I have 2....1 has lost all its leaves and done absolutely nothing all winter. It's in some type of suspended animation. I just repotted in gritty mix and cut it pretty much in half as a last ditch effort to revive it. The other one has put out some leaves this winter by the window. Unfortunately I put it out a few nice days this spring and it got sunburned and lost about half. I was hopeful I'd actually get some fruit sometime after the next set of leaves came. The good news is it still appears to be putting out a few new leaves. Some advice...be very patient with it when you first get it. Keep it out of the sun for a month while it gets established! (assuming you got it bare root). Then SLOWLY move into full sun. They are slow to react to anything, so if you make the mistakes I did you'll keep losing valuable leaves. Take it easy on the fertilizer, it gets along pretty well without much at all. I switched to just a pinch of humic acid (to lower PH) and a pinch of kelp with every watering. It seemed to appreciate that combo- I took it as advice from someone else who was successful. I'd stay away from chemical fertilizers for a while since it is VERY sensitive and easy to over fertilize. Even then go with just a couple drops per gallon. Also I use a spray bottle to try and boost humidity whenever I walk past but I'm not sure if that makes a difference; I think it might. How's yours look? Where'd you get it from? It seems the norm that they don't have much root mass for the amount of top growth.

I look at it this way in simpler terms of course..... I am brain dead and bored, so here it goes..lol I if don't make sense, pardon me. If I can't or do not know how to grow anything in a pot with a Perched Water Table, which I mostly do not, then I won't use a soil that encourages it. Using bottom stones, or even water proof packing peanuts which don't weigh the pot down never helped me. By the way, if your determined to use bottom material, this is the way to go. No more heavy pots.:-) I have killed a many plants in the past this way. The bottom roots being wet ,stuck in that PWT above the stones, never drying out while the top half of the roots keep getting watered because I keep watering the top of soil that is bone dry. My roots can be thirsting for water even 4 inches down into my pots from the top, while the bottom half of the roots are in that PWT portion staying wet, never drying out. And rocks on the bottom of any pot does not get rid of that PWT. It just makes it higher. The Perched Water Table depending on the soil you use will be there, and maybe not if you use a wick or a fast draining soil. Of course this is not a concern to me in any pot smaller than 6 inches... They dry out fast, especially if they are in clay. I typically use something other than the gritty soil for these. But when I move up to a bigger pot, I am not willing to take the risk of root rot. Some people here can grown plants in any size pot with a PWT and have sucess. Some in 30 gallon barrels! I am not one of those..:-( This is why I use A'ls gritty mix minus the fines that could settle down at the bottom of pot and stay wet while the top of the soil gets dry. Bonsai have very shallow roots, therefore grown in shallow pots, and this is how a many of my friends including myself have killed our Bonsai. You can have a PWT in soil as deep as one inch. We can't afford to have a PWT at all in such shallow pots! On this we take NO chances. I can not afford to have a PWT also in big sized pots for regular plants. Since they and I changed to Al's gritty mix, we have been sucessful, with no Perched Water Table and bottom root rot, even in rainy everday weather if pots are left out all summer. We just have to water more often when because the soil dries out quicker. :-) Jean, I have done the same thing to most of my pots, especially the ones my Clivias are in. They are thriving!! I even drill bigger holes at the bottom of my plastic ones and hammer out a huge circle hole on the bottom of my clay ones, then use screen to stop the soil from falling through. I can only imagine the roots breathing all that air from the bottom!lol,and the water exchange because of this.:-) I love that Container Soils thread, at least what I can understand of it! One thing I did learn, I never knew what a PWT was until I read that thread. That was the culprit to the death of all my plants! Thanks for that thread Al! Thanks for all the great info everyone! Take care all! Mike

For what its worth...wind does play a big role on lychee trees...check lycheesonline.com. Also when its windy the faster your pot dries. Check for moisture with a thin wood dowel...stick the wood dowel carefully close to the bottom of the pot and see if the stick is moist...if not water it. Lychee trees require a lot more water than other fruit trees...learned this one from Harry and others on here! Also, since you just purchased the tree recently, that could very well be the main reason. I'm sure its going through some adjustments from the nursery to your house. Good luck! Here is a link that might be useful: lycheesonline.com

