The spoiled foliage is likely attributable to a combination of a poor soil and over-watering. The leaf loss might also be attributed to a drought response from over-watering, or a decrease in light levels. Your plant prefers a soil you can water to beyond saturation w/o concern that an extended period of soggy soil will damage roots or impair their function. Peat-based soils simplt don't drain well, and hold much more water than your plant appreciates. I'd urge you to think about building your own pine bark based soils, or something based on coarse gritty material. I can help there. PLEASE - no dishsoap on your plants. The detergents dissolve cuticular waxes that serve as protection against water loss, and diseases. It also is very bad for roots because it dissolves root cell membranes. There is a very long thread that goes into a LOT of detail about FLF care: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/discussions/1458685/pruning-ficus-lyrata-fiddle-leaf-fig?n=247 Al

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

Hi, Amy. Unlike animals/humans, plants don't grow new tissues in the same spatial planes as the damaged tissues, so the blemishes left by photo-oxidation (sunburn) will be a part of the leaf until it's shed or you snip it off. There are good soil and poor soils, with varying degrees of good and bad within the category. I don't think a soil can get a 'good' grade unless you can water plants in it to beyond saturation w/o having to worry the soil will remain soggy so long it has a notable impact on root health/function. It's hard to make a difference when you "amend" MG potting soil by adding perlite or even pine bark because in order to realize any significant increase in drainage and aeration, the coarse fraction of the ingredients needs to be several times larger than the MG you started with. Using the 5:1:1 mix as an example - it has 5 parts of pine bark of suitable size, one part perlite and one part peat or a soil like MG. That means it has 6 parts of coarse material and 1 part of fine material, which is where the superior aeration and drainage come from. It's kind of hard to say you amended your MG potting soil if it's only 1/7 of the total volume of the mix. I never start cuttings in water because of the issues associated with that practice. If, for some reason I HAD to start cuttings in water, I would move them out of water into a very well-aerated, damp/moist/never wet mix as soon as root primordia (the white bumps) became conspicuous. Good job, BTW. Al

Hello! I am very lost and in need of help! I have no experience on fiddle leaf fig trees other than the overwhelming amount of information on the website. I was given my fiddle leaf fig tree as a gift for Christmas. My husband bought it on Craigslist and kept it in a dark garage for about 2 weeks to hide it from me. Uh oh. It's been 5 months and I just can't figure out how to make my tree happy. In the past 5 months about half it's leaves, mostly towards the bottom, have turned yellow with brown edges and have fallen off. 2 new healthy leaves have grown at the top and 1 not so healthy looking leaf. It is near a NW (mostly W) facing window and gets plenty of indirect light. From reading online, I assumed the yellow leaves were due to overwatering. In the beginning I was giving it 1 cup of water a week, and have tried to adjust depending one soil moisture. I just cannot figure out a good watering schedule. Most recently I've gone 2 weeks without watering it and it seems to be still moist near the bottom about 2/3 down. I use a moisture meter and just last night checked with a wooden chopstick. This past weekend I asked advice from a local plant shop and they told me maybe the plant is too tight in it's pot and to take it out and let it dry out a little. So that is where I am now. Any help, advice, insight will be greatly appreciated. I would love to figure out what's going on and help Mr. Fig live a long happy life. Thank you!