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What's Wrong with my Fiddle Leaf Fig Tree??

6 years ago

I purchased my tree in July/August and it was doing just fine. My house faces SE and has side lights around and above the front door. I have it in a corner in the "studio". The front door and garage door are a few feet away.

I started a new job in October and forgot to water it and now it's dying. The leaves are brown and dropping weekly. How can I save my beautiful plant? I did notice some dust on the leaves. The soil is dry and pulling from the edges of the pot. When I water it, the water seems to run straight through. I saw new leaves beginning to emerge at the base but leaves are consistently dropping.

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Comments (5)

Jaycee
6 years ago
One thing I've learned around here is that if the soil is so dry that it's pulling away from the edges of the pot, your potting mix has likely become hydrophobic, preventing your plant from getting the water it needs. I would submerge the pot in a bucket of water for a couple of hours to fully rehydrate it. You might find this link very helpful too: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/discussions/2842847/container-soils-water-movement-and-retention-xxii?n=72
litterbuggy (z7b, Utah)
6 years ago
For regular potting soil like Miracle Gro I usually submerge the pot until air no longer bubbles up and the pot doesn't have to be held under water. That can take 15-30 minutes, rarely more. But that's just me; I'm kind of paranoid about damaging roots by depriving them of oxygen for longer than necessary, especially if some may have dried off from dehydration.
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Help and Advice For My Fiddle Leaf Fig Tree
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Packing 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
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Normal result from a tip-pinch only, 1 or 2 new tips but no real reduction in upward mobility or increase in girth. Remove the lower leaves to encourage lower branches at the nodes where those leaves were attached. Practicing on Coleus is so fun because they grow so fast.
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It appears you may not be properly watering your Fiddle Leaf Fig. Here are two posts that will be of help for you. Ultimate Guide to Watering Your Fiddle Leaf Fig What Causes Brown Spots on Fiddle Leaf Fig Leaves
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something is going wrong with my fiddle leaf fig
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Comments (2)
Leaves shed due to any of several potential causes. Older leaves shedding is often from a decrease in light levels that occurred in the not too distant past, nutritional deficiencies of the mobile nutrients in particular (N, P, K, Mg mainly), root congestion, a high level of dissolved solids (salts) in the soil solution, or root congestion are the most common causes. Chill, and especially sudden chill is also causal when we get into the colder months. Though it might initially seem strange, a drought response from over-watering or under-watering is also a major cause of shedding. Over-watering inhibits the plant's ability to take up water; this, due to an insufficient supply of oxygen needed to drive the uptake process. When we over-water, the plant's chemical messengers tell plant central that it better initiate the survival mechanism of acting to limit respirational water loss by shedding leaves. Make sure you're monitoring moisture levels carefully with something other than your finger. It's much more important to have an idea of what moisture conditions are deep in the pot than an inch or two below the surface, and to withhold water until the soil is nearly dry. Using a wooden dowel as a 'tell' is very effective. If you want me to post something I wrote a while back about using a 'tell', tell me and I'll hop to it. Al
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litterbuggy (z7b, Utah)
6 years ago
Do you know the tricks to help drain all the excess water out of the bottom of the pot so the roots will be able to breathe? The basic method is to let the water drain out, then prop the plant up so the pot is tilted at 45 degrees (I do this in the kitchen, where I can lean the tops of tall plants against the counter or an open drawer). If the pot's drain holes are around the perimeter, much of the excess water will drain right out. If it has one hole in the middle more water will drain out when you set it upright. Repeat until no more water drains out.

Another option is to insert a wick--a strand from a non-cotton mop works great--into a drain hole and suspend the pot high enough that the wick doesn't touch the drained water until the wick stops dripping (I set the plant on top of two short pieces of 2x2 wood over a bucket, but anything like it would work).

There's a lot more, including suggestions for fast draining soil that your plant will love, in this excellent thread:

Sick or dying plants?
Sonya
Original Author
6 years ago
Thanks so much for the advice! Should I only use rain or distilled water? Will tap water hurt my FLF?
litterbuggy (z7b, Utah)
6 years ago
It depends. Treated municipal water might contain chlorine (often not the kind that dissipates after the water stands for a while), and hard water can cause harmful mineral deposits, but you can avoid that by flushing the soil frequently. Still, rainwater or R/O (reverse osmosis) water is great, especially to flush accumulated mineral deposits from soil. Just be aware that if your ficus's roots can't take up water at all, either because they've died of dehydration or from suffocation because water retentive soil stayed soggy for long periods of time, even the purest water won't help.

That being said, one of the easiest things to start with is flushing the soil to remove mineral deposits, and R/O or rainwater make that easier. I used R/O water from a supermarket machine to flush my plants, but when I'm not up to hauling stuff I use tap water from my faucet mounted filter.

Once you've done that, learned how to tell your plans actually needs water before watering, and learned how to remove as much perched water as possible after watering, you can focus on getting your ficus into a fast draining soil that doesn't pose a danger to its roots.

Another excellent thread called Dealing with water retentive soils:

http://forums2.gardenweb.com/discussions/1415041/dealing-with-water-retentive-soils?n=62

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