I have wrapped above ground pots with aluminum foil, shiny side out, fastened with duct tape. I have also painted above ground pots white. I mulched with coarse limesstone which is also white, or with perlite. Perlite is too flulffy and tends to blow away. Even with these methods, I had to water figs daily in the summer, and Texas summer is hotter than Washington state summer where I live. I atually checked with a thermometer, and the foil and white mulch does keep the soil at least 10 to 15 degrees cooler, but I don't think that's good enough in hot weather. The leaves also transpire more water in hot weather. I also tried a pot-in-pot method, putting a potted fig into a 1/2 wine barrel that was about 6 inches wider, painted white, and I had styrofoam peanuts around it for insulation to keep it cool. That tree also dried out more on hot days, than the in-ground trees. It did stay cooler than leaving it exposed, however. Some fig forum members have planted their potted figs in the ground. I did a seaarch and I haven't found those entries, but I remember them pretty well. The general idea was that the trees grew roots through the holes in the pots, and when they were dug up, those roots were cut off. This makes digging them a challenge, so one grower used pots that had its bottom holes covered, and had holes in the sides at the bottom. I guess they used a 3/4" drill or something similar, to cut those holes. That was easier to work with. Depending on how big your trees are, they should also be top-pruned and root-pruned while dormant. That helps keep them from transpiring too much water in the summer and also from becoming too root bound. Hopefully someone more expert than I am will also respond, but this should be a little helpful. In the end, my potted fig efforts resulted in fruit drop during hot weather, so I planted mine in-ground again. Some growers have great success with containers, so this year I am thinking about growing containinerized figs again due to cold winter scares December 2008.

I have acidic sand soils and want to let my dozen figs (now in 10 gallon pots) grow to full size in the ground. What kind of performance can I expect if I make some reasonable effort to make sure there are few nematodes at first (after a year's mulching or maybe solarization or dense growth of special marigolds)? Nematodes are sure to arrive I assume, but if I keep the trees well mulched, fertilized, and watered, how well do full-size maintained trees normally grow under nematode attack in very susceptible, nearly pure sand soils? I will graft a few onto LSU Purple to see if in fact that is less susceptible when used as a rootstock. Thanks

I've never posted in this forum, and I don't want to spend a lot of time introducing myself, but since 2002 I have moderated three organic lawn care forums around the Internet. I live in San Antonio and have noticed the mention of Malcolm Beck in another post by strawberryhill. That made me feel a little at home here. I have met Beck on many occasions as he had a monthly organic gardening community meeting running for a year or so in the early 2000s. Malcolm is considered the father of organic gardening in our part of Texas and has a huge following, so it is nice to see his mention in this forum. I have an observation or two (or a lot more) on this forum, but in the context of this thread, I'd like to hold my keyboard back somewhat. All my focus has been in lawns for these years, but in the course of many meetings and keeping my ear to the ground, I have learned a little about how the community cares for roses. First of all, to answer a question asked way up on this, the application rate for molasses over an area is 1 gallon per acre which equates to 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet. For spraying roses, the San Antonio organic community typically uses 3 ounces of molasses along with 3 ounces of liquid seaweed per gallon of water. Spray the undersides of the leaves and all surfaces of the plant. What this apparently does is feed the microbes living on the outside of the plant and those microbes help ward off sucking pests. If you add 3 ounces of garlic juice to the mix, it helps keep thrips off the roses. If you have not already discovered it, check your local farm and ranch co-op to see if they sell bulk molasses. Bulk molasses is sold by the pound. I think the current price is around $0.15 per pound which equates to about a $1.50 per gallon. This stuff is feed grade molasses, not food grade. Also I'd like to respond to somethings strawberryhill said above. This might be long so get comfortable. I have the same good results breaking up my rock hard dolomitic/limestone clay here with gypsum. I was digging a hole and stopped at rock-hard limestone at the bottom. I sprinkled gypsum, poured some water, and took a few hours break. I came back, and the bottom was softened enough to fish out more stones. I would highly suggest you get a soil test done before adding anything like gypsum to your soil. The best soil test lab in the country seems to be Logan Labs in Ohio. By best I mean bang for the buck as well as reliability in their test results. For $20 you get testing done that would cost up to $100 at most university soil test facilities. At LL that is their normal test so they are very experienced to doing it. At a university these would be considered "extra" and they'd have to order chemicals and relearn how to do the test. And in general, adding gypsum type calcium to a soil that is already calcareous seems like the wrong approach. In the past I dumped peat moss (pH 4), or alfalfa meal (pH 5.7) at the bottom of the hole. BIG MISTAKE ! Those fine particles glued up with my sticky clay ... and became concrete. University of California Extension listed 1 ton of gypsum as equivalent to 5.38 ton of sulfur. The only thing I would put in the bottom of the hole would be micorrhizal