When it comes to root health, pots with gas permeable walls carry the day. Terra cotta clay pots are better than plastic or vitrified clay pots and fabric pots are better than terra cotta clay. The reason is greater gas exchange through container walls and the fact that an increase in gas exchange comes with an increase in evaporative water loss, which can be a lifesaver when using water retentive media. There will still be a PWT in these pots, and for any given medium it will the same ht in a pot with rigid sides as in the fabric or air pots at container capacity. Container capacity is a measure of how much water the grow medium in a pot or container holds at the moment it has stopped draining after having been watered to the point of complete saturation. The ht of the PWT and how long it affects root function is usually key/critical in determining what opportunity a plant will have to realize as much of its genetic potential as possible (within the limiting effects of other cultural influences). The factor that most affects the ht of a PWT is the size of the particles from which the medium is made. So, reducing the duration of PWTs limitations increases the opportunity for plants to realize a greater measure of their genetic potential. But wait! There's a more important consideration. If you place your fabric containers directly on the ground/soil, from the perspective of hydrology it changes the fabric container to a raised bed; this, because water is free to move through the fabric between the grow medium and the earth, with the earth acting as a giant wick. This means, because of the increase in the force of adhesion in the mineral soil beneath the pot (due to a mineral soils much larger o/a surface area on a per volume basis), water in the soil will be pulled downward with enough source to overcome the capillarity holding it perched in the container. As long as you don't place the fabric container on coarse sand, peastone, or other large particles, the earth will likely pull all perched water from most media one is likely to use in a container. I've mentioned this and the fact that healing in your pots situating them directly on top of soil turns them into raised beds. the only caveat being it's essential that there is a 'soil bridge' so there is continuity of the soil column between the soil (earth) and the grow medium in the container, through the drain hole(s), so water doesn't have to jump an air gap to exit the container. This applies more to pots with rigid walls and is not a factor when discussing fabric containers. Al

Murky, to try to answer your question, I am generally more comfortable with whip and tongue grafting, but my understanding is that there's potential for significantly better percentage takes with bark grafts with some species even apart from diameter ratio considerations. Besides wanting to escape the limitations of matching diameters, I'd like to explore options for improving my grafting success rate with various non-pomes. I'm hoping that various types of bark grafts will increase my success rate with pawpaws, persimmons, and maybe mulberries, and perhaps also work better for species I'd like to begin grafting like pecans, walnuts, and stone fruit. I experimented quite a bit with the modified method of bark grafting from David Osborn's online tutorial (particularly for persimmons) last year, but I've only just started trying more standard bark grafts, and my first impression has been that the cambial contact I had envisioned with a simple bark graft isn't realized very well unless the stock is at least 2-3 times the diameter of the scion. Bill Reid on his pecan blog describes three types of bark grafts he uses according to diameter ratios, starting on the smallest diameter stocks with 3-flap grafts, then using what he calls an arrowhead graft (which seems like the most basic bark graft), and then using what he just calls a bark graft (but involves several angles and asymmetries) on larger stocks. I don't know how applicable those ideas would be to other species, and I'm also curious how others might approach things differently.

Agreed. For pear tree branches that have bark that is older, thicker, stiffer, and grayer, I stop at about 1" diameter or thereabouts. And that is only when the branch is actively growing new leaves and thus full of sap that lets the thick bark easily slip away from the core wood. Once the scion is inserted and thus pushes the 2 stiff flaps on either side of the vertical slit upward so they no longer have contact with the core wood, they will not be pulled downward to again make flawless contact with the core wood by wrapping tape tightly around them. Leaving an under-the-flap gap that new tissue will have to fill in. Or not. An opened up desk stapler can be used to firmly staple down both flaps parallel to the scion so that more of the 2 flaps' under surface will resume having flush contact with the core wood. The staples are too dinky to be pushed into harder wood like citrus, but they sure make pear tree bark flaps get snugged up to the thicker/older pear core wood much better than only using tape wrapping. ....Bark grafting on pomegranate branches that are 1" and older can also work OK, but the side of the r/s branch opposite the slit will usually die off to about a 2" "dead bark zone". But the scions on the other side still grow like crazy. Next time I topwork older poms, I will do a bark graft on 2 opposite sides of each branch to hopefully get a better result........When following Joe's practice of slicing very thin strips of very thin bark on the back side of the scions just prior to inserting the scions below the flaps and next to the core wood, I have a difficult time making the very thin slices w/o sometimes going too deep into the already-thin wood. So, instead of slicing, I hold the grafting knife perpendicular to the scion and lightly scrape away the hyper thin bark on both side edges of the scion's wedge point. Just like using a knife blade to scrape the skin off of carrots. No more gouges.....Hats off to Joe Real for his very helpful how-to tutorials.

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