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Your figs trees look fantastic, Simon. Are those 20-gallon pots? I have four trees in Root Pouches, and I moved them up from 15 to 25-gallon pots this year because I was having trouble keeping up with their water requirements (now I can water every other day rather than every day). I have two others in 15-gallon plastic pots so that I can compare vigor, fruiting, etc., and there's no overlooking the fact that the trees in the fabric pots are much larger and more vigorous. I could really see the difference in the root systems when I repotted this spring, as well. The fabric pot trees had beautiful branched, fine root systems with no circling. By comparison, the root system of the one tree tree in plastic that I repotted was the usual mess of thick, circling, tangled roots. On the other hand, I'm not seeing a tremendous difference in the most important category -- fruit. For example, my most neglected tree (LSU Purple) in a plastic pot has a larger crop than all but one of my four trees in fabric, despite being half the size. Even the Hardy Chicago in plastic that I heavily pruned (canopy and root system) when I repotted this spring has a larger crop than two of the four in fabric pots. It's probably a little premature for me to draw any conclusions, especially since the fabric pot trees got a bump in root volume this year and so are likely expending more energy on vegetative growth. Nonetheless, the Hardy Chicago in plastic is in much the same situation given the heavy root pruning that it received, yet it still set a comparable crop to nearly all of the others. With all of that in mind, I'm actually considering going back to 15-gallon plastic pots for all of my trees -- they're easier to handle, the smaller size means they're easier to protect from critters (a big, big problem for me), and I'll spend less time watering.
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