I have exactly the same problem. The landscape fabric and all the dirt/mulch is growing weeds like crazy but I can't grow anything pretty or productive. Also, my back yard is catch basin for the streets around me and now this yard is a puddle 9 months of the year. I'm sick of it! I have to work around some bushes and rocks so a tiller is a hard no. It's going to be a long hard slog. I think I'll just remove some of the rough edges for now, and pierce some spots with an old-fashioned long-handled grampa weeder for planting things with shallow root systems. Will probably take me several summers of back-breaking work to remove this poorly executed mistake.

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.

Hi Cuddy, doing it the ole fashion way in cold zone i see , it gives me memories as a child when my grandmother and her sons my uncles did this every season. For others that have read this please in past ignore i dont mean to bore anyone. ; ) You may get some ideas or not. They would wrap tree with burlap and twine and knock tree into long trench after digging around roots to loosen it up, then put a long piece of wood on top of it.They shoveled the dirt on top of the wood and in the end had a nice mound of dirt on the top similar looking but taller in height than a fresh grave at a cemetery. When the uncles would dig it up they eventualy came down to the wood with shovel lift the wood up this way they never hit the branches with shovel because the wood protect them.I only seen this done as a child , but if you use leaves you may conside to try the dry ones if you put them right on top of plant. Best Luck Martin

Vladimir, all depends on the size of the tree. Rick, Claire is right. planting it now would encourage the tree to put on some new growth which most likely will not harden off by the time the cold weather arrives. i would store your trees this winter just like you have in the past and then get them in the ground once they break dormancy in the spring as long as there is no longer a threat of frost. All my trees are in 20 gallon pots with maybe 1 or 2 going into the ground possibly next year. all my trees are 4yrs old started from cuttings. as for fertilizer, i give them spring application right around the time they are starting to wake up using Joe Morles recipe. then roughly a month after that i start feeding them every other week with a liquid fish fertilizer called Organic Gem. I stop feeding them mid august just so that they don't put on much new growth. i also sprinkle a handful of garden lime 1-2 times during the season into each pot. once frost hits and all the fig leaves fall off i usually leave the tree outside to get a couple more light frosts to help harden off the new wood. once majority of the new green wood has turned brown, i bring them into my detached garage where they will stay all winter. i dont cover them nor do i provide any heat for them. matter of fact every time it snows its my sons job to place 2-3 grapefruit sized snowballs on each pot to assure that the soil never goes dry. it typically take up to a week for the snowballs to completely melt. sorry for the rambling....