Hi g8trgirl5 and Al! I was just about to make a thread with almost all of the same issues. I hope it's okay if I add onto this thread instead of making my own since this situation seems similar to mine. I've been reading Al's posts on watering and soil and think I probably need to repot too. I've only had my tree (really, three different stalks in one pot) for a week and a half. I got it from Home Depot and I could see a few brown spots on leaves of one of the stalks but the rest of the stalks looked healthy. After bringing it home, I only gave it a "sip" of water as the soil seemed moist when I did the dowel test (with a bamboo knitting needles). The browning of the leaves has spread significantly over the past few days. This was one of the stalks 4 days ago: Today: A couple of the bottom leaves fell when I touched them, and the browning has begun on the other stalks. Now that it has dried out, I'm planning to water it thoroughly by flushing it out in the tub with water and tilting it to try to get this moisture-retaining soil to drain. Maybe the soil has accumulated too much salt. Should I fertilize it with Dynagro 9-3-6 after watering? Could this browning be the plant going into shock from the move to my apartment? I'm also worried that the browning is due to root rot from this soil. If this is root rot, should I repot it into the gritty mix or the 5-1-1 mix? I would completely get rid of the soil it is in (which looks similar to the picture the OP posted). Does it matter whether I use a clay, glazed ceramic, or plastic pot? As for light conditions, I have it near bay windows with very bright but filtered light from the West and Northwest. I'm in San Antonio (Zone 8 - south/central Texas). Should I take it out onto our shaded walkway/balcony after repotting? What direction should should it face? It frequently reaches 100 degrees F here, so I am worried that this summer heat might be too hot. Finally, I am also thinking to separate the three plants into three pots. What size pot should I use? My apologies for all of these questions, and my sincere thanks to anyone who can help answer them!

The browned leaf edges do look like overwatering. Were they there when you bought it? If so, all you have to do is to continue to monitor soil moisture like you did today, and hold off on watering until the dowel is dry. Do be sure to water slowly and thoroughly when you do water. For the rootbound plants I still have in their old soil, I water once until water begins to drain from the pot, making sure to go slowly and wet the whole surface of the soil evenly. Then I come back with my fertilizer solution and water again about 15 minutes later. If the pot was very dry I usually find that the pot takes longer to drain the second time, probably because peat that had become hydrophobic was allowed to slowly moisten a little so it could absorb water again. My pots have holds around the perimeter of the bottom, so tilting after watering works great even without a wick. When I found these forums last September I was ready to repot all my plants, which were weak and rootbound in very old soil. Fortunately I was persuaded to proceed more cautiously and to improve their growing conditions instead, the idea being that it's better to wait until the solstice to repot unless a plant is, as Al says, circling the drain (and I did repot the one schefflera that was doing just that in 5:1:1, with good results). I flushed them thoroughly with room temperature R/O water; bought some 100 watt, 5000k (bright white) LEDs and CFLs, put them in cheap clamp-on fixtures, and mounted them on a shelf above the plants on a timer so they'd get some light; for rid of a spider mite infestation; started fertilizing with a weak solution of Foliage Pro every time I watered; and diligently monitored soil moisture and watered properly when needed. All of my plants responded by perking up, and after a few months they'd gained enough energy and their root systems had recovered enough that they started putting out new growth. I don't have FLFs, but my ficus benjaminas did the best (I listed a few before and after photos in Dave's recent "Then and Now" thread), and they were much improved by the time the weather allowed me to put them outside. Here's where things went sideways, because some nagging health issues prevented me from actually reporting this season. I was really upset when I realized it just was not going to happen, but frankly none of my plants are in better shape than they've ever been, and I've really fallen back in love with the ficuses, which love their half-day of bright high altitudes sunlight so much that they've filled every branch with shiny healthy leaves. I'm sure they'd be even happier with pruned roots in gritty mix (I'll use a modified ratio to compensate for the desert conditions), but I've gotten good enough at compensating for it that they'll keep looking good for another winter, and now that I already have my ingredients and a lot of prepared mix I'll be able to jump into it next June whenever I have a little energy to spare. Al says that if you have two plants in the same condition, repot one in the fall, and repot the other one on Father's Day 2018, the second one will have more growth next fall than the one you repotted now. Some folks will say just go ahead and repot anytime, but your plant looks great despite having a couple of slightly damaged leaves, and they'll respond much better to repotting if you care for them properly and allow them to accumulate the energy they'll need to get through it smoothly. BTW, Cassandra's description of repotting is spot on if you're not going to prune roots. If I had your plant I'd wait until the plant's energy production was at its highest to make sure it will bounce back with some vigor, but Cassandra's method sounds like it would work great. Lenore

