Ideas needed to Enhance my Bonsai Club

[Bill S]

Well to reverse engineer what you are saying Will and Irene is to teach it all to yourself. I'm not saying to learn it all under class and lab style, with a teacher standing over your shoulder to see if you read last nights assignment, or if you will cut off all the foliage of your JBP to induce back budding. Somewhere along the line its good to watch someone else do it correctly, someone to show new/different techniques, tough to do online and from books. Not impossible obviously, but think of the mistakes you save. Many times some of the best demo/learning is from a club member giving a talk on thier experiances so it doesnt have to be high priced artists traveling form around the world.

I also understand that at some point that the club becomes more of something you do, more than something you need, at that point it's giving back, and being social, Al can verify that.

I do understand though that sometimes you just have to take the bull by the horns to learn, I am like that enough, and now I watch my little one get pissed and tell me, I will do it MYSELF Daddy.

Probably one of those things that there is no correct answer, you need to figure it out for yourself what works well for you and your club.

 

[irene_b]

My club does just the "Social shyt", and when I want instructions I bring in someone...
It has been like this since I first joined, and yes I have helped many noobs.
Irene

 

[Chris Johnston]

If our local club were to meet one evening a week, I could actually attend since I work every Saturday and probably always will.

 

[Attila Soos]

At the club I used to go (when I still had time for such things), the official starting time was 7:00 PM.
But people were encouraged to come earlier, bring their trees, and get informal advice from 5:00 to 7:00. So, there were two hours allocated for of informal, unstructured meeting. This was the third Saturday of every month.

I usually stayed for the informal session and left as soon as the official speaker started his demo at 7:00.

 

[Mark]

"I usually stayed for the informal session and left as soon as the official speaker started his demo."

Why?

 

[Smoke]

I belong to three tree clubs and two Suiseki clubs.

Of the tree clubs, I am president of one, ( 5th year). It is a Japanese club and has a formal Sensei. He comes once a month and the club meeting is convention workshop style. The usual twice around the room gig with Sensei tending to each student with ideas or actual hands on help. Do the work and second pass Sensei will let you know if you did good or use it for yearly raffle at club exhibit. Sensei does 6 demo's a year for the club on special techniques and does big demo for the club exhibit with demo tree highlight of the raffle. We earn about 2K a year on the raffle.

In second club I am Vice president (7th year). This club is much more informal. We have Ted Matson four times a year. In the past we had Kenji Miyata four times a year but club funds were lower due to economics so we dropped Kenji and went with Ted full time. Show and tell is popular as well as quarterly displays in the meeting room. We bring trees, set displays and disect the displays for what works and what doesn't. We have found that introducing newer members to display informaly at club meetings will lesson the culture shock of getting newer members to display trees each year in the exhibit. Old timers do demos on an informal basis, and mostly we work on trees in the meetings. The club tries to conduct a buying trip to a local nursery with bonsai material, of which we have several, and help new people pick out material and why. We have a xmas dinner with live auction, this is the blast of each year with dinner, booze and trees. The auctioneer belting out numbers and him yelling at me, "Al your bidding against yourself again stupid!" What fun, I overpay every year.

The third club I just belong to. 26 years so far. Been there a long time. Very informal, Ted Matson four times a year also. I get Ted Matson 8 times a year. Almost full time student. Workshop formatt, meetings held at college botany classroom. Very nice for meetings with overhead projectors, computer slide shows and heat! Club member demo's about 6 times a year or more.

All three have their shortcomings but the wealth of information that can be gleened from club involvement is immeasurable. Club life is only what you are willing to make of it. If you wish to not go then by all means don't go to meetings. I wouldn't want members there that didn't find the meetings informational. I haven't learned all there is about bonsai and I always learn something. Even if it's a tidbit about nursery plants somewhere or where the best buy on wire is or where one can buy a can of Japanese fertilizer cakes. Thats the hot ticket around these parts right now. Some kind of fertilizer shortage from Japan. Hell I can steer them to a huge pile of BS right here. lol.

Get involved in your local club. If there is something you wish to see that you haven't seen, be that person and do that thing. So what, your trial dies. At least you tried and maybe you'll learn something in the process and all can learn something new. If I hadn't chopped three twelve foot tall tridents down to 2 inches I wouldn't have three killer trees to play with today. Take your project each month to the club and talk about it. I did that for an entire year in 2005. My demo at each club meeting was how I handled those tridents thru the growout period.

Cheers, Al

 

[Attila Soos]

"I usually stayed for the informal session and left as soon as the official speaker started his demo."

Why?

Because most of these demos are geared towards beginners: basic pruning, repotting, wiring, etc. For an experienced person, there are better ways to spend those two hours.

On the other hand, there are those rare occasions when an artist is invited to do critiques, or talk about design issues, displays, and other advanced topics. Now that is worthwhile watching, for everybody.

 

[Jrbrown4]

Thanks

Thanks again everyone. We have our transition meeting tonight so I will bring some of the ideas to our members and let you know how it goes

 

[greerhw]

Sinse we're in the middle of nowhere, bonsai related. It is too expensive for us to bring a headliner here for a workshop or meeting, so our programs are usually by the more experenced members. One thing now, most of the better known masters and artists are starting to make videos, Andy Smith has a couple of excellent videos, one working on Ponderosa and one on collecting trees. Boon has a couple of excellent videos, one on repotting and one of JBP decandling I believe, these make great programs, each about one hour long. Meetings don't have to be boring, unless you make them so. I've been president of our club for two years, sometimes I get with the program chairman and come up with different ideas, one meeting I made copies of pictures of 25 trees and we paired off into teams of two and we had to identify the trees, three prizes were awarded, everyone had a good time. Use your head and make the meetings more enjoyable. Our show and tell usually brings out about five trees, take pictures of your trees progression, so people can see the changes from last year. Get off your ass and help out instead of complaining.


keep it green,
Harry