Well the green house is filing up and actually contributing to the garden. The fever is broken! Yesterday my wife moved some cauliflower, broccoli and little gem lettuce starts out into the garden that I had started from seed. The warm weather really gave a boost to my tomato starts. They were looking pretty pathetic. The Amish melons I planted 3 days ago are already pushing up. I got to thinking about how much I have invested each year on plants, cages and the like. It is against my cheapo instinct. I think Ill make an effort to do it on the cheap going forward My cheapo Credo 1) I will not buy anything I can start from seed from the garden centers (except impatients & petunias this year). 2) I will use newspaper pots or Soil squares and not buy any peat starters 3) No miracle grow - leaf enriched soil is all. 4) I will shop for the least expensive potting soil I can get. 5) I will try natural pest control methods wherever possible 6) Next year I will grow my own impatients & Petunias (had a late start this year - gh was up March.) 7)I will do a fall crop and eat every bit of the bounty 8)Tomato cages are going to be my reused gate (wire type). Enough spending. Gone is the day is when people started with a shovel and a package of seed. They succeeded without all this stuff...Why cant I?

There are many variables to be considered in a discussion about soils. I'll tell you a little about 3 different soils & you can decide how different they are and if you think compaction/soil collapse will be a problem for you. Peat based soils, like MG, break down quickly - within a single growing season. When you use them, you have to hope the container size and o/a plant mass is enough to compensate for the collapse toward the end of summer. Hopefully, the roots have colonized the container and the planting has matured to the degree that the plant is able to use the water from compacted soils quickly enough to avoid root rot. We hope that roots are healthy enough that they actually become a part of the structure of the soil and function as aids to the soils ability to hold air. For maximun vitality when using these soils, the plant should be bare-rooted every year. Conifer bark-based soils break down at a rate around 1/4 that of peat soils. They virtually guarantee that the roots will become a part of the soil structure w/o much concern for root rot, as long as your irrigation practices are reasonable. The 5:1:1 mix of pine bark:peat:perlite is a good example of this type of soil, and there are hundreds of GW folks growing in it with very good results. You should expect at least 2 years service from this soil, as opposed to 1 from those based on peat. Your trees should have some attention paid to their roots every two years - 3 years maximum, so this is a good soil to use for your trees. The third type of soil is the gritty mix described way upthread. It consists of equal parts by volume - pine or fir bark:Turface:crushed granite. It is 2/3 inert, so it breaks down very slowly and will still be very serviceable long past the time appropriate for you to do a repot/root-pruning. This soil retains its structure for a very long time, and could easily be pressed into 5 years service if the plant's becoming badly root bound before that wasn't a consideration. Clay pots (or other containers that have gas-permeable walls) will always be healthier for your plants - no matter which soil you choose. The price you pay is the need to water more frequently, but that act of watering drives damaging CO2 from soils and brings in a fresh load of air - greatly beneficial to plants, both. Can a clay pot help compensate for a collapsing soil? Yes, to some degree it can. Roots begin to die only a few hours after being deprived of adequate aeration. The small and most important roots die first - then progressively larger roots until air again returns to the soil, allowing the plant to start a rejuvenation process. This cyclic death and regeneration of roots due to collapsed soil is very taxing from a stored energy perspective. The plant uses it's reserves or current photosynthate (food) production to regenerate roots. This means less increase in mass in other organs - including fruit. How the clay pot helps is by allowing air back into the root zone quicker, so not as many roots die when using a soil too water retentive. Al

Quick return to this thread (I'm trying to get in a flurry of replies, been short on time): Al, you said As far as root-pruning goes, you will likely only undertake it every 3-4 years. Those plants that you have buried will be easy. Depot, saw the bottom 1/3 - 1/2 of the roots off, clean the roots & prune the fat ones. Then - right back in same container. You will likely see a diminished crop in years that you root-prune, but subsequent crops should be greater as a result of improved vitality. Does this mean, though, that as Herman had mentioned, whenever I root-prune yearly to unclog the bottom of the container, that I'll have a diminished crop from the pruning? it didn't sound like that was everyone's experience necessarily, so I want to understand the relationship between the degree of pruning and the lack of productivity, when it sounds like it might be the inverse from some of Herman's recommends. Also, with my figs being so young, I'll just mention that I don't need a saw, only a scissors to prune them at this point! (on a tangential note, I ended up pruning more than roots last night, when de-potting one of my figs: I found a rather large, slightly-slumbering arachnid of a copper-red shade lurking in the roots as I untangled them with my fingers - ICK! the scissors came in handy, rapidly, and now shredded spider parts are a component of that last batch of soil 8-p ) Again, from Al: With regard to your soil choice: A plant that is grown in a container that is not in contact with the soil will benefit more from the gritty mix than those you sink, container & all, in the ground. The reason is simple: there will be no perched water table in the containers that are in the ground. The surrounding soil will act as a giant wick & drain the water. So are you saying that ones being sunk into the dirt will have more wicking action and need a *more* moisture-retentive soil mix used? and that the ones above ground will need the better aeration qualities to avoid a PWC making the bottom portion of the container too soggy for roots to colonize effectively? just trying to clarify my understanding (I do appreciate having grasped the entire PWC concept, that's helped me strategize how I re-pot and mix my soil combos). And a flag to Herman, I don't know if you saw my query? (see above in the thread): Herman, do you trim your container figs to any particular size or shape? (Some of mine were pruned to single stem by the nursery; some seem to grow upright with less branching as a natural habit, others want to branch a *lot*.) I have quite a few single-stem cuttings that are little (24" or less) and have hardly any branchings - I don't want to pinch out the top growing tip on these this spring to make them branch, do I? this is an area I'm not familiar with, is how to prune and *when*, to encourage the fruit. I checked the archives in this forum and saw things about pinching back growing tips, but how big do you let the figs get first before touching them? Thanks for help, everyone! (still looking for Leon to chime back in about his grandfather's fig and any pruning that might've been done when unearthing it in the spring) Sherry (counting down with 15+ figs to re-pot)

I did fail to mention that I went with all white pots this year. Last year I had two in white pots and top growth was more substantial for the trees in white pots than in black pots. Later I discovered the roots also were more substantial. Al's response to this was: "I believe it to be temperature related. The black pots are much more likely suffering more severe heat stress & would unable to metabolize properly & use water from the containers. The plants in the opaque white pots would be the coolest (possibly as much as 20* or more) of the lot & would therefore show more vigorous transpiration rates & be able to carry on (closest to) normal function. I often see water requirements (especially in plastic containers) diminish during the heat & usually don't fertilize containerized plants from around July 4 to mid-Aug in my zone. Most of my trees show almost no growth during this period, so use much less water & almost nothing in the nutrient department. Fertilizing at this stressful time can increase the probability of root rot. Though we rarely associate a weak or sickly tree in fall or spring with root rot, we can often trace the underlying cause to exposure to temperature extremes the summer previous. It is very important for me, in zone 5b/6a to be cognizant of high root temperatures & try to moderate them, & even more so for the growers in the higher # zones, like yours." This is why I not only switched to the white pots, but also water in the afternoon when I can. I remember reading about using one of the turface like products on a lawn. The recomendation was to aerate the lawn and spread the product so that it fell into the holes. Perhaps you could use a pipe to pull a few plugs of your mix out of the pot, mix the turface into what you pull out and pour it back in. You may be able to avoid repotting. Another option is to nest your pots in a larger one and fill the space between with more mulch as an insulator. The mystery fig you spoke of, is that from PN? Mine finally broke dormancy about three weeks ago... about five weeks after the others leafed out.