I'm in Zone 9, 2000' elev. Nor Calif. I dig a trench about 8" deep, cover them with forest compost. I live in the mountains and have alot of big trees that drop leaves that naturally compost every year. I just cover them over with that. The compost is very loose and drains very well. Soil under cuttings is sandy loam that also drains well. No maintenence throughout the winter. Just dig them up in the spring. No need to water, as long as they stay cold and the covering is damp. Nothing rots a fig cutting like too much moisture. I've tried 1000's of cuttings in 20 oz. styro cups, 1 gal pots, shallow trays etc but the best success rate is by burying them in them earth. Of course, if you live in the desert or very dry area, all bets are off if you let them totally dry out. Different strokes for different zones. FF

Melissa, I overwinter over 5000 Hostas every year in pots, above the ground in 4x8 wooden bins that have landscape fabric stapled to the bottom. They are upright and do not get a drop of water other than what they get it from the bottom from mid December through early March. I simply put a pack of Tomcat mouse pellets in the bins, cover them with cheap Menard's tarps and walk away.I may lose 5 or six a year but usually it is Vole damage. About 90% of my Hosta collection( over 1400 varieties now) are in 3 to 5 gallon pots in the ground and have been for several years.They are not covered at all except the ones in Vole prone areas which are sprinkled with grit but no mulch . the only ones that I have lost were in the ground and not in pots. If you have tree roots or Voles this is the way to go .IMHO...and experience! Mary, Your hostas are beautiful! Denny

That's what I do. Use plastic 4-inch pots from store-bought plants. They are the right size and, unlike many plastic cups, have stiff walls that protect growing roots when the pot is handled and squeezed. Those have always been well-sized to get plants to a transplantable size, without having confined roots. Cubes of soil holding a seedling slip out very cleanly from these, without squeezing them. Peat pots are some kind of commercial joke. You pay good money to have your roots permanently walled in. It's just peat, right? Peat is good, right? So we should make pots out of them, right? You can put your plant in the ground without even getting your hand dirty! By the same reasoning, we should be making pots out of diatomaceous earth and compost. Yes, peat pots are "biodegadable" but, in my experience, generally not on the timescale of a growing season.

Okay, I did this a few years back. I, like you, had purchased quite a few roses from my local big box store and I had already had quite a few roses die. The experiment was simple, place all these roses that I had planted in 5-10 gallon pots (the black nursery variety) with good soil into the the ground, pots and all. At first it seemed like a good idea and I will say that for not knowing a thing about the other pillars of rose growing (feeding and spraying) they did fairly well for me...at first. A few observations: 1.) The pots will affect drainage. I, like Ken, added more holes to my pots, but for some pots I went ahead and cut out the bottom completely. Short of doing the later, I would have drainage issues with the pots during the heavy rain season. 2.) Weeds became the dominant issue. In my yard there is little I can do to stop weeds. I've tried most everything and some things work better than others, but no matter what, I always get weeds. During my experiment I was working against a particularly evil crab grass that grows from small bulbs. The crab grass also has a tendency to run roots in every direction looking for a way out. To make matters even "better" it pokes out with a needle thin tip that has made it past commercial grade nursery ground cover. Well, that crab grass found the soil in the pots to be most agreeable and commenced to work its way into my pots through the drain holes. The result was grass that overtook the roses. When I would try to pull this grass out I'd end up pulling the whole pot out of the ground, severing any rose root growth that had made it out of the pots. After seeing several roses die like this I decided to pull one of the pots out and shake out the dirt to see what was going on inside the pots. The root system of this crab grass had overtaken the whole pot and outpaced the growth of the roses. Not good! 3.) When you have a rose die on you, it is fairly easy to start over. You pull from the base stem and, if the rose is good and dead, the remaining root system comes out and voila! Your soil is ready to be amended and a new hole is waiting for its creation. With pots, this is not the case. With time, soil around the pots begins to settle and create a suction that makes easy removal of the pots next to impossible. With many of the pots I ended up cutting or ruining them in order to excavate them. To this day, I still run into some of the pots I forgot to remove when I'm working a new garden. My advice from a fair amount of experience: If you have to plant that Dr. Huey root stocked rose in the ground, pot and all, cut the entire base of the pot. Later on, should you decided to remove the plant and pot, the job will be much easier given the lack of suction. Otherwise, try what I do. I grow the rose in a 5/7 gallon pot and then bump it to a ten gallon pot for about a year (keep it off of the dirt). Once you have established the rose bush into a healthy plant, transfer it into the ground in a large hole with plenty of new dirt. If you fall in love with this rose, take cuttings of it to someone like Geoff Coolidge (sp?) over at Cool Roses and ask him to graft it onto Fortuniana rootstock. The original will last you about three or more years, giving you enough time to start up its replacement. Then again, you could just start with the plant on Fortuniana rootstock from the get-go. I know that I do it because there are times when you find a rare gem at the big box store that you just must try, but it's on the wrong rootstock. This happened to me with Correta Scott King. I found it at Lowes in clearance. Poor thing was half dead but the flower struck me so much that I turned it into my little pet project. Today that plant is five feet high and healthy. Knowing that I'm going to lose it anyway, I have already found it on Fortuniana rootstock from K&M and have hence begun to build it (its replacement) up by placing it in a 7 gallon pot. Either way, enjoy your exploration into modern gardening and please keep us posted on how it went. Good luck, Adrian.