A raised bed? Raised beds are very forgiving, and the physics and biology are very different from that of containers. There are other forums that will help you out a lot more than this one. Is the horse manure / cow manure fresh? Most kinds of manure, and especially horse manure, needs to be composted with "brown" material before it can be used by plants.. otherwise it will burn them. You can get away with small amounts mixed in. The compost and pine bark fines are great soil amendments for raised beds, but you may want to get some cheap topsoil to form the bulk of the mix if you don't have enough to mix into. There is an approach to raised bed gardening that uses completely new material - like mel's mix - but that will require yearly replacement and inorganic components like vermiculite. I think its kind of silly to be honest, but it obviously works in certain situations.

The best medium to plant newly rooted figs in is one that provides the greatest amount of aeration and ensures that aeration for the expected interval between repots but is still something you can deal with as far as the intervals between watering. IOW, you'll get the best growth from a soil you need to water daily or even twice a day, but if that is too inconvenient, you'll need to adjust to something more tolerable. How much vitality you sacrifice for convenience depends almost entirely on how far you go in the other direction and how fast air returns to the soil after a thorough watering. E.g., if you were using a soil/plant combination that required daily watering and could magically change the soil to one that only required watering every two days, there would be some degree of sacrifice in potential growth and vitality. If though, you could magically change to a soil that required watering only every 5 days, there would be a considerable sacrifice in growth potential and vitality. Soils that remain waterlogged for extended periods kill roots, and the plant pays to regenerate those roots by spending energy it would normally have put toward increasing mass, more blooms or fruit, extending branches ...... You may be referring to something I wrote about roots: While fig cuttings may root readily in water, the roots produced this way are quite different from those produced in a solid, soil-like or highly aerated medium (perlite, screened Turface, very coarse sand, e.g.). Physiologically, you will find these roots to be much more brittle than normal roots due to a much higher % of aerenchyma (a tissue with a greater percentage of inter-cellular air spaces than normal parenchyma). If you want to eventually plant your rooted cuttings in soil, it is probably not best to root them in water because of the frequent difficulty in transplanting them to soil. The "water roots" often break during transplanting & those that don't break are very poor at water absorption and often die. The practical effect is nearly equivalent to starting the cutting process over again with a cutting having diminished energy reserves. If you do a side by side comparison of cuttings rooted in water & cuttings rooted in a solid well-aerated medium, the cuttings in a solid well-aerated medium will always (for an extremely high % of plants) have a leg up in development on those moved from water to a solid medium for the reasons outlined above. Al

You find this discussed in great detail over on the Container gardening forum In fact you'll find a great deal of info on your non-tomato questions discussed there as they focus on container gardening. Check out this discussion of bark fines. Dave Here is a link that might be useful: Container gardening discussion on bark fines

I feel your pain on sourcing Jorgen; I haven't been able to find pine bark fines over here either (the pine bark mulches have either been to big or the cypress mulch was too shredded). I haven't tried using pine needles/straw as a bark substitute but it does sound interesting, and they do break down very slowly. And I concur with Jorgen that Coconut husk chips are not locally/nationally available generally, despite the proliferation of coconut trees that dominate much of the natural landscape. I'm not sure of the size of thumbnail chips? Maybe take a picture with a quarter included for size reference. A As to the 5-1-1, I have not been able to find all the sources for it as mentioned but have had decent results with Florida Potting Soils Professional Grower's Mix (it is shipped here in 2 cubic ft bags for 11 dollars or so). Just have to be careful of watering with that one, but as for growing medium it is pretty good.