I cupped the first 4 cuttings on the 5th and haven't watered again since!  I keep them in a bin  have left the cover off the last 2 days - before that the cover has been off during the night.

So far no gnats!!  And no wilting.  Maybe less water is more!

water only as needed. way i do it, i use peat pot method. so when the peat pot is light color, it's time for little bit of water. then after the water, i leave the bin open since there will be more moisture around the cuttings. 

I use a moisture meter.

Jo Ann, Yes It seems less is more when it comes to watering young fig starts. I know when I first started rooting figs I killed a lot of them with overwatering, now I tent them with a plastic pag and water every couple weeks a very slight amount. 

Barry, that's what happened to the cuttings I tried to root last summer!  I stuck them in bags with potting mix  and some in straight perlite and it was too much moisture for them so they rotted - very disappointing.  This time I used sp moss in containers and waited for a goo amount of root growth before I potted.  So far it' is working - I'll see what happens as things progress.  I will try it this way for the next round of cuttings also.

The clear cups keep me from over watering since I have a tendency to hover, poke and prod.  I can see the moisture on side of the cup so I know it's not time to water

Very nice looking cuttings JoAnn.

Nice job JoAnn!!

Those are looking real good JoAnn. When I first started rooting a few seasons ago I found out that looks can be deceiving. Some potting mixes are darker even when dryer so I'm with Snag on using the moisture meter. Now according to some, you are not measuring moisture but one thing for sure, when there no water present it reads zero. When there is a little moisture it reads low on the scale and when it's wet it reads high on the scale. That is all a novice could hope for. I find that the mix is a little more moist than the meter shows because sometime the contact between the probe and the mix isn't perfect. For that reason I usually keep my cuttings at a very low level, like right about on the line between dry and moist. Also it takes very little water to raise the moisture level a bunch. Until I have roots crawling all over the cup I use a syringe to water and I do it through the holes in the side of the cup and not by pouring it in from the top. Until I move the cutting up to a 1 gallon pot I never put in enough water that it comes out the bottom of the cup, then your mix is way too wet.

Now that I've been rooting for a few seasons and have rooted and killed several hundred cuttings, I have a better feel of the moisture by looking at the mix in the cup, but I still use the meter when I have a doubt. For a novice I would greatly recommend using a meter for a season or two. Over watering and under watering are the main enemies of a new cutting. The meter is also handy for newly potted trees. Some times the pot seems moist but it's only the top that has the moisture. A meter lets you probe to the bottom where the roots are. A meter will also let you know if you have a mix that holds too much water, you will get a good reading at top of the mix but the bottom will make the needle jump all the way up or at least much higher. The bottom will remain wet even when the top is dry.

Just sharing a few things I've learn as the seasons have passed.
"gene"

Thanks Gene, I will put a moisture meter on my list.  I'm using an organic seed mix by Espoma (?), it has perlite in it,  but I mixed it 1/2 & 1/2 mix with perlite to lighten a bit more.  I haven't had any signs others have reported and I am grateful for that.  No brown spots or edges, no gnats, no wilting.  I am not going to say it is do to my extraordinary gardening abilities, I just don't want them to rot like they did last year, so I've been been cautious about watering.  I admit to being a somewhat lazy gardener so I have put the lid on the bin when I go to work and take it off when I get home - not going to time it to air out for an hour or two.

One of the cuttings is going to be to tall for the bin now that it is leafing out, so I am going to see how it does out of the container with no bag on it, if it starts looking wilted then I will put a bag over it.  Time will tell!

Jo-Ann, imagine the roots are straws and the leaves are a vacuum that sucks up water. Until the roots have spread out through the cup they cannot access most of the water in the mix directly until it migrates to them by capillary action. Until the leaves have grown larger and have bright light they will not pull water through the roots very hard. As temperatures and wind increase the air will take out moisture from the mix and also the leaves will suck up more so you will find that you need to water more often if conditions change. Until you get a moisture meter you can use chopstick, which will be dark on the end if there is still moisture in the mix, you can just leave it in and pull out to check. I judge by weight or wait until I see the first signs of water stress which is a softening of the leaves as they lose turgor pressure (that is a risky game sometimes if the air is dry).

I like to use a spray bottle on mist to water my cup medium. I hold it about an inch away and spay the surface. Usually about 5 pumps does it(granted all spray bottles give a different amount w/each pump). I am a novice as well when it comes to fig cuttings, but I start my vegetable transplants from seed every year and I do the same for them.

I also learned quick that it is indeed very easy to give too much water. The first time I watered a cutting I misted untill water came out the drain holes(luckily I only had one that needed watering at that time) and the next day I could tell I did more harm than good. I didn't kill it, but it's still recovering, I think that killed at least half of the roots on a cutting that had a rough start to begin with. I am so glad I had one batch of cuttings that I tried to root long before I got all my others, there's only one still standing but their sacrifice taught me a great deal and I guarantee all my others cuttings are greatful.

It's funny, you hear so much about how resiliant figs are, but cuttings can be fickle little buggers. I for one am not going to count any cuttings as a varietal success untill it is in a one gallon pot or bigger, outside, and being watered from the garden wand on the end of a hose like all my somewhat grown-up figs.

Misting It works for me SUCCESSFULLY. It has been approx a mont since I watered