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

Al I don't quite follow you. The bigger particles the better? Particles should be the same size? There is a Goldilocks range when it comes to particle size - not too large, not too small, JUST RIGHT. The second post above yours supplied misinformation that, at a minimum would be confusing to those who are still in the process of putting together a working knowledge of how behaves in soils. In soils that have a consistent particle size, the perched water table disappears when the particle size is about 3/32 of an inch or larger. From the plant's perspective, all PWTs are limiting because they rob roots of oxygen they need to function for varying lengths of time. A good rule of thumb is, the largest particles in your soil should be no more than 3X the size of the smallest, which would limit the largest particles to around 5/16" ....... in a perfect world. The gritty mix incorporates these guidelines, but the 5:1:1 mix doesn't hold to them as strictly because most growers are ok with sacrificing some of their plants potential for the convenience of not having to water as often. There's no sin in that - I do it too. I think that KNOWING there is often a sacrifice to be made for the sake of convenience is important because it provides us with a better sense of what is in our best interest when we consider factors most pertinent to us, which might be quite different from those factors important to our counterparts. Al

I wish whoever ran this forum would post at the top that this section is for edible figs. Newcomers and people new to plants would obviously have no idea since their tree is nicknamed “fig” and this section is also for figs. This part of the forum could be set up to be less confusing to some