Its not too late to ship for me here, but I don't know how hot it gets down there this time of year. The main downsides are you don't want the plant to overheat on the way or get baked upon arrival. Pomegrantes are some of the most heat-tolerant plants so it may not even be a problem at all. Pomegranates naturally grow as bushes but can be turned into a tree by selecting only one of the stems as the main one - cut off the rest at ground level. Any size bush can be re-trained this way but don't chop out too much in any given year. I don't know what they mean on their site by tree form. By the way if you are serious about pomegranates I highly recommend RIchard Ashton's book The Incredible Pomegranate. I refer to it all the time. It is an e-book and I think it cost something like $7. It is a bit of a hodgepodge but wow, what a treasure trove of information! Scott Here is a link that might be useful: book

I will cover if I ever get fruit. I started mine from cuttings and they have not done anything. I have had figs in the past but the gophers killed them. When I did get fruit, I had more problems with rats and squirrels than I did with birds. I plan on using knee highs to cover my fruit. It worked on the mango (until my dog ate it). I'm hoping I can get something to myself this year if I continue to leave the black raspberries uncovered for the birds.

Jae, "Encourage root development," preposterous!!! Root growth follows leaf growth, not precedes it. Remove all its leaves and a tree will essentially stop root production, even balance its root load by aborting (dying back), those roots that are no longer needed since there are no leaves to support. Leaves feed a tree. They are a tree's mouth, and stomach, and bowels. They "eat" (so to say), the nutrients, and the water their roots provide to nourish the tree. Eliminate the leaves and the roots have nothing to do but stop functioning, go dormant and/or die off until new leaves emerge, and start the "green factory" going again. Figs are tough, extremely adaptable, and respond like crazy to good care. There's hardly a more lush looking fruiting tree than a well cared for fig tree. Let your denuded fig just recover now. It should be pushing out new growth by now. If we have a warm fall, the growth should get a foot or so long by Thanksgiving/season's end. Give it good care. In spring, just as it begins to leaf out, start shaping it to the form, single or multiple trunked as you choose. It should sprout new growth down low that you can encourage if you want a multi-trunk fig tree. There is a fig nursery out your way in NJ, French Fig Farm, frenchfigfarm@gmail.com. Give them a call or visit. Their web site is extremely informational for cold climate fig growers like us. Keep your fig between 40 and 25 degrees F. all winter long. No light is needed. Water when needed just to keep soil moist. Do not let the fig sit in water in a catch tray. Its roots will rot. My largest fig pot is 10 gallons. I use black nursery pots, Gro Pro pots, made in USA, and BPA free, are best. Through periodic root and branch pruning a fig tree (I keep my fig trees at 4-5' X 3-4'), can grow excellently, and produce tons of figs. You don't need a larger pot to have success. Of course, a larger pot is perfectly OK, cumbersome, but fine, too. The larger the pot, the harder it is to shuffle it around. Your back will not thank you. I wish you great success. Moses

It makes no sense to wait to remove the subordinate leaders if she wants a tree with a single trunk. The wounds from the subordinate trunks will just be larger and take longer to close. In addition, there is nothing that says a person must choose the dominant leader as the last stem standing. Sara could as easily choose a subordinate stem as her new, single leader based on things like its movement, the angle at which it leaves the soil, or position - related to the other stems removed. So would you recommend I do a little surgery on the base to see how many ”trunks” I’m dealing with? I don't think it matters how many trunks there are. If you have 10, you need to remove 9, if there are 20, it's 19 you'll remove. I can’t really tell if this is just one trunk with multiple off shoots or whats going on. It feels so messy and overwhelming at the base. You probably have the cultivar "Bambino", which is just one of the names given to a dwarf form of lyrata with smaller, more upright leaves and much shorter internodes. All my advice, so far, was aimed at the fact that you want a single trunk on your tree. That's easily doable, but you'll be fighting against the tree's natural growth habit, something I think Dave might have alluded to upthread. As your tree grows, those trunks will become more exposed, so you can tidy-up around the soil line with a pair of scissors. You can even remove several trunks so you end up with a great looking clump formation. That's definitely what I would do with the tree. I'd keep 3, 5, or 7 trunks of varying thickness, shorten them (or not) based on their thickness, and remove the rest. Then, I'd get another tree that wants to be a tree, and not a shrub. If you DO go for a single trunk, make sure you remove all buds that break low on the tree, as they emerge, or you'll be removing another dozen wannabe trunks in a year or two. Al