Help and Advice For My Fiddle Leaf Fig Tree
Comments (7)
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Please save my fiddle leaf fig tree!!!!!
Comments (11)I'd do a through flush of the soil when it's ready for water (use the dowel method to check). Put the tree in the tub and add 10x the water it would take to saturate the pot. Then let it drain while tilted at 45°. Get it closer to a window and it it wouldn't hurt to fertilize at the next watering after the flush. Ficus trees are super easy once you get down the basics. I started with a small 3 foot ficus Benjamina 2 years ago and knew nothing about what I was doing. i leaned a lot from Al and now my tree is 7 feet tall, very full and healthy in an 18" pot with the 5:1:1 and does really well. Ficus Benjamina has just about the same exact cultural needs as your ficus lyrata....See MorePlease help save my Fiddle Leaf Fig Tree!
Comments (6)Hi all, I desperately need help saving my fiddle leaf fig! I purchased her (Precious) about a month ago and things seemed to be going OK. Within this time she even grew three new leaves. I noticed several brown spots and thought I might be overwatering so held off. We also have had a heatwave so the blinds have been closed in the house and she wasn’t receiving as much sun. Within a few days I noticed she was covered in big brown/black spots and starting to lose leaves. I gave her a big dose of water and left her outside to get some light. With warm weather predicted I left her out overnight. Of course an unpredicted thunderstorm came though. I brought her back in as soon as I could and moved her to another room where the blinds could stay open. She lost 4 more leaves. Now the worst thing happened - my dog got to her. I came home yesterday to find the whole bottom branch destroyed. My dog is ok but Precious is not - she lost 5 more leaves today. My question now is is there anything I can do to save her? I have attached pictures of Precious when I brought her home and today. This is my first FLF so I could use all the help I can get. Thanks in advance, Ashleigh...See MoreWhats going on with my calathea and my fiddle leaf fig tree??
Comments (1)Claire, I would suggest you post these questions in the house plant section as the fig forum is for edible figs. They are very good folks over there and I bet they can help you. Good luck....See MoreNot sure how to continue growing my Fiddle Leaf Fig, seeking advice
Comments (9)The best time to do any kind of heavy pruning is not Spring, as in the first day of ...... But Spring, as in the last day of, sounds about right to me. There are 3 reasons for this. 1) In early spring, indoor trees are only sort of maybe thinking about getting a little serious about starting to grow like they might mean it some day. On the last day of spring, they will probably be at the peak of vitality, and their food/energy making ability will be peaking as well, so the recovery time, during which they will be more vulnerable to biotic AND abiotic pathogens, will last only a small fraction of the time it would should you prune now. 2) If you prune your tree now, it's going to put on a lot of growth with long internodes that will work at cross purposes with you trying to ensure your tree is compact and full. What do you do with all that leggy winter growth and the leggy growth your tree has now? How about leave it alone until June, then prune hard? It would be to your tree's advantage. Pruning hard in June means you take off ALL leggy growth from the previous winter. In the summer months, all growth will be tight - with very short internodes. Then, starting in Fall, let the tree grow wild (unpruned) all of next late fall/ winter/ early spring, and remove the leggy winter growth again in June of '20. This means that all internodes from the time you start your pruning sessions, will be short and your tree will be as tight as it can be within the effects of influences like light, temp, and fertility. 3) All plants have natural rhythms. Learning to work with their growth cycle instead of against it is much better for and easier on your trees; and, it makes you a better nurturer for planning your heavy work to take advantage of when your plants are at their best, while making allowances when when the vitality level of your plants is at low ebb, and Also, it doesn't much matter how sharp your pruners are because whatever internode you cut through when you prune is going to die back to the first proximal node, even if you used a laser beam. What you do with your tree now will determine what you'll have to work with in the future. IOW, you probably shouldn't expect the tree to provide you with a structure YOU can build on. You'll need to do that yourself - but it's very easy in this case. I see 3 trunks and a bit of a single wild branch. Is that right? The wild branch should be pruned back to 2 healthy leaves. Of the 3 trunks, the thickest should be the tallest. The next thickest should be pruned back so it is about 2/3 the ht of the tallest trunk after the tallest has been pruned. The thinnest trunk should be about 1/2 the ht of the tallest after it's been pruned. Important: When you make your cuts, make sure the top leaf on the trunks you're cutting faces AWAY from the vertical midline of the pot.If this ^^^ was your pruning cut, you can be sure the branch in the axil (crotch) of this leaf will grow to the right (absent effects of phototropism - growing toward the light). If you'd cut just above the lower leaf, you can be sure it will grow to the left. Plan your cuts so the new branches will grow outward from the center and not inward. If you're interested in what I'm saying, I'll help you with how to keep your tree from getting so far out of control it needs a hard prune to reset it to something you can build a canopy on. Obviously, you don't want your canopy at ceiling ht where (lack of) light will be a serious limitation. Al...See More
Kay L.
