Ball Bearing Principle

Anthony

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Question -
Anthony :
May I please ask about your glass marbles;
- Do you mix these in the substrate of all your trees or just for certain species?
- Is the purpose of the marbles simply to improve drainage? Or something else as well?
- Are there any drawbacks with using them? Do they get too hot in the sun etc.?

Answer-

@Ingvill ,

that was a test of what is known as the Ball Bearing Principle.
[ Introduced by Ms. Iris Cohen about 2010 on IBC, but I believe
the idea was already known and published in the 1980's ]

The idea is simple, the way glass marbles fit in a glass, is the optimum for
soil as drainage and the movement of 02 into the soil.

You can also use this idea with the Leca pebbles. The idea was illustrated
some years ago on IBC [ Internet Bonsai Club ] by Mrs. Yvonne Graebeck
from Denmark, who used the leca to grow Ficus bonsai.

There are several trees down here in marbles [ 16 mm ] and leca [ 8 mm approx.]
and they are doing fine.

All of our trees that can handle full sun are in full sun. However please note though
we have a greater exposure to sunlight, Trinidad is a cloudy, breezy island.
So much so, only April and May are registered for temperatures mostly around 32 deg.C
With the highest high being 34 deg.C.
Additionally the high is only for 30 to 10 minutes.

Rest of the year we average out to 32 by day and 23 deg,C at night with January to March/April
20 to 18 deg.c as our lows [ this year we hit a good many.]

It runs with our Dry Season [ No rain - Jan to May/June ] and Wet Season.

The above is a simple idea that works.
Which is why we only have three ingredients in our soil mil, most of the time only using
two ------ 5 mm silica based gravel and aged compost.
The compost holds the water and fertiliser in the water.
Our humidty runs from 80 % with rain to as low as 45 % with midday sun, but back up to
60 % in the Dry Season Evening/Night/Morning.
Heavy clay soils and lots of vegetation.

We use the compost at mx 3 parts to 7 parts inorganic [ by volume / shovels ]

Our inorganic cannot be broken by roots and thus, when we checked those at the
30 year old level, found only fine feeder roots.

Our 3rd ingredient is crushed fired eartheware brick at 5 mm [ hollow clay building block [
Will absorb water/.fertiliser and for thirsty trees, replaces a % of the gravel.
Good Day
Anthony
 

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Anthony

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Alexandra,

I not sure how that got posted :), the laptop got a malware attack,
looking up images at the image host for IBC.
Will have to look into that.

Yes, that is a 70 year old Sweet Lime [ Murraya p.]
Given as gift, by the neighbour up the road, about 10 houses away.
The guy's mum planted it.
He ask K to keep it in her memory.
Good Day
Anthony
 

Adair M

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Anthony, I agree that round particles are better than sharp particles. But, marbles are smooth, have little surface texture, do materials that are “roundish” but have lots of porasity provide even better oxygen exchange. A good example is pumice.
 

0soyoung

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Anthony, I agree that round particles are better than sharp particles.
I don't.

Though it is not intuitively obvious why round particles are actually worse. In @markyscott's soil physics he showed a plot for very small particles (fines) that showed porosity for randomly arrayed spherical grains is less than that of 'angular grains' . I believe that I've located a paper (actually a chapter from a book) which Scott relied upon. For grain sizes we are concerned with, it posits the following porosities for randomly ordered shapes:

sphere 0.399
cube 0.425
cylinder 0.429
disk 0.453

From which I conclude that grain shape really isn't important for porosity (less than 15% difference in porosity across the tabulated shapes), But, in so far as what shape is best, spherical substrate particles are the worst, not the best, for substrate porosity.i
 
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markyscott

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Yes - that’s the reference for the image I posted. The figure demonstrates that the porosity limit of uncompacted random packing for round grains is lower than that for angular grains. So lower porosity for rounder grains on average. However the average pore size for angular grains is smaller than for rounded grains. So even though angular grains have a bit higher porosity, they also have higher water saturation and lower air-filled porosity.
 

