Bonsai Nut's personal pine entry thread

Bonsai Nut

Nuttier than your average Nut
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Location
Charlotte area, North Carolina
USDA Zone
8a
Posting about the finish line - at least for now. Here is the tree that I submitted for the contest. Though I am not sure it will be the best tree long-term out of all of my candidates, it is the one that photographed best once I cut all the needles in half :)

In summary here are a few comments of the last six years:

(1) I had a really strong first two years, but then had to move across the country. All of my JBP were bare-rooted and shipped in the back of a U-Haul in plastic totes. I was not able to pot them up until April, and I think I may have lost about a year of development in all of the stress.

(2) The problem that I think hurt me the most is that when I potted the trees in April, 2020, I was not able to use pumice - because none is readily available here in NC. So I potted all my JBP in an organic mix consisting of mostly pine bark.

(3) We had to move again in 2022, at which point half of my remaining JBP seedlings went into the ground, while the other half followed us to a rental house. The seedlings in the ground are doing surprisingly well, and you may see some of them in the future. The seedlings that moved with me to the rental house I should have replanted into inorganic mix. I had a lot of problems with roots as the organic mix continued to break down, and the trees lost much of their vigor and strength. I went from 22 seedlings to 8 as many weakened and died. I knew better, but I have a lot going on in my life right now and simply couldn't give them the time they deserved.

I had a great time with the contest - and am looking forward to seeing other peoples' trees continue to develop over the years!

bnut.jpg

Let me also add... another thing this contest forced me to do was to work on taking better bonsai photos. This photo was relatively good (in my opinion) considering it was taken in a cold garage in December and I was freezing, LOL. Believe it or not the lighting is the light in the ceiling of my garage with no supplemental lighting.

The base is a black piece of fabric that I placed over my work bench.

The backdrop is a black portable photo backdrop that I originally bought for my daughter when she was taking an online college class and didn't want a busy background on her videos. It has a hoop-like internal frame on the rim so that the backdrop springs open, but can be folded away for storage. Considering it had been in storage for 7 years, it was relatively wrinkle-free. The backdrop is sitting on the floor of my garage and is held upright by a vise on my workbench that is off-camera.

The slab is a redwood slab I've had for years.

The pot was made by @ForrestW . I bought it on 12/2/23 specifically for use in this contest :) You can see more of Rob's work on this thread:

 
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