I have to give credit where credit is due. This is my son's next door neighbor's tree. My fig trees are still too young to show the results or where they are headed. Pruning is about as controversial as rooting so you seldom see one pruner doing anything but picking out the mistakes in someone elses work. I want to say this job is as good as I've seen. My family farmed about 500 acres in prunes, apricots, cherries, and pears. I don't think anyone in my family or any of the workers we had over the years could improve on this job. There is one thing I left out, always cut branches at the joint. If you leave anything other then a flush cut i.e. a 2-4" stub, it is referred to derogatively as an 'ethnic' flag. That is in my case another pruner would look at my work and if they found any stubs would say something like "What are you leaving all those Italian flags for?" Kind of good natured old school racial pruning superiority wag. Every country thinks they have the best pruners in the world. The tree appears to be a Mission fig. Dark purple fruit anyway. Note I am something of a fig rookie here to learn so... The tree produces a medium to heavy crops of fruit. More important IMHO is the size of the fruit is uniform, large, and blemish free. I'll try to remember to take a picture of it when it in fall with leaves and fruit. Possibly one of the things people may not want is the crop ripens over a 2-4 week period vs. maybe double that for a tree that is less uniformly pruned. FWIW: Told/showed my son the technique for pruning because he had a badly neglected apricot tree in his front yard. Just doing the cut [low, suckers, straight up, straight down, center, crosses] and leave no flags. He did a pretty good job and actually got a complement or two. Ended up a decent crop of fruit but neighborhood ladies picked them before he got a shot at them. I think I managed to get 4-5 before the neighbors stripped the tree! The technique is geared to a slightly lower yield of larger fruit rather then a heavy crop of peanut sized fruit. Some things will change figs depending on the variety and owner. For instance the farmer/crop method is used in part because of my family's selection of fruit, the main crop is 'on second year wood.' For figs the best ones are on the new growth so people often prune them back harder to maximize new wood. I'm kind of a knucklehead though: If it is any kind of fruit tree and I have a pair of shears in my hands, it will look like this. Kind of boring and monotonous when you think about it. Rick

It seems like you should have enough room to plant a fig tree in this space. Fig trees can be pruned to maintain a small size. The best location for a fig for us in the Northeast is against a wall facing south, where it's protected from cold wind and gets enough sun.

Dave, I assume from your post, the tree is planted in the ground. Either way, you should check the roots of your tree for rootknot nematodes. If you pull the soil back to expose some of the roots, the gals the nematodes create will look like a brown pearls on the roots. I am convinced that most ficus carica will root faster than nematodes can keep up with... especially when the weather is cool enough that the nematodes are largely inactive, but it is warm enough for root growth. Being in zone 10, however, the ground may not cool enough for RKN activity to slow down. Or, as is the case sometimes, the infestation in the ground is broad enough to be everywhere the roots grow. In these cases, the number of roots blocked with gals may be high enough to kill the tree. It is possible the weather was sufficiently different to effect your crop. Last year was a very wet summer in Houston. The figs which were already beginning to grow before the rain hit, split. Most of the trees defoliated due to rust and did not recover enough to produce fruit afterwards. All in all it was an extremely poor year for fig production. Pruning the crown of your tree to let more light and air through will help deal with moist weather. In zone 10 it is probably too late to do any major pruning. You should consider only pruning what is absolutely necessary now. Then plan for a more significant pruning after this season. ~james

Yes Dave, those are 20 footers and 3/4". What you can't see except for the orange tape is the string I have tied between them. I took some heavy nylon and tied it to the bottom of one leg and then ran it over to the next one to where I wrapped the tape about 4' from the ground. The tape keeps the string from slipping. I tied it over the tape. From that point I went down to the ground on the next leg. The I ran one from the bottom of the middle up to the tape on each of the two end legs. This created a criss cross pattern which added a lot of rigidity to it. The top piece is just taped on with good old duct tape. It's very cheap, light weight and can be put up and taken down in a few minutes. "gene"