help me kill a fig

the previous owners of my property have a nearly perfect record for planting inappropriate fruit trees. the selection of plums and pluots in the little orchard they started here in this exceedingly damp little ditch
where i have never in five years seen a stone fruit tree successfully ripen a fruit can be exhibit a.

exhibit b is the focus of this post. there is a fig planted in the most perfect top-edge-of-a-south-facing-slope fig-spot. It's kinda the closest they came to getting it right, but i don't know what variety the fig is supposed to be, and it has never even hinted that it would like to try to make a fruit. It's a many-stemmed monstrosity that grows to about 7 feet tall each year and then freezes back about halfway each winter. the footprint where the stems leave the ground may be three or four feet across. aside from never fruiting the plant is kinda living the perfect exalted fig life. i have other figs that i've brought in that do produce well for me - all of which produce on new wood. i've never had any luck with protecting a fig enough to avoid damage during winter (we get down in the single digits F), and it's always seemed like too much work trying when some figs will feed you on new wood even if they froze back to the ground.

all of this is to say that i want to kill off the fig that's in the perfect spot and replace it with a fig of my choosing. what's the non-toxic low-labor way to kill a fig that seems to be healthy but doesn't earn its keep?

and yes, even that perfect fig spot is too humid and low air-movement for stone fruits!

I would cut it back as far as possible, as often as possible.

Build a sheetmetal enclosure around the stump and fill it with charcoal.
Then set the char on fire and stoke it using an hairdryer and and a pipe.

Alternatively, drill holes in the stump and fill them with high nitrogen fertilizer.

If no method works, treat the tree as a perennial source of wood /chop-n-drop.

Smother it with heavy black plastic.

A). Cut it down to the ground.

B) Cover the stump with a piece of old carpet or an old bedspread --- something thick.  Make sure it's large enough to extend at least 3 feet from the stump.

C) Cover that with black plastic and hold it in place with bricks or a big pile of whatever you have available.

D). Leave it for 2 years.

Strange as it sounds, figs can be grafted (strange because they grow so well from cuttings). I would try grafting a desirable cultivar in order to take advantage of the established root system

thanks for the ideas, y'all.

there may be a real stump somewhere near the middle of the cluster, but from what i can see, even at ground level no stem looks above ~2 years old in size. i think i'm probably going to try to cut is as flush to the ground as i can and solarize it, if i can find a big enough piece of black plastic. burning it out is an interesting runner-up idea.

grafting is an interesting idea, but we do get the odd year where we get a real cold snap and it freezes all the way to the ground, and i wouldn't want to have to redo it...not to mention that i would either have to graft onto lots of tips or spend a lot of energy regularly cutting back all the regrowth from the rest of the plant, and probably for years. i'd like to get to a point where the only labor involved on this spot is picking all the figs, as soon as i can!

i'll try to get a picture soon - i probably should have had one to start with...

I've had great luck with threatening my fig plants. in fact after warning Fig #1 it was going to be thrown out and replaced, and Fig #2 was purchased and sat right next to it, Fig #1 got its act together and produced two fruit. (fig #2 is now being a lazy sack, but it's going to get cut right down one of these days)

i've been threatening this plant for years, i don't think it believes me. i think i have to do something to prove it's not all talk.

Hook a cable to it, hook the other end to a pickup, and yank it out of the ground.

Perhaps you should get a couple of cuttings and try them elsewhere to see if it just didn't like that spot. ;-)

I havent tried this because I am not yet done with threatening and moving on to the next phase, but copper nails in a few of the larger shoots can be pretty effective from my research. Basically causes local copper toxicity. Must be done when its growing rapidly.

here's pics from a couple of angles. aside from freeze damage in the winter, i don't see any evidence that it's not happy where it is - and it is the perfect fig spot after all - it just doesn't want to have to work for it. it's already 7 or 8 feet tall, so i may have underestimated earlier.

i did start cutting into the uphill side, cutting off everything as close to ground level as i could. as i expected, there weren't any 'trunks' bigger than 2" across at ground level. the area the growth is coming from is easily 3½ feet across, lots of little knobs sticking out of the ground with fig shoots growing out of them.

tj - would the copper nail method leave the site safe for a new fig to be planted there?

The usual way to get rid of a tree here is to put an advert in the local classified ads.  Free Fruit tree, you dig.  
It's usually gone in an hour.  

I've seen some massive trees go.  

[size=12] Also you might consider in the mid fall piling ground up leaves around it and holding them in with a wrapping of chicken wire, then once spring arrives, pulling down the leaves from it, spreading them around it in the feeder root zones, spreading wood ashes ( maybe one or two pounds) over the feeder area (a six foot radius ) prune away 1/3 of the mass of the bush, then after enough growth of greenery, a few weeks later in the early summer pinching all the tops.  Save all your banana peels and blend them up and pour them around the fig roots.

The fig sounds like it can not build enough energy to fruit under it's present conditions.  Pruning away some of it's focus on green vegetation might redirect it to fruit production.  If the soil it's in has too much nitrogen, consider spreading a one inch of sawdust plus the wood ashes over the radius of the feeder roots, and work it in lightly with a potato digger. That will tie up excess nitrogen, and increase the potassium.  Perhaps that will encourage fruiting.  And contact the WNC extension service near Asheville, and ask them how to put the fig in high gear to fruit.  

It sounds like the fig survives winter, but is too drained to fruit, then the season shuts down on it too soon.

i was thinking about updating this thread! the further advice is appreciated, but too late for that particular fig, which has been gone since not long after i first posted about it.

i ended up cutting everything off as close to the ground as i could, then building a nice hardwood fire over the spot and burning it over for a while. afterwards i came through and chopped off the bigger rooty bits i could find with a mattock. i thought i might get some resprouts from deeper roots that i couldn’t get to, but i may have cooked it enough to avoid that - never saw any fig-looking sprouts at all. a couple weeks ago i planted a young ronde de bordeaux fig in that spot, for early main-crop figs.

i appreciate that there may have been some way to change this plant’s attitude, but for a couple years i had done some trimming/thinning stems, a bit of fertilizing, etc, with no discernible result. in my world, figs are pretty well known to thrive on neglect (as demonstrated by my other, productive figs), and i didn’t feel that this one was holding up its end of the bargain.

What does the variety ronde de bordeaux taste like, production levels etc ?  I like the production I got from my Kadota figs when I lived in Arkansas.

usually considered to be in the ‘berry’ flavor group. i don’t have much experience with them. since the onset of cold weather shuts many figs down mid-bearing-season here, i wanted something that would start early. it’s pretty widely agreed to be one of the earliest to start bearing. other figs don’t even start ripening until october sometimes here.

My first thought is to coppice the tree in autumn and turn the bark into cordage, cloth, shoes, or baskets, and the wood for mushrooms, walking sticks, or burying them to build soil. I have heard about Ficus natalensis being beaten into bark cloth, which suggests that maybe this fig has similarly fibrous bast.

Otherwise, maybe it would work to cut back the fig and plant other kinds of useful trees around— a few faster-growing fruit/nut and firewood trees to shade out the fig, cutting back the firewood trees once the fig has died, and cutting the shoots from as they grow.