Thank you for the responses. Maybe more information would be helpful.
I have eight fig trees in pots that I overwinter in my integral garage every year. Five of them have been in pots for 15 years and producing well every year. My only issue has ever been fig rust late in the season. The other three are only three years old, but also in pots. Two of them are not very large, so they haven’t been affected much by the rust.
Only two of my trees are Lemon Yellows. When is 15 years old and the other is a three-year-old plant. They are the two trees that seem to have the most problems with whatever this disease is, although it does seem to be spreading too, an adjacent tree gradually… But at this point it is happening slowly. Maybe the change in the weather has something to do with it. The temperatures have been in the low 80s and much less humidity.
The two LYs began the season with normal growth and ripening. This species produces a very large, the size of a big purple plum, bright yellow fig with a large eye on the bottom and pink inside that is very sweet and tasty. I had only picked about a dozen figs before they started to look a bit tainted with spots, And the leaves were showing this different kind of rust pattern. As the days and weeks went by, the leaves became more covered with what you saw in the photo and more and more fruit was rotting before it could grow to full-size and ripen. That’s when I started removing all the affected fruit and leaves that I could get my hands on in hopes of preventing it from spreading farther. But that did not seem to help. Each morning when I go out, I find more figs rotting as they ripen and new sections of rust on other leaves.
As for watering, I never wet the leaves or any part of the tree. I have an irrigation system with four spouts in each pot that supposedly gives it about a gallon of water and a half of water per day. The system goes on three times per day… 5:30 AM, 7:30 AM, 10:00 AM For about three minutes each time. During July, when the weather was so unbearable, I started either adding another watering or Adding more water with a hose in the early evening. I don’t think they were lacking for water because I never saw the leaves droop… Not even once. However, my mission, fig and Chicago Hardy Produced a much smaller fig this year than before. But all of the other trees seem to be producing the same size as I’ve seen every year.
I have searched all over the Internet for anything that remotely resembles what I am seeing on the leaves and on the fruit of my affected trees. The closest thing I come up with is called anthracnose.
I’m not sure if the Leaf and fruit damage is perfect match or not.
If you have ever heard about anthracnose and how to get rid of it, I would appreciate you sharing it with me. I don’t want to give my trees a hard prune this winter unless it’s the only way.
I do not spray my trees with anything during the growing season. But, I typically treat all of them in January/February with Copper sulfate to help keep the fig rest under control in the summer. It seems to delay it until later in the season… But not this year. My purple figs were affected in July when all the humidity and high temperatures came to our area.
