It’s Time to Transplant my HUGE Fiddle Leaf Fig!

Do you want to learn how to transplant big indoor trees? Well, you've come to the right place. You can see behind me I have a big fiddle leaf fig that is in a 17 inch grow pot. It needs to get into a bigger pot and this summer time is the right time to transplant your big trees. You're going to need a few things if you want to transplant a big indoor tree, especially if you're doing it inside your home. You're going to need a tarp, an old sheet or something that can protect the floor. You're going to need a grow pot or a larger ceramic container that is at least, I'd say, 4 inches wider in diameter than the existing one. I say 4 inches or more because you're probably going to want to do this once and after you've transplanted your big indoor tree into a larger pot, you're probably not going to want to do it again. It's a one and done at this point, the way I look at it. The other thing you might need are some pruners, scissors, and more soil. Really good, well-draining soil, especially for fiddle leaf figs. Before you think about transplanting your fiddle leaf fig, think about cleaning off the leaves. I'll tell you why. This plant has been in this house well over two years and I can see it's accumulated a lot of dust, spider webs, cobwebs, and God knows what else. So I'm going to take a hose and I'm going to gently clean it because this is my opportunity before I put it back inside the house. You don't want to spray a hose inside the house and this makes it happen faster. You want to get underneath the leaves, spray it like that, and also you can do it on the lawn so you're not wasting the water. It is a hot summer day too, so I'm sure this fig is really happy to be outside. And spray. And I'm getting wet. Wet t-shirt. Not that you want to see that. I tell you, you don't. Look at this. All this new growth looks so shiny and pretty and there's some new growth up there. So now we've got the foliage pretty clean. You could take a towel and gently wipe off the excess dust. Go underneath the leaves like I said before. But this one's in pretty good shape. Just wanted to give it a good once over. Like I said earlier, you're going to need a container that's bigger than the existing one. A lot of people have said, how can that big tree live in this small pot? It's not that small. The pot's not that small. But we do want to give the roots the ability to reach out and fill in and get bigger. And once the roots start filling out, your tree can get larger. But I do want to talk about how to control the size of your fiddle leaf fig. And I'll do that after I do the transplanting. So now I'm going to remove the pot. It's time to remove the grow pot. And if you're alone like me doing it, you have to just do it slowly. Think about what you're doing. Luckily, this plant is not heavy. Because it's not watered, I was able to bring it outside and do all this work outside. But if it were watered, it would be a lot heavier. So you can see how the soil is pulling away from the sides of the grow pot. That's an indication that this plant is dry. It also tells me it wants to be in a different pot. So that's what we're going to do. This is what I do. I'm just going to show you what I do. I try to pull this plant out. These roots are going to get caught and I'm going to get frustrated. And I don't like being frustrated. So I'm going to cut this root. I'm going to cut this one. And then hopefully I've got some freedom to pull. You always want some freedom to pull. Nothing's stopping you. So here we go. Ready? One. Two. This is not that big of a deal, but I'm making it a big deal. Three. Pull. That was really easy. That was actually too easy. And I'm actually a little shocked here. But you'll notice that this plant is not root bound at all. You don't see any roots that are circling the pot. They're sticking out. I'll turn the whole thing around so you can see it. Look at that. Soil. There are healthy roots in there. I don't know what that was. So you might be thinking, well, why are you going to transplant it? I'm transplanting it because I already made it this far and I'm going to keep doing it. And I do want it to grow into this big container here. So nothing's going to stop me. But I just want to explain something too. I'm sorry. If this were root bound, if you had a lot of roots, you would take your pruners or your scissors and you gently pull the roots away. And I'll probably show you some footage. I have plenty of footage of root bound plants. Or you can even cut them. So you can cut them just a little bit. So the cut area, that's where new roots will start growing and shooting out and anchoring down this plant when it's in the new container. So this is another opportunity to look for pests, to look for any issues. And if you don't see anything, I mean you