I had some sporadic issues with more fruit drop than usual but my plant foliage stayed healthy overall and we had a really great harvest, but not the biggest harvest ever or anything even close to it. We've had 54" of rain so far, with most of that in May and June, and that is when the fruit drop was at its worst. On plum trees in particular, even when you thin a lot, a certain amount of fruit drop is inevitable---so much so that the phenomenon is commonly referred to as June drop, since in most parts of the country it happens in June. Here in southcentral OK, I tend to see the heavy fruit drop more in May than in June most years, especially in a year like this where the last freeze/frost was earlier, and the trees bloomed earlier than usual and set fruit earlier than usual. I believe there is a point where the tree is carrying more fruit than it can mature so it dumps the excess fruit on its own so that the rest of the fruit has the best chance of maturing well. You almost always have to thin a lot of fruit off the trees, particularly stone fruit like peaches, plums and nectarines. I like to thin in stages because Mother Nature often comes along behind me (hail, exceptionally heavy rain, high winds, etc.) and thins more fruit. I try to get all the thinning done before the fruit are the size of a nickle. If you wait too long to thin, the fruit you leave behind on the tree won't have a long enough time to reach their maximum size before they ripen, so they won't benefit from the thinning as much as you'd hoped. In a year when it seems like every single flower formed a fruit and the plums, in particular, look like bunches of small green grapes because there's so many of them, I tend to remove about 94-96% of the fruit that set. That sounds like a lot, and it is----depending on the size and age of your tree you will find yourself removing anywhere from several hundred to a couple thousand tiny fruit per tree----but the thinning is essential. If you leave too many fruit on the tree, they remain small and you have a lower flesh-to-pit ratio with the stone fruit. Proper thinning at the right time gives you a higher flesh-to-pit ratio. Even when you thin at the proper rate and the proper time, sometimes weather causes additional thinning, and there's nothing you can do to prevent that. I grow early varieties that tend to finish up their production before July arrives and only have one very young tree (planted 2 years ago) left with fruit on it, and we'll be through harvesting from it in a couple of days. I have found that with early varieties I can harvest almost all the fruit for us, with the deer, squirrels and birds getting less of it because they don't realize it already is ripe. With the later varieties, the wildlife tends to take a disproportionate share. The peaches and plums are finished up now, with the exception of that one young peach tree, the cherry (also very young) didn't produce much yet but I have high hopes for future years, and the fig trees are heavily loaded with fruit that is not close to maturing yet. The fig I overwintered in the greenhouse in a very large container has a lot of fruit, but the one that was growing in the ground in the back garden froze back very hard last fall when we had that early freeze and I didn't think it had survived. It finally began putting out foliage in June, but hasn't set any fruit yet. I don't spray my fruit trees and get away with it, but am in a hotter and generally less humid part of the state. If I was in a more northern or eastern part of the state, I suspect I'd have to spray at least with a fungicide in order to prevent brown rot. I also don't have issues with plum curculios. If I did, I'd have to spray to prevent them too, or there would be no crop. I occasionally see something like brown rot or peach leaf curl on a tree, but not often---maybe once a decade. If you see it routinely, you probably should follow the OSU-recommended spray schedule in order to ensure you get a good harvest. I think this year's weather has been really hard on fruit trees as they tend to get diseased leaves, which then causes them to drop the leaves. Normally, though, after the diseased leaves fall, new foliage comes out on the trees shortly thereafter. I do see some thinning out of the leaves on my plum trees now, which is fairly common here in late July or early August, but I generally don't worry about it because they leaf out again. It seems linked to rainfall in hot weather and probably is fungal-related. The peach tree foliage looks great and is much less prone to drop like the plum foliage. Honestly, with all the rainfall we've had (our June rainfall was almost 400% of normal, and May was probably closer to 500% of normal) this year, it wouldn't have surprised me if every fruit tree we have had died. I am sort of astonished at how resilient the fruit trees have been in the face of incredible rainfall, but I do have all of them growing in well-drained sandy loam. I doubt they would have survived this amount of rainfall in the clay soil found on the majority of our property.