fungi and possibly rock phosphate. I also tested how sulfur soften my clay ... takes way longer than gypsum. It took at least one month for the sulfur to have an effect. A bit of gypsum is 5 times more effective than sulfur to soften clay, also to de-salt saline soil. First of all I would disagree with making this sound like a blanket statement. Gypsum does not soften soil except in special circumstances. Sulfur is a fungicide which kills the beneficial fungi which normally soften soil. So sulfur would be a bad idea for softening the soil. In the lawn community there are commercial surfactants sold to soften soil for professional sports complexes and golf courses. The cost roughly $70 per gallon which is out of reach for most home owners, but not out of reach for one of the moderators I worked with for several years. He also happens to be a soap hobbyist and junior chemist. Basically he tried the various surfactant materials and found they worked fantastic. Then he reverse engineered them and examined the ingredients. Then he bought those ingredients on eBay and started experimenting. As his basic tool he uses a screwdriver. Stab the screwdriver into the ground and measure how deep it goes. Then soften the soil and measure the penetration. Then along I came and simplified his approach. I have been recommending the use of baby shampoo at the rate of 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet. Apply to the soil and immediately follow up with 1 inch of water. A week later give another inch of water. A week after that reapply the shampoo and inch of water. That should set up the soil environment to favor the beneficial fungi which normally keep the soil soft. In the typical lawn this has worked across the country. In my yard after watering my soil is almost too soft to walk on without turning an ankle. That moderator experimented with increasing amounts of his surfactant to see how deep his soil would soften. He got up to about 50 ounces of surfactant per 1,000 square feet every week for months. There was no problem to the lawn (but I would redo this for roses to be sure). As far as softness, basically he ran out of screwdriver and had to resort to other measuring devices. I believe he was at a comfortable 20 inches or so of pretty soft soil (he's north of Philly). Another mod had a tree limb bury itself 27 inches deep in his lawn. So I would highly recommend trying this. Molasses & gypsum & sulfate of potash to lower alkaline water: It works better than vinegar, I wilted a few roses by watering plus vinegar in high heat. I tried used lemons last year, didn't green up. Molasses is thick so I dilute molasses with water, before adding the other 2 powders and shake the bottle. Then I use 1 teaspoon of that pre-mixed solution per 2 gallons water. Here's the basics if used from concentrated. Again making the blanket statement that gypsum is good for the soil is not going to work for many people. Certainly it won't work in Texas where most of the soil is limestone with a pH of 8.0. Normally we use vinegar instead of RoundUp to kill plants. Spraying it on plants is one thing (non selective herbicide), but using it on the soil is another (carbohydrate bacteria food). And I'm also interested in the mention and use of potassium sulfate (sulfate of potash). That is not an organic material. That is salt. I realize it is used in every commercially branded organic fertilizer, but that is why I never use those. So I'm curious why it is so prominent in an organic forum and what it does to enhance rose health or production. One teaspoon of thick molasses per 2 gallons of water, beyond that will turn the edge of leaves brownish (I did that to Gina's rose, most likely from the 20% iron of molasses). Wholesome Organics (zero salt) and Plantation brand (low-salt) also has 15% calcium and 20% potassium. I have not heard of any problems using 3 ounces of molasses per gallon. I'll check into this further. The purpose of adding sulfate of potash and calcium sulfate (gypsum) is to utilize the sulfur part to green up roses, and neutralize the lime in tap water. Again this only applies to calcarious soils, but I believe there is a much better material to use. Sulfur is a fungicide surpassed only in potency by most sulfates. If you want to harden your soil, the first thing you should use to kill the beneficial fungi is sulfates. If you have calcarious soil, you'll be better off using greensand (if you can find it) and mulching with a shredded tree mulch. As the mulch decomposes the organic humic acids from that process will do more to acidify your soil than sulfur. Any tree trimmer has the material you need. One teaspoon of gypsum powder per gallon of water, beyond that will make plants more prone to fungal diseases (rust and black spots). Too much calcium drives down potassium, necessary for disease-prevention. Instead scatter whole ground corn meal (the kind you cook with or animal feed) around the base of your roses. Cornmeal attracts the trichoderma (try koh DER mah) fungus. Trichoderma is a predatory fungus which feeds on the cell walls of other fungi. This research was done on peanuts at Texas A&M in Stephenville. They have suppressed the research and recently took it off the web. Basically what they found was that peanuts, which normally develop a fungal disease over the course of a season, had to be rotated with a non-fungal crop every year. By using ordinary corn meal on the ground (20 pounds per 1,000 square feet), they were able to use the same soil to grow peanuts year after year. I tried it on my roses and the PM and black spot disappeared in a 3 weeks. Corn meal is also a weak organic fertilizer so there is certainly no harm to try this approach. There was a lot more about the use of potassium sulfate and gypsum, so while I believe those are not good for an organic garden, I am interested to know why y'all thing they are.

