I am well aware of what modern day experts recommend. I disagree. I have experimented for 40 years on every kind of tree in my yard. An open wound, like all unsealed drying wood, cracks. Water enters the cracks along with debris and causes rot. Bugs find the moist rotting environment enjoyable and take up residence. Next thing you know you have one of those trees that are all hollow in the heart. The experts say the tree shuts the wound off and everything's Ok. Well if you don't care how long the tree's life span is and it just has to live as long as you do, Ok, otherwise, it's crap! Just like collar cuts. Under the right conditions, with a branch at a good horizontal angle, they're great, but not every situation is ideal and when you have three or four branches intersecting a crotch to remove it's going to take close cuts and sculpting with chisels to get cuts that will drain and heal and not rot. Keep in mind, these new methods are designed for todays professionals who must temper perfection with time is money. Sterilization takes time. Reworking the cut with hand tools takes time. Periodically inspecting and renovating the wound takes time. Properly treating the wound takes time and an improperly dressed wound is worse than no dressing at all. If you can come up with a reasonable compromise then you have saved a lot of time, therefore, money. None of this applies to the home orchardist. He can do a little at a time and do it right. Remember, these same experts are the ones who prune maples in March along our highways and byways, instead of waiting until just after bud break which would promote an almost immediate callus to form, and no bleeding. Lastly, fruit trees seem to be about the slowest to heal and the most prone to fungal diseases, so any precaution, no matter how time consuming is warranted. Methods like clean, close cut and wound dressing were developed over thousands of years by the people who developed most of our fruit and nut cultivars from wild, inedible plants, the Chinese and the Italians. Even if my own experiments hadn't convinced me, I'd still ere in favor of the ancients!

The following link (pick & paste) will help as a starting point: http://figs4fun.com/basics_Pruning.html

Hi Map1e, I'm doubtful that your tree was grafted. Although your tree could've been grafted its more work for the nursery and why would they do that when a fig does fine on its own roots? I would suggest that you try to root some of your cuttings or if you have any suckers come up pot those up and compare them to the mother tree. If its grafted the suckers and the cuttings that you took will be different. Either the fruit color or leaf structure would be different. Would it be a robust plant if you air layered.... Yes, the fig would have a good headstart if you air layered a section of your 10 ft tree and cut it down to 6ft you would have a 4 ft tree instantly...well almost, you'd have to have roots develop first. I guess that your current option for propagating more trees would be to root some cuttings. Good luck, Little John

LOL, bud! Thanks & love your "pose." You kind of look like my little brother, interesting. That tree is a turkey fig in my Mom's yard. It makes so many figs, just what we can reach is usually way too many. I took that pic 2-3 years ago right after I pruned it extremely heavily. You can't tell, but I removed all of the growth from inside so we could "step into it" and pick from inside & out... or hide a bus full of kids. Great for climbing in there, too. It needs pruning again, which I will do later this summer after the figs are gone. Some of the branches are laying on the ground again. The original owner of the home gets the credit for the beautiful "bones" of the tree, though. All I have done is maintain what was already done so well, removing crossing branches, those going straight down, etc... I'm still not sure how he got it into such a nice "low vase" shape instead of the "naked trunk" appearance of most other trees I've seen in the area, but I've only been a southerner for 5 years, still a lot to learn about the plants & trees that are new to me here. I hope the baby trees from my cuttings will grow up to be even in the neighborhood of such fantastic-ness!