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RKN?

Rescued two 5 year old fig trees from someone who could not get them to grow or fruit.
besides being in yard dirt and extremely wet I thought they might just be root bound.

but what a mess


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Now you know why they wouldn't grow or fruit.  Rkn
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That's a nasty looking mess Grant . I guess it wasn't worth the drive .

John
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In an old thread someone described how he used a heat method on RKN roots and that seemed to 'cure' the problem without killing the tree. You could probably search for it. It could have been at Garden Web.
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Burn the clothes you wore and pour acid on your vehicle, if a hint of infected dirt dust flies onto your yard, you'll never get rid of that crap.  If you have a blowtorch handy, I highly recommend using it now on anything that came in contact with those things.
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One of the reason why I don't use local soil and keep all my figs in containers. Never want to chance RKN.

Pete
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Is purchased  potting soil ever infested with RKN ?
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Forum member Ingevald was the one who posted about cooking the roots.
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Here is the link to the posting I made about eliminating RKN using the warm water technique.   Click here.      


Ingevald
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I took a few cuttings off each plant, the rest I'll burn.
I just hope my yard has not been infected.
my wife will be happy to see the clothes I wore go up in flames.

Grant
z5b
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I was serious about the warnings, joking about the acid, mostly serious about the burning it with fire and mostly joking about the blowtorch.  ;)

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Originally Posted by Chapman
Is purchased  potting soil ever infested with RKN ?


I have my suspicions whether this is possible, because I've heard anecdotes of people buying 'pine fines' (pine bark) that had RKN ... but I personally haven't found any traces of RKN with cuttings I started which had no chance of cross-contamination from other sources.  Of course, with potting soil, I think a lot of it depends on what brand you buy, who makes it and how (since it can vary regionally with the same brand), and how it's stored and/or how you scoop it out. 

For example, if you aren't the kind of person who bothers to clean your nursery pots or fig pots and that nursery happened to have RKN in their soil (which you wouldn't know if the plant purchased isn't susceptible), then you used that dirty pot to scoop out your potting mix ... guess what?  You probably just infected your clean bag of topsoil with RKN.

Likewise, if you're one of those people who doesn't trash/recycle your pots of bleach-soak them after using (before re-use), if you ever have an RKN-infected plant in that pot, every subsequent plant is ripe for infection.  I never re-use pots from unknown sources and if I ever re-use my own pots, they get scrubbed to remove debris (in an area far away from my figs and yard), then they go into a storage tub with a 20% bleach solution for a couple of days.

I've been on the unfortunate end of RKN-infected figs from respected and/or well-known vendors on a couple of occasions.  I hate to say it, but I've pretty much stopped buying trees from others and focus primarily on cuttings now.  Any time a tree comes to me with soil, it gets bare-rooted and repotted immediately.  If it has any signs of RKN, it gets quarantined and airlayered, and the remaining rootball gets planted in our neighborhood community garden, which is already suffering pretty badly from RKN.  Our community garden currently has 5 fig trees, some pretty awesome varieties, too.
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well, my wife is happy,
she had actually mentioned a day or two before that she would like to burn those clothes.... just a t-shirt and track-pants
I burned the root balls.soaked the shovel I had been using in kerosene and sterilized the blade in the fire.
when I get chance for a bigger fire i will be cooking the soil that came with the plants. It has been lime-sulphured and oiled while it waits.
I soaked the area that i was repotting in with lime-sulphur dormant oil. as well as the side walks ...
this thread has got me thinking I should just burn the cuttings and everything combustible that I use in rooting too, just to be really really reaaaalllly safe.

Grant
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Update:
might get 2 plants out of the 10 or so cuttings I got off these trees. I am surprised even at that. The mud they were potted in was so wet one of the trees was hollowed out with rot. So 2 cuttings, which I buried and left to their own after most rotted in the rooting chamber, are poking up a few leaves.

Grant
z5b
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