TexasRanger, I doubt the nematodes are a serious problem for ornamental plants, especially the native types you grow, but they are for many agricultural plants and I know lcdollar is growing an edible garden, so that's why I mentioned nematodes. The folks to my south who have deep sand (roughly 280' deep) in the Thackerville area have gorgeous ornamentals because they grow the types of plants (mostly natives or at least cultivated ornamentals that were bred from natives) that grow well in sand. They also can grow some vegetables (particularly melons and southern peas) that like the sand. Their sand is not the sandy loam found in much of Oklahoma, it is deep river sand that looks almost like beach sand. I am just a few miles north of Thackerville and don't have that deep river sand. In our areas with sand, we have a light brown sandy loam that is heavy on sand and silt, and short on loam, but it isn't at all that beachy sand like Thackerville has. We call their sand "sugar sand" to distinguish it from regular sandy loam type soils found in much of Oklahoma. If someone is trying to grow the wrong kinds of plants (by wrong, I mean not well-adapted to fast-draining sand) in that deep sugar sand, they are in trouble. My friends who have attempted to grow tomatoes and peppers in deep sugar sand have had to wage protracted, unwinnable wars with root-knot nematodes. I always tease them and tell them they need to truck in some clay to mix with their sand, although I doubt anyone really would want to buy clay soil on purpose. I think your landscape is beautiful and it works for you and fits the architectural style of your home so well. I am sorry if you catch a lot of grief from folks who are adamantly opposed to adding sand. I think you're right on track when you say that a lot of sand must be added. I think most people with dense, slow-draining clay add far too little sand and it does give them even worse soil than the clay they had before because often clay + sand = adobe. Well, for true adobe, I guess they'd have to add straw. I also think that sugar sand works better for edible gardeners when lots of compost is added at the same time because edible plants tend to need the nutrition from the compost and also need soil that drains well but not too well since many vegetable and fruit plants need lots of moisture available consistently in their root zones in order to produce good fruits and vegetables. The first thing I did to improve the very dense red clay around our house was buy one dumptruck load of sand our very first year here. They told us it was topsoil, but it was the worst sugar sand I've ever seen, and I didn't even care, because our clay wasn't going to grow anything we wanted to grow until we did something to fix it. We couldn't really rototill it into the clay because the clay was so dense that even a powerful rear-tine tiller just bounced around on top of the ground, so then we spread hay and straw a foot deep on top of the sand once we had hauled the sand around one wheelbarrow load at a time and raked it out smooth. Since we have strongly sloping property, we wanted to keep the sand from eroding away. Once we had been here 3 or 4 years, we rototilled the sand and compost (the remains of that foot of hay and straw) into the clay and it got a lot better, but since then, the only improvement the lawn area around the house has gotten has been compost layered on top of the ground occasionally. We still get sand occasionally (but not because we buy a a truck load of it) when it erodes during heavy rainfall from the property directly south of us which still has some sand left, although their sand is slowly becoming our sand with each heavy rainfall. I don't mind their sandy loam washing onto our land---it isn't filled with nematodes because it is on top of clay subsoil---but we got up to 4" of sand washed into our garden in a very heavy rainstorm (12.89" in one day) in April 2009 and my whole garden, including several inches of mulch, was buried under wet sand. There wasn't much I could do about it then, but in the fall and winter, I just rototilled all that sand and the mulch that was underneath it, into the garden soil. While it was frustrating that year to have all that weed seed-filled sand on top of the mulch, it didn't harm the garden too much (though the excess moisture made plant growth stall for a couple of months), but I still have a lot more weed issues in the area that got the 4" of sand so I'm still pulling out those weeds every year when they sprout. Oh, and oddly, the ranch right across the street to our east has a lot of that sugar sand, but the only place we have sugar sand is in our creek bed.....because it washes there from the ranch across