Adair M

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Yes - that’s the reference for the image I posted. The figure demonstrates that the porosity limit of uncompacted random packing for round grains is lower than that for angular grains. So lower porosity for rounder grains on average. However the average pore size for angular grains is smaller than for rounded grains. So even though angular grains have a bit higher porosity, they also have higher water saturation and lower air-filled porosity.
And, they tend to pack over time.
 

milehigh_7

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Is this tree an "orange jasmin" (Murraya paniculata)?

As a side note, I have a orange jasmine (Murraya paniculata) that is growing like a weed in 100% DE! I got it as a cutting about 3 months ago and it has way more than doubled in overall size as well as caliper. Still matchstick size but it seems to like what it's in.
 

Ingvill

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@Anthony thank you so much for taking the time to explain this thoroughly for me.
I've finally landed on a mix to use for deciduous trees and am now looking into options for pines/spruces/etc.
Something that won't degrade to mush during our harsh winters etc., which is why I was curious about your marbles.
We don't have all the products here that are available in the US. And we can't choose between different sizes on the stuff we actually do have, so my options are more limited.
So whenever someone talks about something that I haven't heard of, I'm curious if it's something that I can use here.
(Yvonne is a very lovely lady by the way, and I was so sad for her when she told me that her world famous ficuses had perished in a house fire in 2016 or 2017.)

Thank you all for your input in this matter :)
After spending some 6 months on this forum, I have to say that the wealth of knowledge among you guys, and your willingness to share it, is very impressive.
I've no idea what I would do without this place to be honest.

Bonsai substrate is overwhelming....just when you think you've gotten a tiny grasp on the subject, you realise that you really don't, lol.
 

Anthony

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Guys, all I can say is almost, 40 years down the road, the 5 mm silica based gravel,
has caused no deaths.
We keep repotting and finding only fine feeder roots.

When we examined the internals some years ago, nothing but fine feeder roots.

We do not bare root, nor do we have to.

All I can offer is experience gained over time.

As to spheres, all of the plants grow well in marbles, glass spheres and the hand rolled
stuff. Even the leca when sifted for fines produces good growing.

What I can tell you, is in the early days [ 80's ] bare rooting slowed down
the trees tremendously.
As we ran side by side tests.
Good Day
Anthony
 

Anthony

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Guys,

I took a re-read and I am not sure how anyone came up with the idea that marbles
are our soil ingredient.

They are test materials, as I have said time and again.
Good Day
Anthony
 

Bonsai Nut

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An interesting subject for physics nerds...

The perfect "close pack" of hard spheres in a fixed space is 74.04%. What this means is that even stacking spheres perfectly, there will still be almost 26% of "void space" in between and among the spheres.

But spheres aren't perfectly smooth, and don't in practice stack perfectly. Think about a garbage can full of marbles that were just randomly dumped in. Fill the can perfectly to the top. Then shake/vibrate the can. You will find that the marbles settle a little bit - due to the fact that the marbles weren't perfectly packed. Shake it some more... and they will settle some more - though not as much as the first time. Eventually you get to a point where shaking the can doesn't cause any additional settling. This point is known as a "random close pack" and is an important concept for freight and shipping since bulk products (like grains) will never settle perfectly / optimally, so there is always more void space than you would originally expect.

Believe it or not, a "random close pack" of marbles is somewhere around 64% - leaving somewhere around a third of the space void. Thinking about it slightly differently, random packing of marbles introduces somewhere around 10 percentage points of void space above the most optimal arrangement.

This does not change based on the size of the marbles - at least not when we're dealing with particles that are large enough to be visible.
 

Anthony

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Bnut,

I think the idea is about the spaces.
For if you are doing concrete, the idea is multi-sized particles
that will pack closely.

This is why we use no soft materials, that roots can smash
or have a chance of changing size by further decaying.

Additionally, the way compost ages, it glues itself together to
form particles the size of our 5 mm inorganic components.
Then as I understand it returns to the base materials of oxides..

We have observed the glued compost, so I can tell you that happens.

BUT our soils are also years tested , and have not killed anything.
In fact we aim for Lush / Health and then onto Design, with continued Lush/Health.
Good Day
Anthony



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