David: You are right, most here couldn't kill a fig. But I once lived near the worthless wild kind and I'm not a fig lover unless they're dried! Anyway, I'd try a very heavy dose of Roundup applied to the foliage when the tree is growing rapidly. After the leaves fall off, cut the top down. Wait if you can to see if the tree sprouts back from the ground. If so wait until it gets a foot or two tall and spray again. That will likely do the trick. If there is no sensitive vegetation nearby, adding some 2,4D to the Roundup would help. The Fruitnut

in southern MD- My fig tree looked awful last year summer '09 and produced fewer figs than usual. There was less fruit and very few ripened. They stayed green and hard, and were small. This tree had been a very prolific tree. I was wondering how your trees produced last summer. So far this year I have very little growth on old wood and some long new growth from the bottom. Top looks bad. Any advice is welcome. Not sure weather is only factor. There is a groundhog hole nearby. Could it be eating the roots? It did not get the fruit because I was keeping a close eye.

Hi Bass, I agree with Jon. I am transplanting a tree before the spring thaw (if you can call it that in Houston) and have dug a ring around my tree to let additional roots grow underneath the trunk before I remove it. Its clear, after digging, that the roots are fairly shallow. I don't see evidence of any more than 8 inches from the surface. I'm guessing you could hack away at the soil with an ax or sharp shovel, maybe a 36" diameter ring around the trunk and take care of the tree once and for all. Good luck, ~james

Unless the parent tree was own root the sucker yours came from is the sweet cherry rootstock and not the named cultivar that was presumably grafted onto it. Either the rootstock seedling happens to be a yellow cherry as well or the whole parent tree, including the roots was the yellow cultivar. Sweet cherry is actually a weed species in this region and suckers to form groves on local wooded hillsides, where it even overtakes and overtops the native red alder trees often present in quantity on the same sites. It also crosses with the much less exuberant, native bitter cherry to produce a nearly fruitless, intermediate hybrid called Puget cherry. Some ~tall examples of the latter are conspicuous when in bloom, on undeveloped land between I-5 and Lakeside School (near Seattle). It is usual to have problems with suckering and bony surface roots with plantings of sweet cherries - perhaps all the more so when these are present as rootstocks for Japanese flowering cherries. All you can do is uncover the bases of the suckers and saw them away. If there are horizontal runners that lead back to the original planting follow these back to the parent tree and saw them off at their points of origin, pull the rest up. You don't, of course want to saw off normal roots of the parent tree - just the ones that are suckering runners like aspen trees and running species of bamboos produce. This post was edited by bboy on Sat, Mar 15, 14 at 17:05