grow a bonsai tree

The growth has slowed since the sun hasn’t been as bright recently.
Otherwise my tree has been growing like mad. I actually had to trim off buds on the branches to slow it down.

Surprisingly I got three buds to form on the end of the long lower branch. Exactly what I wanted it to do so I can make a pad of leaves to balance the already thick foliage on the left hand side.

I went home for fall break this weekend, and got to see my trees at my future mother-in-law’s house. The maples are okay, but are already starting to lose their leaves.

The pine/cedary thing I found is doing really well, and grew almost two inches. Now it’s about 5 inches tall. I need to wire it down next year. Since it started out crooked and curled at the base, I think I will train its branches to spiral around in a cork screw and across a wide, flat pot. Maybe add some bleached dead wood to it or a nice rock feature to compliment its low proximity to the ground. I wasn’t sure what I was gonna do with it at first. But I kinda just let it grow and got a feel for it’s potential.

I have successfully repotted him this summer. Took a while for me to find an appropriate pot though.

The soil mixture was potting soil, sand, and compost (all I had). 10-20% sand, 50% potting soil and 30-40% compost. I just eyeballed it really.

The original pot I had to break, and it was easier than I thought. The glued on rocks were the fake fish tank ones. After chipping away the rocks, I unveiled an interesting root stucture.

I decided to raise up the tree, and expose the roots there were previously covered in glued rocks. I added a rock or two beneath it on one side for support because it didn’t have any roots to support it and training a root to sprout there at this phrase didn’t seem likely. The rocks prevented to the tree from being lopsided and added balance ton the look as a whole.

I have a tray that bonsai-san had been sitting on. I wired the pot to the tray so it wouldn’t slip. The tray was made of some light wood and was laced together with a basket weaving type of material. The holes in it were large enough I used them slip wire through and wire branches down.

Bonsai-san has almost doubled in size since my last post.
Sorry for the bad quality. My old cam broke. :(

I was browsing the supermarket the other day, and saw some avocados. I remembered as a kid we used to do a science experiment with the seed and sprout them in water. So I purchased one, and the seed is sitting in water on my window sill right now. I’ll take 4-6 weeks for it to germinate, hopefully it’s not a dud. Then I’ll have a new member to the bonsai family!
I also heard you can do similar things to other fruit seeds like mangos. If you consume these kinds of fruits on a regular basis, then you have free bonsai material in your hands.

Mr. Bonsai-san is still doing very well. He grew a bunch of leaves recently, and even grew some on it’s smallest weakest branch, to my surprise.

Mr. Bonsai-san is doing well. The days are getting longer and he’s popping leaves like crazy despite the crazy cold. I set a black piece of fabric under his pot to help absorb heat and keep the pot warm. I also just wired him down today to put some of his vigor to use.

I’m going to invest in some paper tape to wrap around my wires. It will make future wiring easier.

It’s interesting to note that our dorm floor is halfway underground and the snow plow pushed the snow up and over the top of our window. I had to dig some of it out, but it’s way too much snow for one girl to shovel alone. It wastes study time. I at least shoveled half of it gone.

Currently Bonsai-san is sitting on the kitchen window sill where the sun can get to him. He makes an interesting conversation piece, that’s for sure.

Recently it warmed up from 30°F to the 70°. It’ been like this the last 3 days. Mr. Bonsai-san thinks it’s summer! He’s growing new leaves. Also, he water consumption has been going up. I had to water him almost everyday.

To bad the temp is supposed to fall down this weekend. It’s kinda nice that he’s growing. It lifts my spirits. It’s been kinda gloomy here lately anyway.

It’s been a month or two since I tried to remove the wires.

So far he has turned out nicely. I have a better prespective of where his branches are now so I can make plans for this spring.

Yes, I should be up to speed now. I have a cheapy walmart digital camera/webcam. It should serve my purposes nicely. :)

I also have a few more photos on my profile. I’ve been have problems getting more than one pic to display in an entry.

I kinda like where he’s at on the window sill. It makes pretty pictures, even if my cam isn’t the greatest :)

Days are getting shorter and cooler.

Still watering every other day. I really wish I had a bucket to collect rain water. This faucet stuff is full of calcium and lime, but not near to the extent as my dorm last year.

I found out we have a pür water filter upstairs so I’m starting to water him with that. Now that most of the desposites are filtered out I start to mist him again (He was starting to get a bit dusty, so I wiped off the leaves with water and a soft cloth). Only problem with water filtration is much of the mineral content is filtered out as well. I still like to stick with rainwater.

Bonsai-san is still growing, just more slowly now. I can’t help to feel gloomy when I see him on the window sill on a overcast day. I thought about getting a grow light for winter but I figured it would be best to let him ride out the seasons like everything else. After all, we have seasons for a reason. To rest, so we many regenerate next season :)

I’m finding that growing a ficus bonsai really isn’t that much work. It’s good to have something to focus on each day and take your mind off everything else. He’s becoming like a family member to me in a way.

It’s times like this I really wish I have a digital camera.
Recentally I have rewired my tree. I looked at it from a distance, and realised that it was more than 2/3rd’s tall than the pot is was in and looked kinda out of balance.

Currentally Bonsai-san is in his orginal pot from walmart ( I will break him free next growing season). The the pot widens near the top. In order to lower the branches, I made a ring of wire under the lip of the pot and put one end of a wire on the branch I wanted to lower and fastened the other end on the wire ring on the pot. His branches aren’t that thick yet, so manipulating it was easy.