8 years ago
tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)
8 years agoIt always gets to be a catch 22 situation when a grower buys a plant and discovers it's struggling late in the most robust part of the growth cycle (like now). Because it's perched water that creates the bulk of the problem, and the ht of the PWT is a constant with any given medium, it sort of makes sense to go against what convention would suggest and pot up a size but use ballast in the bottom of the pot to reduce the volume of soil that CAN hold excess water.
I'll try to explain by using an example. Lets say you're using a soil that supports 4" of perched water - about average for peat-based mixes. If you added ballast to the bottom of the pot equal to the ht of the PWT, but only left a small spot for soil to reach the bottom of the pot, the only soil that could hold perched water would be that small column of soil. Your soggy soil problem then goes away. It isn't ideal because o/a porosity wouldn't be entirely as good as it could be, but it's much better than a root system nearly totally immersed. Putting a bunch of bricks in the bottom of the pot sp only a small column of soil or 2 reaches the pot bottom would work fine.
In the picture above, imagine that the bricks used as ballast were taller and almost but not quite entirely filled the bottom of the pot. How much soggy soil would there be? Almost none. Do you understand the concept?The spots you provided pics of are oedema, and come from the plant taking up more water than the plant can get rid of. The internal pressure gets so high that cells burst and tissues die, leaving you with the symptoms shown. Over-watering + anything else that slows transpirational water loss contribute to the physiological disorder. Low light/cloudy days, high humidity, cool temps, some nutritional deficiencies, partial or total defoliation, are all potential contributors to the malady. I know some of those sound familiar to you. ;-) My nephew just got married on the island a couple of weeks ago. They've since moved to an aptmt in the city, so they could be your neighbor. Interestingly, he's a master glass blower and artist of some renown, having blown all the goblets and other 'storage' vessels in the last Hobbit movie.
Your thoughts about your plant?
Al
Kay L. thanked tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)Kay L.
8 years agotapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)
8 years agoPacking peanuts tend to make water perch in the soil above the "drainage layer" and are something of a nightmare at repot time, so I'd discourage you from using them. The ballast you need should allow a continuous column of soil that goes all the way to the bottom of the pot.
Notice, in the picture above, that the PWT is the same ht in every picture. No matter if the soil was 12" deep or 12' deep, the PWT would be the same ht for a given soil. Also note how the volume of soil is reduced in C and D, reducing the volume of saturated soil considerable. If you build a ballast system in the bottom of the pot so there is only a VERY small amount of soil that CAN support perched water, you can eliminate it almost entirely. If you go too far and eliminate that soil column that extends to the pot bottom, you don't get the benefit because that causes the water to perch.
If you pot up now, you don't want to mix the media in the pot because you'll have parts of the soil that are too wet and parts too dry. Your main purpose for the repot is to use a little science to get rid of the excess water retention until next summer when you can bare-root/repot with little concern about the plant's recovery time, which is an issue now.
Yes - the soil I use for my trees is very gritty, which is prolly why people started calling it the gritty mix.
The dime is about the same size as your dime. In many ways, it doesn't matter much how you implement the concept of using materials of larger particles to eliminate the limitations imposed by saturated soils, and pumice is a useable component. I probably have 50 ficus trees, and none show any evidence of oedema or any other symptoms of too much water in the rhizosphere, and I water most of them daily in the summer - not particularly because they need it, but because I can w/o concern about over-watering.
This is a ficus a week after I defoliated it in July of '14. You can see the soil ......
It grew a lot before I took it in for the winter, so I pruned it back before it went indoors. This is the tree in spring, this year
and here it is after defoliation
and ready to grow some more
I'm not sure where to find soil ingredients in Canada. Fir bark should be easy to find, but you must be careful that you don't buy a product that was ponded in salt water. Quartzite or cherrystone is mined in MN, but I don't know if it crosses the border into Canada. Look for the grit component at rural feed stores or grain elevators that cater to rural populations that raise fowl, and don't use crushed shellfish because of the salinity and high pH.Al
She Kay
7 years ago
tapla (mid-Michigan, USDA z5b-6a)