Indoor Gardening and Houseplants: Rehabitate an old ficus benjamina?, 1 by GreenScaper

GreenScaper wrote:
Hi mehera1,

You don’t need to be a master of anything other than your own mind to do what I’m going to recommend. Your specimen Ficus tree is anything but a bonsai and not a typical “house plant” either. It does not live outdoors for 40-50% of the year and only live indoors over the winter. It’s a **full time** 24/7, 365 days/year indoor live piece of fine furniture.

The first thing to do is buy a soil probe http://www.insideplantslive.org/archives/000327.php if you don’t have one. Here’s one available in your home state in Greeley, CO.
http://www.ci.greeley.co.us/cog/PageNewsDetails.asp?fkOrgID=...
It is a hollow core type of probe and would be useful to rehab the soil in the planter. The photo below shows the 2 types of probe I use regularly. The red one is for tabletop plants and the ½” diameter solid metal one for floor plants. They are far superior to finger poking and should be more widely available at retail.

Using a probe, you will learn more about your tree **before** you remove it from the planter. I have a hunch and it’s only a hunch, based on experience that it’s not getting enough water. You can determine a lot about the soil using a probe. It may be that the tree has consumed most of it. BTW, don’t worry about hurting the roots. Just be forceful but gentle and twist the probe to unhook it from any roots you might snag.

Assuming you use a 1” hollow core probe, fill each hole with potting mix. I recommend Supersoil, which is available in the western states. Tamp it down with a wood or bamboo dowel.

Unpotting it (without probing the soil) and performing radical root surgery is akin to my doctor immediately recommending prostate surgery based on an elevated PSA test.

Step 2 would be to unpot it if the probe does not bring up soil samples and you realize you are just probing air pockets. By adding Supersoil (or professional equivalent) to the probe holes, you will be doing a certain amount of root system rehabilitation without removing the tree from the planter. Messing around with “special soil” mixes is treating the symptom rather than the cause, which is top watering. Fast draining mixes are only necessary as an attempted remedy for the faults of top watering.

If you do step 1, I don’t think you’ll need to do anything further until next spring. I’ll post my recommendations about step 2 and the benefits of converting to sub-irrigation in another post in the next couple of days. This post is already too long.

There is no way I’d top water a tree like this. Unfortunately, the lay public poorly understands sub-irrigation. It is also much maligned when known incorrectly as so-called “self-watering.” There’s no such thing.

Greenscaper…just Google