He is recovering from me pruning the end buds, and now is producing some new branches.

I also just moved back into college, and found a very neat looking rock I may want to plant him on some day. I’m considering putting him in large bowl and putting mulch around his trunk to produce some new/stronger aerial roots for this purpose.

Bonsai-san hardly fits all the requirements for a show tree. He still have a few years of training to get the thickness of the branches right. I have a small lower branch that really doesn’t want ot grow. I know how to make it grow, but I like it small the way it is, not to mention it’s a 1/4th of the tree height. Growing it large would look funny. It may become a sacrifical branch later. Also, most of the limbs come in pairs because it came from a cutting, so everything sprouted at the top. The apex isn’t above the trunk yet. I may just say “screw it” to some of the rules and just go with my artistic intuition. I’m pretty satisfied with his current shape (looks like he is a sort of upright and gently windswept). I just need to work on the branch thickening, root placement, then I can move on to defoliation to produce pads of foliage and smaller leaves (if you haven’t guessed it yet, he’s a ficus).

That’s what’s going on for now. He probabaly will remain somewhat dormant for the rest of the year. I can’t put him on the deck because some drunken college students may come along and notice the tree all wired down in a pot and think it would be something fun to throw. Despite those set back, I do have a very nice and large south facing window. That’s where he sits now. Since he isn’t in full growth mode now, I don’t need to water as often. The soil stays moist enough for every other day waterings.

Mr. Bonsai-san is still doing well. I keep him on the north side of the house so he doesn’t dry out too quicky (he’s still in that crappy rock glued pot. No ill effects though, he still grows well, and has no disease or died back leaves. I gradually prune him. Currently he on his second set of wires. This hot and humid weather we have been having has really brought out the best in him. I didn’t have a humidity tray. So I made one out of a styrofoam plate and put it under his pot (the pot has a bottom drainage piece so the water can’t get back in and root rot him. I mist him every time I go out the front door, and check how dry he is every morning. There’s a little plastic lable stick that I can pull in and out. I affectionally refer to it as his dip stick, lol. I may just keep it for that purpose when I repot next year.

At my boyfriend’s house I have a crap load of maples now. The biggest one I dug up at the beginning of spring. It was growing between slabs of broken concrete and being strangled by a gaint dandilion. I chop sticked the dandilion roots out and potted him. He’s turning out rather nicely and doubled in size since I potted. I’m wiring him to swing low off to the side and to be in a wide shallow pot. I repotted recently but didn’t root prune. He’s a red maple and the leaves started to turn red at the bottom and die back some. He was in a plastic pot, now he’s in a ceramic pot, about an inch large in diameter than before. Next time I will root prune and plant him in a flatter pot to develop a better nebari. Well I’m HOPING to find a bigger flatter pot by then, otherwise I may have to train him in a styrofoam crate lid.

I have three trees I got from the dam. I used to have four. I had a small maple, a native spruce (they usually grow in ditches and such, but a neat little trees) and two oaks. One of the oaks got dug up by a bothersome 13 lined chipmunk. They aren’t seen very often in these parts, and boyfriend watched as it dug up the tree thinking it was cute Xo. Luckily I found it soon enough and repotted. No ill effects. I wired them both down into the pot so they couldn’t be pulled out. It seemed the chipmunk has a refined pallete, and only tender oak roots would satisfy it. Sadly it still dug up the oak. But this time it happened to the the other oak. I couldn’t get there soon enough and it died :(. The surviving oak I placed on top of a larger pot mixed in with some pansies to hide it. So far it’s working. It still hasn’t grown much. Probably not at all. No new leaves or anything.

The little maple and spruce haven’t grown in leaps and bounds, They had more of the native soil in their containers, and less of the potting mix and peat moss. Both are about the same height, 3.5 inches or so. I have them started with some light wires, and am training them to grow in a more exagerated direction, close to what they have been growing in the first place. The spruce had a little web of catepillar eggs in it and I took it out and pulled and browned needles with a pair of tweezers. It looks quite nice now, a little pretty thing. My little maple finally grew a second tier of leaves, but they are now full of tiny holes! There’s some stupid catepillars running around eating. I ended up spraying all my tree leaves with a mixture of water and baking soda (I also sprayed any surrounding porch foliage, because I know that’s where it came from). Actually, I will post the recipe along with others in my next post. They are all natural, and supposed to be effective. We will see how it works.

My boyfriend’s mom found alot of small red maples at his grandmother’s house when gardening, she brought them over to his house and I transplanted them into pots and gave them a good watering. There’s like … 10 or so of them? I planted two trees together because they wrapped around one another at the base. I could have separated them easily, the soil was loose enough, but they looked pretty good together. Of course after I planted them it rained for three days straight! They started turning red after that…. they are finally coming out of it though, and are thriving. I just hope my boyfriend’s mom doensn’t try to water them too much when I am away, they are still pretty moist.

I would have grown some bonsai from seed, but I started way after the winter seed stratification season, and spring growing season. If you find a native tree seeding in your yard that will most likely die or get mowed over, I recommend potting it (depends on the variety, pest trees wouldn’t be a good idea). Most bonsai as supposed to be let out doors like a normal tree with extra help with the watering and fertizing since it’s in a pot. Of course there is always the exception of tropical trees or trees not native to your area. My native spruce is a weedy shrubby tree, and with some effort it will look really nice :)