the road. We have a new back garden (new as of a couple of years ago) about 100-120' west of our house that has native sandy-silty loam in about 70% of the area and I like it, but the voles like it as well, so I am having to be careful with what I plant there because the voles devour the roots of everything. I barely saved my Texas lantana from them by digging it up, putting it in a very large container and pruning back the topgrowth very hard to match the root pruning the hungry voles had done. So far, there isn't much the voles won't eat in that back garden's sandy soil, so it is frustrating to plant back there and watch everything die. They eat fruit tree roots, including native persimmons that popped up in that area on their own after we rototilled it, conflower roots, the fig tree roots, etc. Since we have 10+ acres of wooded land filled with pine voles, we'll never be rid of them, so I think the only way I'll be able to use the new back garden for anything permanent in nature will be to make root cages with 1/4" hardware cloth and plant the root balls within the wire cages. Every year the voles eventually, usually in July, start eating the roots of my annual flowers and veggies in that back garden, but usually I've gotten enough of a harvest from the veggies to feel fairly satisfied with the performance of that garden. I thought gardening in native sandy loam would be easier than amending clay endlessly, and it would be, if we didn't have a non-stop population of voles. An interesting note---in that first year when the voles began eating the roots of everything in the back garden, I frantically dug up everything I could and moved all the plants to the front garden, except for trees (fig and desert willow, which had almost no roots left so I put them in containers and they have recovered). I've never had nematodes in that front garden since it started out as clay, but there must have been nematodes on the roots of something that I dug up that year and moved to a specific raised bed in the front garden because last year one single tomato plant in that bed was covered in nematodes and I raise my own plants so those nematodes weren't brought in from the outside. I so far haven't had nematodes in the back garden as far as I know, but somehow they must have been on a plant I moved from the back to the front in the first Vole War. lcdollar, Your soil looks like brown clay. Black gumbo clay is as black as night. I love the way hugelkultur improves the land, but we have a woodland full of deadfall I can collect in winter and use. Most people here in our area clean up their woodlands and pastures and just burn the wood and brush, or they use prescribed burns out on the big ranchlands to accomplish the same thing. I just compost it or use it in limited hugelkulturs. I don't plant much in a hugelkultur that will need to be harvested for the first couple of years because we have so many snakes here near the Red RIver. I wait until it all has decomposed enough that the snakes cannot climb around freely in it. In our earliest years here, I just added big chunks of wood---burying them several inches below the soil surface in the veggie garden. They decomposed in no time at all....a year or two or three....depending on their size and improved the soil as much as anything else I've ever done. When I added big chunks of wood to my raised beds, the old rancher-old farmer crowd about stroked out and couldn't wait to tell me how big of an idiot I was and how wrong I was and how much I'd regret it. In this case, they were wrong and I've never regretted adding the wood. Yes, I know all about how it will tie up nitrogen as it decomposes, but I just added extra nitrogen to accomodate that, and I had this most lush, lovely, productive gardens ever. I still add wood whenever I can. All I have tried to do with my veggie garden is to turn the soil there into the same soil we have in our woodland areas---that woodland soil comes from decomposing trees, leaves and other plants as well as decomposing animals (wildlife does die, you know, and we don't go in there and bury them) and insects, etc. that fall to the ground and decompose in place. It is the most gorgeous soil, being "built", so to speak, from the top down over the last 50-70 years as the trees grew along the creek and the farmer quit farming that area, and then the woodland expanded and expanded over the decades. If you dig down in the woodland, you find the same horrible red clay we have on most of our property, but it is beneath about a foot of woodland soil. I hope someday that my veggie garden soil is as loamy and rich and dark brownish-black as the woodland soil. It has improved a great deal, but still has a long way to go.