In a couple hours since I've posted, both of the smaller plants are back to normal. Like nothing happened. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Very interesting. This outright rules out any root problem. IMO any root problem is no/cannot be reversible. Wilting like what I see in the picture, can be due to TWO things: ___ extreme thirst' ___ extreme heat/sun In both above cases, plant will perk up after watering and after the source of heat/sun has gone. You say you water them every other day. But is it possible that you forgot watering for much longer than that ? OR maybe it is not just enough. It happens to me all the time. Just a week ago some of my tomato seedlings were wilting to the point of dying: THE CAUSE: thirst. After watering, they perked up but the lower leaves did not recover. Sure, soil less medium is better but I have grown all kinds of things in pots filled with garden soil. The problem with compaction and root bounding is that the pot cannot hold enough moisture for a long time (maybe not for one day), in the dog days of summer. Probably you have summer like weather in Florida right now ? THE BOTTOM LINE SOLUTION (imo) re pot them with soil less potting mix into a bigger pot. Hope all this is worth couple of pennies. But I am not asking for anything. hehe

I know this is long, Heidi, but I've got personal experience with your situation. To be brief, I'm confident that this tree is not even close to death's door, and would be much better served by fixing the causes of its decline now so it can green up and be much healthier to deal with the stress of repotting next summer. In particular, your ficus was thriving until three months ago, and we know that the decline was caused by low light and poor watering, which means that fixing the root congestion and soil aren't an emergency. To be clear, gardengal is probably right that you could repot now without killing the tree, but because it would be easy to get it green again by correcting the biggest problems now, you would be best off waiting until summer to do major root work and put it in a great growing medium. Then you will be rewarded with a burst of new growth, and you'll soon be pinching growing tips and pruning to control its enthusiastic growth and tell it to fill in all those gaps left by dropped leaves. My experience: I have two smaller roughly five year old ficuses that were completely rootbound and were stuck in a dim corner. I often forgot about watering until leaves started yellowing and dropping, and the I'd fill their tall plastic 'saucers' and left the water there until they stopped soaking it up. In other words, I drowned the roots every time I watered, and maximized the amount of deadly mineral deposits in the soil. Aside from feeble attempts to maintain a few leaves, they had almost stopped growing entirely because their depleted energy reserves made them more vulnerable to attack and only allowed them to put our a few leaves at a time, and most of the buds and leaves that appeared were killed by spider mites. But these are tough plants, so they clung to life for about three years before I finally cared enough to search for answers and found these forums. I immediately started treating the mite infestation, thoroughly flushed the pots (I swear I could hear them sigh with relief), fertilized with a weak solution of Foliage Pro, which has a great ratio of basic nutrients plus all the micronutrients plants need, moved it in front of my best window, which only provides mediocre light, and added bright white (not soft white) 5000k 100W led and cfl bulbs in clamp-on fixtures. Two months later, each branch has about half a dozen new leaves, including some emerging near the stem (a sign that the tree is getting better). It's wonderful to see them getting so green, and I'm already reading up on how to prune them when they get growing again. So Heidi, if I were in your place, I'd start by checking the leaves for spider mites with a bright light and a magnifying glass (they're tiny red dots on the leaves, and you may see little bits of webs on the leaves our branches). Ask about treatment if you find any. Then I'd flush the pot (details below), fertilize with a 3:1:2 ratio fertilizer (miracle gro general purpose granules are easy to find and the right ratio), move it to the best window I had, and put two 100 or brighter led or cfl bulbs in it for 12 hours a day, using a timer. From then on, check soil moisture by pushing a sharpened 3/8" dowel all the way through to the bottom of the pot, and DO NOT WATER until the dowel comes out completely clean and dry (at that point there's still a lot of water inside the soil particles). When that happens, water until about 15% of the water exits the drain holes, let it drain, and then either tilt the pot at 45 degrees for 15-30 minutes after watering to remove excess water, or insert a wick into a drain hole and raise the pot up so the wick won't come in contact with the drained water. You can wait until the surface of the soil is dry to start checking the soil moisture, but after that you should check daily until you have a feel for how long it takes for the poor to dry up. About flushing: flush with lukewarm water, using about ten times the pot's capacity, then give it a weak solution of fertilizer. Use R/O (reverse osmosis) water if possible; water from supermarket water machines are usually $.39 per gallon, and that little pot will maybe need two or three gallons to do the job. My water is hard, so I used R/O water to flush, and because my tap water is hard I use water from my cheap faucet-mounted filter for regular watering. And the reason midsummer is the best time to do something stressful is that 1) ample summer sunlight generates much more energy from the leaves than even a lot of winter sunlight can provide, and 2) the plant is programmed to put energy into new growth in summer, whereas in winter it wants to store it for use in the spring. From several people's experience, including Al (talks), who knows whereof he speaks, if you take two healthy plants and repot one now and one next June, the second will be in better shape next fall than the one you repotted a year earlier. Sorry for my rambling post, and I hope it helps at least a little.

If you're growing this indoors, it will be very difficult to keep it happy over the long term because of heat or air conditioning sucking moisture from the air. I had to put mine under a cloche over the winter to keep it from dying. Unless you live in a dry climate, it will be much happier outdoors (in the shade).

Agree with Matt, leaves look rotting but are also sunburned. Rot wasn't visible in other photos. Many of the leaves are sunburned toward the tips... I wouldn't worry much about looking for turface and/or bark unless they are easily found. I went thru all of that (as many others did); found turface but not too lucky with bark (lots available, but is too large - 2" and bigger). So I settled for mix I use, with ingredients I mentioned in previous post (including photo I posted). BTW, I have read all posts by Al. I am very strong 'believer' ...but if you understand principle, you can make excellent mix using materials easily available, without going crazy looking for exactly the same...For example: Al's recipe doesn't call for perlite. But knowing perlites water holding capacity, one can figure out what it is good for and use it as a substitute for substrate not so easily found. There are many other substrates that are excellent if used in making well draining mix.