ESPALIER FIGS!

I have been an apple and stonefruit orchardist in a past life and know how to train & prune fruit trees. (my parents still have the orchard and I love going up and helping prune each year.

How ever I have never espaliered fruit trees before. A lovely friend "G" gave me a subscription to The Diggers Club with a gift voucher for one of the many short courses they conduct. After looking at what courses were on offer it was a toss up between composting, raising seedlings and how to espalier.  You Guessed it Espaliering won out.

The two Fig trees are what I'm going to Espalier.  The fact they can get very large the varieties I have planted can get 4 metres by 4 metres.  I just dont have that space in my back garden! So I put in two tall posts 2 metres either side of each Fig Tree.  I then attached Concrete reinforcing Rio mesh sheet.

Having chooks a wire tree guard is needed (mainly to stop chooks digging up mulch under each Fig tree).

The aim now is each growing season for the next 4 −5 years to train one level of scafolding branches....

I'm hoping 4-5 levels of branches which will be tied to the Trellis.

Will continue post to show various training processes as they happen.