I sure hope someone gives this ficus a good home! I emailed a friend who is an avid plant lover, but she lives in Pittsburgh, which is apparently quite a long way from you. (I live in Ontario, and was unsure of the distance). Good luck!!! Sherry

I mean this in a good humored way: Bend them to your will. I have seen everything from fig trees pruned like a speading oak to fig trees pruned to a bush. IMO the bush type pruning doesn't look good when they lose their leaves during their dormant stage but that is me. I'll volunteer my general rules: Cut out all suckers. Cut off all branches that go straight up or straight down. All branches that cross, pick the one you want to keep and cut off the other one. I clean out the low center branches too. I like to end up with 3-5 large limbs branching from the trunk with none in the center. No small limbs anywhere within ~3' of the ground at the trunk. Outside of ~5' diameter circle around the trunk cut all branches within 4-5' of the ground. Lot of wiggle room here. You want working access to the trunk area for everything from fertilizer to raking leaves. On the other end, I have grandchildren so now I can see someone intentionally growing fruit low to the ground for young hands. If you can't get to it, it goes. There are techniques like a bamboo pole with the end split and separated to get high fruit and ladders of course. You can leave the high fruit to the wild things but know that once they get used to feeding on your tree they will not discriminate against your lower fruit. You end up with trees shaped like portobello mushroom. All the energy that would be spent on suckers and growing high goes sideways. For me it is much about convenience over style. Rick

i wouldnt doubt it because there are naturalized parrots in many cool areas. Brooklyn is a zone 7 and has parrots thriving in some communities. They are in abundance too but arent very widespread and live together. Just like all other city birds they eat a lot of food that is on the ground but will eat a lot of other foods too. They dont look like tropical parrots, but can be trained to talk, but probably will never do so in the wild. Definitely not those beautiful tropical looking parrots you see as pets or in the zoo, but they do have nice green colors to them. But as far as stealing fruit, there are lots of other much more common birds that will do that job a lot quicker than these parrots in brooklyn (I believe they are called quaker parrots and are from argentina). I think they are also in other areas but Im really only familiar with the ones in Brooklyn. Good luck! -Alex

I wish whoever ran this forum would post at the top that this section is for edible figs. Newcomers and people new to plants would obviously have no idea since their tree is nicknamed “fig” and this section is also for figs. This part of the forum could be set up to be less confusing to some