can't see all the pests. Some are microscopic. But if it looks pretty good to you, leave the soil and you're going to use new, fresh soil to backfill it with. So let's do that. Let's get it in this pot. You can see here, can you stay just for a second until I'm ready? Thank you. This is a bigger container. This is actually an outdoor container, but you can use outdoor containers inside as long as you have a large enough saucer to put underneath it. So I've backfilled it already with soil. If you want to come look at the soil. It's clean. It has perlite in it. It has mycorrhizae in it, which helps. It's a fungus that goes around the roots and helps them absorb nutrients. Really important thing to have in your potting soil. So I've got that going on and I'm just going to because it's not wet, I'm just going to make a little bit of a hole here. Stay close. I'm going to make a little bit of a hole and then I'm going to work this in. Ready? And now you can go back. White dirt. White and dirt. And slidey glasses. Use your knees. So now I am going to have to do a little bit of this. With my hands. With my hands. Push down a little bit. Get in here with my hands. Push down a little bit. I like to keep it a little bit on the top side. I don't want it to be too deep. This has to be at least two inches below the lip of the pot. I might have miscalculated. Push down. I did put some pots, some empty grow pots in the bottom of this pot so I didn't have to use so much soil. Just like trying to carry a big plant that's not potted. Can you imagine carrying a container? Yeah, this is a container. A potting container filled with soil and a giant plant. Nope. I can't. Push down. Cut. Like I said, things get dirty. Things get really messy. If you can transplant your big indoor trees outside, try to do it outside. If you have to do it inside, don't make a giant mess. Think about what you're doing. Now I've got the tree where I want it. Once I water it down, it's going to sink a little bit. It'll be about an inch below or two inches below the lip of this container, this pot. Now I'm going to water it in a little bit just to get all the soil that's in this layer wet. By the way, I'm not moving this today. This is staying outside for a couple of days in the shade just because I don't want to do it after this. I need help. I need a dolly or something. I'm watering this in and then I'm going to backfill it with soil. If for some reason you're not confident that your tree's going to stand up straight, you could put a stake in it at this point in time. You could use a piece of wood. I'd recommend a large piece of wood that's put into the pot all the way down to the bottom and tapped in tightly so it doesn't fall over. But trees tend to not fall over inside if they're not lopsided. Okay, let me just get the soil. I'm going to dump a bunch in and I want to come in and go a little closer to see a little tighter what I'm doing. Oh my gosh, I'm like making a mess. Meanwhile, dry soil really sticks to sweat very well. Okay, so we might have enough. Let me get this out. We might have enough. We might not. Probably not. I have other sources of soil. So I'm going to now just use my hands because getting your hands dirty feels really, really good. Just plant it like that. I'm going to water it in a little bit more. I'm doing it in too many stages. You can just dump a bunch of soil in and be done with it, but I kind of like feeling the dirt. It's going to settle. This is going to settle. All right, let me get a little bit more soil to top it off. I'm cheating. I ran out of soil. These planters have not been planted yet. So I'm going to steal some of this soil that's in these pots here for the sake of the fiddle leaf fig. And I'm going to get dirt everywhere. I am sweaty and my glasses keep falling off. I think I got too much, but sometimes too much is better than not enough. I'm going to just fill the top. Can I just mention one thing? One thing here. Don't wear a white shirt. Two things. And I forgot my train of thought. Don't use garden soil. If you run out like I did and you're looking around and you're thinking, I'll just take a couple scoops from the garden. Don't do it because you will be introducing you don't even know what into the soil and you bring it back in the house and you might have a bunch of critters, unidentifiable critters running around. So don't be tempted. Use sterile potting soil or extra from last year. That's not so sterile, but it's free. Now it's raining on me. Okay, so you can see what I've done. What I did, what I have done is that I made it a little bit of a mound because it's going to settle. I'm tapping it in to tighten it because it's a top heavy tree. I want to make sure that it doesn't fall over, even when it's outside. Even when it's inside. I just don't want it to fall over. And here's the