For those in the NW suburbs, there is plenty of mulch, woodchips and compost at the Palatine recycling center located on Smith Road just west of NW highway next to the blue water tower. There is also a huge pile of horse manure mixed with mulch on Dundee Road east of NW Highway. There is a large sign on the fence that says "Free Fertilizer" anytime. You can go get it anytime indeed. All you need to do is lift the stable gate, pull your car in, close the gate behind you to prevent horses from leaving the stable and load your car with manure to your heart content. It is available 24/7. Go to the back of the pile for aged manure. I have been hauling mulch and manure from those two sites for several years and have created a system that fits my built and capacity. Equipment: 1. 5 gallon buckets (25 can fit in my Toyota Prius, 34 in my Plymouth Voyager) 2. a 4 prong garden rake 3. a shovel 4. Tarps to line the interior of your car 5. Gloves 6. Face mask Make sure you close the gate behind you. Happy manure hauling.

Those are mine too! Well, with the exception of Growing Place...haven't been there----------yet! In the Chicagoland Gardening magazine, they list so many nurseries, and every year I tell myself I'm going to visit them, but time gets away from me. I get my hostas, though, from Hallsens. The best in terms of quality, price and customer service.

Daphne, I'm a little bit north of you, just across the KY state line. I've had a number of figs in-ground, but rarely got fruit - though LSU Purple has re-grown from being frozen to the ground a couple of times and ripened fruit before winter arrived. I finally moved cuttings of all my figs to pots and maintain them that way. You'd probably be successful with them in-ground if you protect them the way lovebnretired described - I just don't have time to do that for mine - much easier to just move the pots under the house for the winter - but they sure require daily watering through the summer in pots. I've got a number of Asian persimmons growing here, but only Great Wall(an astringent-til-ripe variety) has fruited. Ichi-Ki-Kei-Jiro, Hana Fuyu, and Matsumoto Wase Fuyu are non-astringent types that *may* work - I'm still hopeful that they'll be able to fruit. Saijo, Hokkaido, and Sheng should be plenty hardy in Dickson - I know folks in PA who are growing and fruiting Sheng, and Saijo & Hokkaido are proven producers in southern/eastern KY. There are a few AmericanXAsian hybrid persimmons that might be worth a try - Rosseyanka, Keener, and...heck, the last one escapes my memory - it's a seedling of Rosseyanka backcrossed to another kaki, so it's 3/4 Asian; Russian Beauty, perhaps?

I can't say whether or not it's mealybugs or fungus, but I did want to chime in. Not all fungi are bad. In fact our rainforests wouldn't be able to exist if it weren't for the fungi that break down dead organic matter and recycle the nutrients back into the ecosystem. That's why archaeologists have discovered entire petrified forests from our ancient past. Because all of these massive trees had no way of decaying back down into reusable nutrients. These ancient trees just lingered there for so long that they eventually petrified into stone. It wasn't until many millions of years later, when fungi were able to evolve and take up their role in recycling dead organic matter back into our environment. For the longest time, orchid growers could never get their orchids' microscopic seeds to germinate. They would just sprinkle the very fine orchid seed "dust" down close to the parent plants' roots and just hope for the best. It wasn't until a botanist figured out that they needed a specific fungus to "infect" the seeds and get them to germinate. After that discovery, orchid growing and hybridization essentially exploded onto the market. Now we have literally hundreds of thousands of hybrids, with ever more newer varieties being introduced all of the time. All thanks to the symbiotic relationship between orchids and their beneficial fungi. I've found fungi growing in many of my plants in the past. And not once do I ever remember any of them being adversely affected from it. In fact, it always seemed to be quite the opposite. My plants were/are doing great. And from what I can tell, your Fiddle Leaf fig seems to be doing great as well, and doesn't seem stressed out at all.