Ben nerds out when it comes to fruit and vegetable plant life; for example, he’ll visit all types of fruit and vegetable online forums. When he was looking to round out our four fig trees with two more, he visited Figs 4 Fun for guidance.
One of the figs that popularly rated high for taste was Ronde de Bordeaux. Despite having a good amount of local (well, San Diego), niche nurseries selling rare fruit tree cultivars, he had trouble finding this one.
He learned that fig trees can start out as “cuttings” so he was able to find a Ronde de Bordeaux cutting on eBay. This eBayer was really both helpful and thoughtful… so thoughtful that not only did she send cuttings from other fig trees, but a small Ronde de Bordeaux plant as well!
For the cuttings, she directed him to this string on the Figs 4 Fun site to learn about “rooting” them in coconut coir. We found some at a local soil distributor (you can also find them on Amazon and perhaps at a local nursery); we started experimenting with it as instructed.
The approach is simple: (1) moisten the dehydrated coir in a small shoebox-sized plastic container; (2) cover the cuttings with the moistened coir; and then (3) cover the container. They’re two weeks in and we don’t see any rooting yet. We might have taken too long to plant them. Because of the hustle and bustle of the holidays, Ben wasn’t able to place them in the coir until about three weeks after receiving them. They stayed refrigerated (which was recommended), but not sure if we took too long to transfer them into a rooting medium like the coconut coir. We’ll let you know! Gardening is such a learning process…
I love your respective gardening and houseplant obsessions. I’m slowly growing my houseplant collection, but actually haven’t purchased any except a few succulents and air plants (which died, sadly! I was so careful about not overwatering, too). So far they’re all cuttings from friends, baby plants from my husband’s coworker’s office plants getting too big, ivy dug up from our back yard, a teeny tiny lemon tree I started from lemon seeds, and so on. But I would really love to visit an amazing nursery and buy a few big, gorgeous plants like yours. Like a fiddle leaf fig, lots of succulents, fern, and a giant snake plant (I have a spindly one that was a baby from a friend. It literally has three tall leaves. Haha! But she had had it for over ten years! She split it when she moved and I was so thrilled to receive it. It just hasn’t gotten bigger as well as I’d hoped.). There don’t seem to be many good nurseries around us in VA, but maybe I need to look harder!
I plan to get more plants today! We love green so much. My husband is much better at planning things out, and I just kind of go for it, but I’ll forget to fertilize and other upkeep things. Not sure how far Terrain is from you, but maybe it might be worth a road trip someday. http://www.shopterrain.com