Sorry, I should have been more clear. I planted it in the ground right after I purchased it. Like most new fruit tree growers, I am learning from the school of hard knocks. It is probably 3 to 4 feet tall with 4 or 5 young figs on it and several nice leaves. Just worried as the yellow then brown effect has gone up the plant to effect about 3 large leaves and given the young nature of the tree, I am worried this trend will continue. I am growning an odd affinity for my fruit trees! We have a very good local nursery and I guess I had either gotten the advice or misunderstood the advice and I planted in direct sunlight (he did warn me to cover the roots with pine straw to help with heat on the roots). It has been very very hot up here in the panhandle of Florida(after we had record rainfall for June). I feel like I planted it towards the end of the rainfall, so I believe heat is the issue at hand. (my satsumas and meyer lemons are living it up, but the celeste fig does seem stressed.) Al, thanks for the great lesson on 5:1:1 soil. I have made some good batches of that for my container plants and it looks and feels fantastic, plants seem to really be taking to it and drainage is outstanding. Probably should have started the fig tree out in a pot until I learn something. Thanks for all the replies. Any advice on helping the plant out after I made the mistake of planting it in direct sunlight?

I know this is horribly outdated, but I figure I'd post for documentation in case it helps anyone else in the future. Tawni: Your photo looks exactly like what I saw on my tomatoes. I took eileen_nv's suggestion about spider mites and looked them up. The description seems to match. Also, I'm not sure if this was present on your leaves, but I inspected my infected leaves closer and noticed many white/clear specks on them. And some of them were moving. So, I guess those were the tiny little spider mites. Some resources I found for controlling spider mites: http://faq.gardenweb.com/faq/lists/orchids/2003010242014131.html http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/brug/msg090328378869.html http://www.entomology.ksu.edu/DesktopModules/ViewDocument.aspx?DocumentID=4173 (it's a PDF titled "Spider Mites on Tomatoes" from Kansas State University)

Yellowing of the bottom leaves - be they cotyledons or true leaves - is almost always a sign of excess watering. Too wet soil causes root rot. Given your container mix - "store bought top soil with homemade compost (leaves and grass)" - too much water/too wet soil would seem very likely. Potting soil also compacts making good drainage problematic. This the standard recommendation to use a soil-less potting mix instead. Have you fed them anything else? Compost unless it was well finished humus won't provide much in the way of nutrients. Dave

Is the mix in the pot the same as the mix in the bed? The bed plants are clearly nitrogen deprived, severely so. All the wood chips in that mix could explain it as they could be binding up all the nitrogen in the soil. But the pot plants don't show that so if the mix is the same stuff then that explanation won't work. So IF you are not over-watering the bed the first thing I would try is a good heavy dose of nitrogen for those plants. If that doesn't help then I'd suspect there is something else in the bed soil mix that is causing the problem. Dave