I used to live in north Louisiana, Houston, I'm from Lafayette, and I now live in Ocean Springs MS. And I've NEVER seen anyone in any of the above do anything to protect fig trees. They're pretty hardy unless you have some extra-zonal variety of fig.

I don't believe you have to worry about it.

sea ya
tami

Hi Tami

The figs are between 3 and 4 years old.

I had two of my 7 die back to the ground last year, they returned but had to start over

The others all lost between 4 and 8 inches off the stems.

Do you know if we need to induce a slow down in growth as winter nears?

Al

Thass purdy wacky...

I don't know about slowdown, but you could mulch and you could put visqueen over them. I visqueen my entire beds (I'm into tropicalesque) by taking smallish diameter PVC tubing and bending it like a dome tent and then putting the clear plastic over it. You could vent your 'tent' some if you were worried about overheating on those variable days.

are you REALLY sure it's frost? Maybe they weren't that healthy to begin with? Your question's gonna drive me nuts... cause I know damn well I've seen big ol' figs my whole life and I can't ever remember seeing them be covered...

Try doing some Google searches, or maybe someone else will chime in. Is there a fruit tree forum here at GardenWeb?

sea ya
tami

Here you go...

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/fig/

I've gardened in climates too cold for figs, but here I've never protected them and they do fine (they'd do fine-er if we got some rain!) When my sister lived outside of Portland, Oregon, she had a big 'ol fig she never protected. It doesn't get much colder there than here, but it also doesn't get hot in the summer except for a few days here and there, and I think many plants--not sure about figs--need the summer heat to store up whatever they need to store for the winter. Things out there tend to be damaged in the winter much more easily than here, tho' I'm not sure about figs specifically.

Hi greenelbows,

When I lived in metairie and Slidell I didn't have a problem but now I'm near Hackley and it gets significantly colder. I am also at 350ft. elevation so that may have something to do with it. We got into the 20's last winter.

I guess I'll take Tami's advice and build a dome around them. Now that we finally got some rain the bushes are taking off and we will have a lot of new growth on the bushes by the fall.

Al

Last winter I experiemented. I don't have a greenhouse so I made a 'ghetto greenhouse' out of a cheap screenhouse I bought at walmart. I put extra pvc pipes throughout for reinforcement and anchors to tie it all down. It had 2 sides with zip open screens and the other 2 sides were solid. I grow a lot of tropical stuff and it worked great for everything, kept the frost off and kept them dry. I just watered them periodically. I had also bought some rolls of 6 mil clear plastic but I didn't really need it. On the few really cold nights we had below freezing, I wrapped blankets and sheets around the pots. The 'ghetto house' finally got too shredded by the wind by the end of the season so I tossed it. When they go on sale again I will probably do it all over again this winter because I procrastinated again about building a greenhouse this year lol.