original base of the plant right here. I need a little bit more soil. And I need a leaf. Come on, leaf blower. Clean up. Clean up. Clean up. Everybody clean up. That looks pretty good, right? That looks pretty good. So now I'm going to take this. I used the hose on myself first. It's so dirty. Rinse myself off. Rinse myself soft. I'm going to water this. I'm going to water it here. Where am I going to put this? It can't stay here. I'm going to put it over there when I'm done. But I'm going to water it right now. Water it in. And you have a nice new transplanted fiddle leaf fig. A really good recommendation I have is when you're transplanting your fiddle leaf fig, you want to add some fertilizer. You can add extra fertilizer to the soil. You can add slow release fertilizer. Or you can add more compost. This has a mycorrhizae in it, but you can put compost in there. And it'll just give this fiddle leaf fig the energy it needs to get even bigger, right? That's what you want. I think that's what you want. The other thing you can do too is add you can put a coating of moss or mulch or something on top of it. I don't have enough of the moss here. But it makes it look a lot nicer when you have some moss on top of it. So maybe I'll grab some more moss later. See, just look at this area. That looks better, right? It's pretty. I'm not looking at a bunch of dirt. Now this tree is about I'd say it's about 8 feet tall. Maybe even taller. It's probably about 9 feet tall. I don't really know. I have a measuring tape. But the issue is it might be too tall for this space. It might be too tall for the room at some point in time. And you might be thinking, well, I need to prune it back and I also want to encourage it to kind of grow outward. Like this particular branch is growing horizontally. So how do I do that with a fiddle leaf fig? This is a great time to do that. It's the middle of the summer. We can do one of three things to help this tree bush out and start growing more lateral growth on it, like horizontal growth. If I want to encourage a fiddle leaf fig, a ficus lorata, to start putting out growth this way, I can do two. This is the first thing I can do. It's called pinching. I can pinch this bud off here. It's the top bud. If I pinch that off, it sends the auxins, which are these chemicals that say, oops, you can't grow from the top anymore, so we're going to start putting out growth from the side. So it sends that reaction, a chemical reaction, down the stem of this fiddle leaf fig. So it's called pinching. The second one is just pruning. Pruning also sends that same response. So if I wanted to prune it, which I probably should prune it from the top. I need a ladder now. I should have done this before I planted it. I'm going to just prune this one. I'm going to prune this area. I'm going to prune this section off, just like that. It's a little bit shorter. And the great news is that I don't have to throw this away. I can propagate this. I can put this in water, and roots will shoot out, and I can have another fiddle leaf fig tree to transplant when it's giant. The third way is kind of brilliant. It's when you score you score above a node or where the leaf meets the stem, and you gouge out about a little bit of a notch. It's called notching. I just don't know what it's called. And you go like a third of the way into the stem, and that'll stop the flow of xylem, of phloem, whichever one it is. Do you remember which one it is? I don't. And it'll stop it there and say, hey, you should start growing from here. And then their buds, I forget the name of the buds, but their side buds will start to form new branches. So that's called notching. It's called pinching, pruning, or notching, or three ways you can get your fiddle leaf fig to fill in horizontally and stop it from growing vertically outgrowing its base. I'm a sweaty mess, but this fiddle leaf fig is not a mess. It's pretty happy. It's sitting high and pretty. It's in its new pot. It has a lot of space to grow. The one thing I want to mention in addition is that because I've exceeded the two inch rule when you're potting a plant, I've given it four extra inches in a diameter radius, whatever, I want to watch the watering. I don't want to overwater it because then it could actually damage the roots. So I'm going to wait until this is, I don't know how I'm going to know, but until I feel like the water has been dried, the soil has dried at least halfway down the pot, then I'll water it again. So I just want to just point that out. You're happy. I'm going to be happy after a shower. I hope you learned a little bit about how to transplant big trees, and I think maybe the next one I do might be indoors where it's a little bit more of a challenge. Thank you so much. Thank you for subscribing. 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