My Small Golden Gate Ficus: How to Care and Grow

This post will familiarize you with my small Golden Gate Ficus and how to care for it. This used to be a collection, however, one of my small cuttings died a few months ago leaving me with only this one. The remaining cutting has been a slow grower and hasn’t shown much development.

Summary of Care

Taking care of this small Golden Gate Ficus cutting has required very little work. I took this cutting ten months ago and have been watching it grow very slowly ever since. I have not had to fertilize, wire, or prune this tree at all yet. The development of roots and canopy growth has been so slow, the tree is not ready for any additional stresses yet.

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Propagation

I first started to eye this cutting about eleven months ago. At the time, it was an extremely skinny branch on my large Golden Gate Ficus. I let the branch mature for about another month before I decided to remove it. This was such a thin branch it didn’t really matter what cutting tool I used, but since I had my concave cutter on hand, I decided to use that. Once I had cut the branch off, I used my pocket knife to remove a thin layer of bark at the base of the trunk. You can read my last post about why this step is so beneficial. Next, I dipped the base of the trunk into root hormone. Once a nice thick coat was applied, I stuck the branch in the soil and watered it thoroughly.

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Tree Development

After propagating this small Golden Gate Ficus cutting it was time to care for it. I waited for close to two months for this particular cutting to develop any roots. This was one of my first ever cuttings and at the time I did not realize how long this was. Compared to all the rooting times on my recent cuttings, this time of two months is extraordinarily long.

Once the first roots started to appear, I began waiting for more roots and canopy development. Unfortunately, no growth ever appeared. After about six months, the cutting grew one new leaf. Originally it had three, now it has four. This is pretty underwhelming compared to all the growing my other plants are doing. For now, I am just maintaining this cutting and keeping an eye out for if it starts to wilt.

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If you look closely you can see that this cutting is in different pots in the first and second pictures. I performed one re-potting on this tree after six months of growing it. The roots were not outgrowing the original pot, I just wanted to give the tree more soil to grow in. This was done in an attempt to encourage more root growth with a larger pot. I have not noticed any positive correlations between the two thus far. I will keep you updated on this to see if a larger pot size encourages faster root growth.

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Future Considerations

If the current growth pattern continues, it will be a long time before I can do anything with this tree. The roots are still too fragile to introduce fertilizer. There are no leaves that need to be pruned and if no new ones develop, there will be no new leaves to prune either. In addition, the cutting is so small it will not need to be wired for some time. For now, I will just let this tree grow by itself while I water it.

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There haven’t been many developments with this tree so there hasn’t been much to report. This Golden Gate Ficus is probably the easiest to care for out of my entire collection. If you want to learn more about how to care for this type of tree, you can check out the posts about my large and medium Golden Gate Ficus trees and the introduction post. They contain more in-depth information about how to care for this tree species. If you want to check out more pictures of all my trees you can do so in the Gallery.