Why do the figs drop off my tree before they ripen?
Natalie Crowley, by email
Stefan says: The fruiting habit of the fig tree is different from that of any other type of British garden fruit tree. The fruit that are produced in edible condition begin life during the previous season and survive the winter as tiny little fruitlets. The figs that dropped off your tree had developed too far during the preceding summer to be able to tolerate our winter cold but, on the other hand, had not developed far enough, because of our short summer, to reach edible size. So they drop off.
Towards the end of summer, there are, in fact, three different types of fruit on each plant – last season’s now maturing, the young of this season preparing to face the winter, and the half-grown of this season that will never make it. In practice, it makes sense to knock off the half-sized fruits during the autumn because they will only shrivel and attract disease.
But I should add a word about the pruning of figs, because this has a bearing on their fruiting. Assuming you have a fan-trained tree (and most fig-growers do), my advice is to leave on all the wood, that is, do no pruning, until the spring because the more growth the plant retains during the winter, the better it will be protected.
In March, cut back to about 2.5cm half of the shoots that bore fruit the previous year and tie-in the remainder to the support wall or framework. Then around the end of June (but no later if you don’t want to cut away the embryo fruit), nip out the growing points of about half of the remaining shoots to encourage more young, embryobearing shoots to arise from lower down. By adopting this regime, you will remove about half of the old wood each year, and should retain enough to produce you a crop.