any advice anyone has about figs in general and broadscale frost protection for orchards in particular.

We have been sourcing figs from a small orchard locally so we know they can ripen OK (and we 've taken cuttings form these trees) but we are concerned about late frosts in Spring.

[sweetpea]

I looked up your area, but are you right smack on the coast with salty air and sea wind all day, or are you a few miles inland from that? If you are dealing with a lot of salty air, be sure to choose the figs that say, "Does well at the coast". I have one fig that was rather shocked at first by the wind, and probably by some salt, but it rebounded pretty well.

I'm not finding the temperature ranges that you have. Do you only have frost, or does it get much below freezing? Trying to protect a fig from freezing is a huge job because they get to be so big. here when an occasional winter threatens to get too cold, we use smudge pots, large air blowers to keep the air moving, which raises the temperatures. If you have an orchard it will be a big job to cover them, but I guess it depends on how dedicated you are.

Some Common figs can do well where it freezes. Chicago Hardy fig grows in Canada where it snows. Not all can tolerate those conditions, some need a lot of heat. I am near the coast and I have many cloudy/foggy days in summer, which limits the types I can grow. I have a White Genoa, Peter's Honey Fig, Violette de Bordeaux, which is a really pretty fig.

There's also one kind of fig, a Smyrna fig, that requires a special wasp that probably isn't in New Zealand, and another kind of tree that that wasp lives in to pollinate it. You'll read great descriptions of a Smyrna fig, but unless you've got that rare combination, which is only naturally in the Middle East, and has been imported to California, don't get tempted to try it!

Your local nurseries probably carry the most successful kinds for your area.

[Foodfarmer]

Thanks for the advice sweetpea,

We are inland from the coast, which in turn makes our frost risk higher. We are pretty sure we've got the best varieties and are doing a variety trial for NZ Tree Crops Assoc as well. It's interesting that you sound like you have variations of the white figs we are looking at!

In winter, when the trees are dormant, we can get as low as -6 degrees celcius ( 23 farenheit) but in spring, if there is a frost, only really as low as -2 (28.4 farenheit)

We are also the vineyard business, so have used smudge pots and air movers (usually helicopters!). We are concerned about the price of diesel for smudgepots (how many do you have an acre?) and there aren't many other small scale air movers that we've heard of. We can prune the trees to keep them small enough to cover but we'd be interested to hear if anyone is doing this for frost? The orchard is 200 trees and takes up around 3/4 acre

[sweetpea]

Sounds pretty chilly there, which is necessary for the grapes, but not for the figs! That's a tricky line to straddle. You might be able to keep the figs in a slightly warmer place by putting them in the middle of a hillside, if you have one, or the middle of a slope, and not down at the bottom of a slope where cold air will gather. Sometimes those few degrees makes all the difference.

I put my citrus in a location like that, in the shadow of a larger tree to protect them from storm winds and a few degrees of temperature.

I am only a couple miles from the ocean, so it rarely gets more than a few degrees below freezing for me, but the tips can still get burned on some plants. Yet this winter it went below freezing, and although there was a lot of tip kill, the crops were the best yet, so there is a yin and yang about the freezing

I don't use smudge pots because of the pollution. I don't have a whole orchard of figs, just a few trees, so I can cover them, but I encourage new growth all the way up to a month before frost so that if there's die-back it's minimal. I keep them a reasonable size because I don't want to deal with a lot of ladder picking.

Have you heard of low volume, undertree microsprinkler irrigation?

In California farmers are pushing the limits of growing sensitive crops in freezing zones, and they are doing citrus, which requires much of the same circumstance as the tender figs, and there is a way to use sprinklers of water where it will freeze, and then just under the ice it is not freezing, so the crops are protected.

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/CH182

It's a safe and relatively inexpensive way to handle it.

What kind of figs are you considering?