I was just going to put on a dusting of AGLime on top. Is once a season enough?
How often do you lime your potted figs?
Figs don’t need an alkaline medium, so check whether your mix is so acidic that you need to raise the pH. And unless you think that your mix already has sufficient Mg, I would suggest dolomitic limestone (Ca & Mg) instead.
FWIW I use roughly 1/2 cup of dolomitic limestone per 20 g pot, once each season.
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I’m using peat, mini pine bark, pine fines, perlite and maybe some sand.
Never.
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In your situation, to the original mix I’d add slow release nutrients such as dolomitic limestone, gypsum, green sand. Then adjust with lime to get pH right. Then in subsequent years just add some dolomitic limestone annually.
You’ve got a lot of absorbent materials in your mix. It could get water-logged. Perlite and sand help but sand is heavy. Think about adding some calcined clay and diatomaceous earth, both sold as oil absorbent materials in auto supply shops.
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Never added lime. Figs do fine in a wide range of PH. Optimum is sometimes said to be 6.0 to 6.5.
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Richard as usual is correct. They can tolerate quite a bit of lime but certainly don’t need it. Better not to use at all ever. The only plants I lime are my grass to keep the moss out. And my lilacs who like a basic pH. Nothing else I grow requires lime.
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Take a look at the proposed mix. It sounds very acidic, like something you’d prepare for blueberries. I’d at least check. Other people with a different mix might not need any adjustment. Especially true if planting in the ground.
Dry climates tend to produce alkaline soils, so I’m guessing that Richard’s ground is already alkaline. Wet climates tend to produce acid soils. Here in RI the rainfall is acidic. LIme is used regularly to offset the acidity of soil and rain. PA is probably similar.
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There is no need for two sources of Calcium. Further, igneous and metamorphic green sand contains no plant nutrients that can be broken down by soil or microorganism processes in 10,000 years to a quantity meaningful to plants. It is an expensive way to add texture to soil. Landscape sand (e.g. retail 1/2 cu.ft. bags) is a better choice for several reasons. Avoid sand products solely labeled for playgrounds. Also avoid mixing sand solely with clays.
Ficus is highly adaptable, provided the Sodium (Na) content is minor. In the case of Ficus carica, its protagonists developed an excretion in their roots that slowly dissolves limestone (during the Messinian crisis) and nowadays fig trees adjacent to limestone architecture of Western antiquity are being removed.
The native soil is pH ~6.3. The municipal water supply at my home is pH 8.1. In general, alkaline water supply is responsible for metropolitan alkaline soils in southern California. (Check the USGS soil reports from the early 1900’s for more details.) As a consequence, I fertigate to achieve appropriate pH in my irrigation circuits. Further, the hundreds of figs in my repository were all in Stuewe TP912 pots with no native soils.
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Dolomite can be useful for the magnesium, but not the calcium
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@Phlogopite
Agriculturally, Sul-Po-Mag is a better choice for fruiting plants.
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So to be clear, you never use lime but you do use other chemicals to adjust pH. Your initial response (“Never”) turns out to be somewhat less than useful.
Give @Zone6 a break – tell him what chemicals you use to manage pH and, more important, what chemicals you would recommend to manage his pH, given an acidic initial potting mix as well as acidic rainfall.
I’ve never applied anything to adjust the PH for my figs
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i dont adjust ph specifically but i do add calcium which as a consequence increases ph of my similarly high acid mix.
Check the title of this thread.
I have made potted soil mix recommendations to him in the past but he has ignored them. The same is true of you.
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Given a modicum of cognitive empathy, you could discern what he needs, irrespective of the title of the thread. So unless you suffer from an empathy deficit disorder, you could have simply told him the best approach to adjusting the pH of the materials he has chosen.
To withhold advice simply because he ignored some recommendations in the past is just spiteful. It also seems rather presumptuous as it presumes that he could not have received better advice from someone else. Is that possibility inconceivable?
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i will say ideal potting mix may differ from location to location, here it rains a LOT so i need a lot less water holding than someone in a more droughty place might. but who knows
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@jrd51
I reserve the right to limit my level of effort.
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