W/o an understanding of what the medium you chose to grow in is like, no one can divine what size pot might be appropriate, but how the appropriate size pot is determined might surprise you. I wrote the following simply because this question comes up with a fair amount or regularity. Choosing an Appropriate Size Container How large a container ‘can’ or ‘should’ be, depends on the relationship between the mass of the plant material you are working with and your choice of soil. We often concern ourselves with "over-potting" (using a container that is too large), but "over-potting" is a term that arises from a lack of a basic understanding about the relationship we will look at, which logically determines appropriate container size. It's often parroted that you should only move up one container size when "potting-up". The reasoning is, that when potting up to a container more than one size larger, the soil will remain wet too long and cause root rot issues, but it is the size/mass of the plant material you are working with, and the physical properties of the soil you choose that determines both the upper & lower limits of appropriate container size - not a formulaic upward progression of container sizes. In many cases, after root pruning a plant, it may even be appropriate to step down a container size or two, but as you will see, that also depends on the physical properties of the soil you choose. It's not uncommon for me, after a repot/root-pruning to pot in containers as small as 1/5 the size as that which the plant had been growing in prior to the work. Plants grown in ‘slow’ (slow-draining/water-retentive) soils need to be grown in containers with smaller soil volumes so that the plant can use water quickly, allowing air to return to the soil before root issues beyond impaired root function/metabolism become a limiting factor. We know that the anaerobic (airless) conditions that accompany soggy soils quickly kill fine roots and impair root function/metabolism. We also know smaller soil volumes and the root constriction that accompany them cause plants to both extend branches and gain o/a mass much more slowly - a bane if rapid growth is the goal - a boon if growth restriction and a compact plant are what you have your sights set on. Conversely, rampant growth can be had by growing in very large containers and in very fast soils where frequent watering and fertilizing is required - so it's not that plants rebel at being potted into very large containers per se, but rather, they rebel at being potted into very large containers with a soil that is too slow and water-retentive. This is a key point. We know that there is an inverse relationship between soil particle size and the height of the perched water table (PWT) in containers. As particle size increases, the height of the PWT decreases, until at about a particle size of just under 1/8 inch, soils will no longer hold perched water. If there is no perched water, the soil is ALWAYS well aerated, even when the soil is at container capacity (fully saturated). So, if you aim for a soil (like the gritty mix) composed primarily of particles larger than 1/16", there is no upper limit to container size, other than what you can practically manage. The lower size limit will be determined by the soil volume's ability to allow room for roots to ’run’ and to furnish water enough to sustain the plant between irrigations. Bearing heavily on this ability is the ratio of fine roots to coarse roots. It takes a minimum amount of fine rootage to support the canopy under high water demand. If the container is full of large roots, there may not be room for a sufficient volume of the fine roots that do all the water/nutrient delivery work and the coarse roots, too. You can grow a very large plant in a very small container if the roots have been well managed and the lion's share of the rootage is fine. You can also grow very small plants, even seedlings, in very large containers if the soil is fast (free-draining and well-aerated) enough that the soil holds no, or very little perched water. I have just offered clear illustration why the oft repeated advice to ‘resist potting up more than one pot size at a time’, only applies when using heavy, water-retentive soils. Those using well-aerated soils are not bound by the same restrictions. As the ht and volume of the perched water table are reduced, the potential for negative effects associated with over-potting are diminished in a direct relationship with the reduction - up to the point at which the soil holds no (or an insignificant amount) of perched water and over-potting pretty much becomes a non-issue.

It's ok for roots to be visible at the surface. In fact, exposed roots are often intentionally cultivated as a point of interest, especially in bonsai. The image shows a very young schefflera being trained in the root-over-rock style. Your tree appears to have a combination of mechanical damage (like cuts and bruises would be to a human) and some symptoms related to root health - likely over-watering, or perhaps a high level of salts in the soil, or even both. How to prevent the mechanical damage is self evident. The cultural conditions you provide are central to preventing the necrosis at leaf tips and margins. Soil choice, watering habits, light and temperature levels, and your fertilization program should be reviewed to determine what aspect(s) of those influences are forcing the plant to operate at or near the limits of what it's genetically programmed to tolerate. Figuring it out isn't that difficult, and simply hitting the reset button and embarking on a course that eliminates limitations affecting the plant to the greatest degree possible is probably the wise choice. My suggestion is that you take advantage of every learning opportunity you come across, because learning by trial and error is a painfully slow process, one that very often leaves us in a rut and thinking mediocrity is a destiny rather than a phase we're passing through and about to leave behind. Al