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Alkalinity and ph are not the same thing. Alkalinity is the ability to buffer acids...or it's ability to hold its ph level constant. Hard water may not be alkaline. A ph test will not reveal your alkalinity. High ph with high alkalinity is bad news. You would know by now if it was an...

Minoru Akiyama hands down. Minoru Akiyama.....he was head apprentice at Shunkaen for Kunio Kobayashi and was Peter Warrens teacher. He also was the youngest ever to win the Sakafu ten exhibition and prime ministers award for the juniper pictured below. I believe he was at Jim Doyle's a couple...

Do not forget about wind and dessication, which for a well developed specimen bonsai is a huge deal. Brent's article is a great no BS example of how solid science and years of experience are combined and articulated in a manner that anyone with a decent attention span can understand and apply...

Removing that much foliage in 4 months and repotting....into a huge box will not help the odds. Big box=wet soil, lack of foliage on a juniper= no roots, no roots= wet soil....west soil, no roots, minimal foliage equals dead juniper. What happened to the pine next to it? Those big boxes...

Chris Your pine looks great! I think that's the one we dug together in Geneva right? Don't eliminate anything yet. It's not in bad bonsai soil either as I recall it was pumice correct? Maybe turf ace. Either way its not in nursery soil so that's great. This has the makings of a great...

Cool stuff! Great composition too. Was the pot one of the old concrete pots produced by the monastery back in the "old" days?? Thanks for showing a piece of bonsai history. I believe Rodney was a student of E. Felton Jones. And part of a small group in Atlanta including Father Paul Borne...

Super nice tree Bob. A bit too much for me though as much as I would love to have something with so much potential. I think I'd sell 20-30 lesser trees in the $200 range before I let go of such a nice piece of material with the history this one has!! Cool tree, best of luck selling it.

No, I may have some plans for them down the road, plus they help with providing volume of blossoms. I'm not really concerned about any out of place branches....just having blooms, eventually some bark and a nice pot that compliments the tree. Thanks for commenting and the compliments. Neil

Sharing a flowering cherry Ko Jo no Mai that is now blooming. It should be in full bloom in a few days. The blossoms are pendulous and hang in pairs turning from Snow White to pink as they mature. I bought the tree 6-7 years ago bareroot from miniature plant kingdom for about $10.....some...

Understand your dilemma. What about this: Rain barrel, 1hp electric pump, outdoor electric timer, hose. I have a pump which cost me $70 and produces perfect pressure from a rain barrel. Set it up in 10 minutes and wait for rain. :)

Why not just water the old fashioned way....get a hose and a sprinkler with a timer...$40/ 10 minutes. The KISS principle always applies in bonsai...from fertilizer to soil to watering systems. There is genius in simplicity.

...to add, my pet peeve is to see a bonsai on display with 3 title patches of moss applied to a brain desert of plain old bonsai soil. Nothing natural or artistic about that. But, that's just my own preference.

I've had luck cultivating moss after repotting if I apply a thin layer of shredded white sphagnum moss after repotting and then pressing it firmly into place to ensure good contact. Some observations, the year I started doing this, I had much better root growth and roots that happily...

Absolutely not a prunus mume aka ume. I really would not worry or care much about what it is exactly....it's a tree I would not spend the Money on to find out whether it would live (or die)....let along what variety of prunus this is. Its a great example of what's wrong with bonsai in the...

All three trees came from the same collection. The white pine, according to the previous owner was purchased at Brussells some 15+ years ago. He maintained it in its un styled state for years. I've had the tree for about 4 years I think. It grows very slowly.

Mine does too, but it loses something in translation...it often creates some goofy sentences because of Japanese grammar and dual meanings of words. Anyway...his pictures and progressions are good enough that you can often tell exactly what's going on.

I just keep checking it from a book mark every day. It helps to have a kid who reads hiragana, katakana and some kanji....all of the Los are to different species...and within each species is a number of pages going back hundreds of posts so you can see true progressions over a few years..it's a...

Here's one from a chopped trunk as opposed to a seedling as in the other example.

I follow a very small handful of blogs, below are some photos from one of them..a japanese blogger and shohin grower. http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/fwnt1093/MYBLOG/yblog.html/ This is an outstanding blog. He updates almost daily across a wide variety of species. Hope you enjoy seeing how those...

Thanks...did not know he was retired. I did find his work online for sale however. Here are a few links....perhaps they are outdated though. http://www.peter-krebs.de/index.php?page=fertige-schalen-finished-pots http://www.peter-krebs.de/index.php?page=ovale-schalen---oval-pots

Below is a very nice Peter Krebs unglazed pot. It has a unique "pear skin" like surface and I believe has been burnished. The underside is a very well crafted Basho Haiku in German, and of course his signature little crawfish. 11.5" x 8" x 2" Price on his website for a similar pot is around...

Please follow the link below to view the new items for sale on my blog. http://broken-arrow-bonsai.blogspot.com/p/for-sale-items.html Two very nice larger Kishu shimpakus and a nice kokone Japanese White Pine. Also, if you are in the Indy area I have shohin graded Pumice. $25/40 Pound...

Great job. This is a nice little tree. What plans do you have for a pot. Or are you planning on keeping it in this one?

I bought a few shishigashira landscape trees a few years ago. I have been air layering them for shohin and for small forests. They're not the fastest growing tree around for sure and layers are a little more challenging then other maples. As bonsai they're tough to find. It's definitely not...