The tree is a tropical zone tree, but is not growing in a tropical zone. It needs to adapt, and will. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but EVERY place in the world has growth periods that vary with season. Geography is the Mother of weather, period. Mostly, the seasons in the tropics are subject to prevailing winds that blow from drier inland to the sea some of the year and from the sea towards the land in the other period. For instance, India has dry winds blowing south in "winter" from the Himalayas and on or about June 1st the winds reverse and blow north from the warm India Ocean beginning the wet season. Indonesia has trade winds blowing east half the year and west the other half. Depending upon which side of the mountain you live on, the winds are drying when running downhill, or wet when running inland from the sea. (My brain does not compute the complexities of having two summers
and two "winters" for equatorial lands. We could use a lttle help from our Indonesian, Malaysian or Philipino friends here.)
If putting the tree into a tent for a week would help it, would taking it back out a week later into ambient, drier air hurt it? I think it would be easier to just give as much sun as you have and water it when the soil is drier. Figs are
real tolerant of getting too wet or too dry, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. As to giving it fresh, or "new" water, that doesn't compute either. It will use less water as it does less transpiration due to having less leaf surface. Some species of fungus are present and normal and beneficial in all healthy soil. Using a tent would encourage grey mould which doesn't help or hurt anything, but looks evil and will disappear when exposed to ambient, drier air.
Just because the buds are swelling along the trunk doesn't mean that those on the branches are dead or won't follow over time. That is the answer to the "Mayday" call for secondary buds to switch to primary. Consider them a bonus in that you may choose to let some grow
after you have given the whole plant a chance to bud out, all over. Depending upon whether or not you already have existing branches every place you want them, some of those buds may be in preferable places such that you would rather let strategically located new buds grow and lop off a branch in a crummy position. For now,
let all my people grow!
If you feed it now, it will grow more, but the leaves will be bigger, too. You have accidentally done, at the wrong time of year, an operation that we do,
TO HEALTHY PLANTS, to force them to grow a new canopy of smaller leaves. Normally, it would be done some time after it had just grown a new year's canopy and it had enough time to mature a new set of buds in the axils. In that case, you get smaller leaves because the plant had recently used all the resources stored in the root system from the prior growing season and has less than a normal amount of resourses for the second new canopy of a given year. I normally do that by denuding the tree in the 3rd or 4th week of June. That gives the plant time to grow the second canopy and then a set of buds in the axils for next spring before the growing season ends this year. Since it has not yet leafed-out for this year, you only get a half-assed leaf reduction when it puts on this year's canopy. The glass is half-full.
The spell checker on this website is not working. Us stupid people rely on it.
