Josh88
Shohin
I have just returned to work after a 5 month hiatus to have surgery for a herniated disc in my neck. One of the only things that kept me sane during this time was being with and working on my trees. Having the time to spare I was able to repot over 40 trees this year, and I would like to use this thread to share what I have and will continue to learn from these experiences. Please keep this thread going by sharing what lessons you picked up repotting this year. To begin, last year was the first time I was given good instruction on repotting, and with the repots I did last year I entered this season with more confidence and deeper understanding working on roots than I ever have before. This year was the first time I would see the root systems of a lot of my trees, and I rarely got what I expected.
1. You can not have too many pots! I have been amassing a decent pot collection for the past few years, and not one of the trees I repotted went into the pot I had thought it would. Having a wide variety to choose from let’s you pick the pot that is right for the root system you uncover, rather than feeling you need to force the roots into a less then ideal home. I kept a large selection of nursery cans I could cut down to size, and this proved invaluable when the right size ceramic wasn’t there, especially since most of my trees are in development rather than refinement, and I wanted to provide room for roots to grow, but not so much room that I would have difficulty balancing water and oxygen between occupied and unoccupied substrate.
2. Give yourself lots of time. Every repot I did took longer than I expected, and our goal is to do a great job, not just to get the job done. Make sure you won’t be rushed toward the end of your work. You wouldn’t want your heart surgeon rushing through their work, and your trees deserve the same.
3. I need to learn more techniques for tying trees into their pot and supporting them. Since most of my trees are coming out of nursery soil or their collected native soil, I was usually not securing trees with dense root pads. I often had to improvise and try to come with something that would work for securing a tree with only a few little roots while not damaging what little I had. I will focus on learning new techniques for next years repots so I have a better bag of tricks.
4. Not all trees should be repotted as the buds swell. One of the first trees I repotted was a dwarf Sitka Spruce that had its buds swell very early. The repot went very well so far as I could tell, but I lost a few branches (fortunately I have gone slowly in pruning this tree and I still have a lot left to work with). At the last Bonsai Society of Portland meeting Scott Elser, an award winning bonsai artist, presented on his repotting techniques and shared some great info. Among his many great bits of info was the idea that with a deciduous repot, there is some leeway around timing. In the pic below, if the top of the arc is the moment buds begin to open, this is the time you can be the most aggressive, and you have time before and after when you can still do this work, but must be more cautious. With elongating species, such as hemlock, spruce, cedar, and fir, your repot should be done just as green begins to emerge from the buds for the best results. He said there is a lot less leeway before and after this. My guess is that if I had waited to repot my spruce until I saw green, I would have avoided the branch loss. Picture below is to help illustrate this idea.
He did not mention pines in this discussion, but I believe they fall more in line with deciduous in terms of bud swell to candle elongation. (Feel free to chime in on this!)
5. If I let the tree grow all season to bulk up, I will follow up with root work the following spring. There were a few trees, especially a root over rock trident, that I was letting run wild for the past two seasons to build the trunk. In this time some of the roots grew in less than ideal ways that will now take more time to correct. With the ROR trident this meant that there will be a gap between root and rock that I cannot correct, but if I had done root work last year as well, I could have placed it exactly where I would have liked it.
6. Problems don’t get easier to fix over time if left unchecked. As with that trident root, there were a number of trees I wish I had done root work on earlier in their lives. This is of course a natural part of learning this craft and we can’t go back in time, but I won’t make this mistake in the future. For deciduous trees that have vigorous root growth I will try alternating work each year between work on the canopy one year and root work the next.
7. Don’t wait to get trees into good soil! Not everything that I repotted went into a fully inorganic mix, but everything got into soil that will allow for a much better balance of water and oxygen. I collected a few vine maples last year that were mostly left in their collected clay, with pumice surrounding. The more pumice that was there, the more roots I had to work with. The trees left totally in clay had very little root mass, making securing them difficult, and likely meaning that they simply didn’t grow as well as they could have over the last year. Again, problems don’t fix themselves, and the earlier the tree has soil that promotes good growth in a container, the sooner we will reach our goals.
8. Learn the chopstick method of getting existing soil out of the root ball, and new soil back into the root mass. This was the technique that I learned from my mentor last year that really gave me the confidence to step deeper into repotting.
9. Sometimes things just don’t go the way you expect and we may or may not ever know why. One trident maple that I repotted as the buds swelled, that went as smoothly as any repot I’ve done, has shown no further signs of growth. No leaves, no nothing. If it doesn’t survive I’ll look at the roots again and see if I can find a reason. Sometimes despite our best work, things don’t go according to plan. That doesn’t mean you stop trying. More knowledge and more experience will hopefully bring more great results.
I hope some of this is helpful to people new to repotting, and I hope a lot more people offer what they’ve picked up this year. I’m sure I will learn a lot more from this experience as I watch each tree respond to the work done, and I will update this as time goes by and I have further realizations and deeper understanding of this process.
Thanks for reading and sharing.
Josh
1. You can not have too many pots! I have been amassing a decent pot collection for the past few years, and not one of the trees I repotted went into the pot I had thought it would. Having a wide variety to choose from let’s you pick the pot that is right for the root system you uncover, rather than feeling you need to force the roots into a less then ideal home. I kept a large selection of nursery cans I could cut down to size, and this proved invaluable when the right size ceramic wasn’t there, especially since most of my trees are in development rather than refinement, and I wanted to provide room for roots to grow, but not so much room that I would have difficulty balancing water and oxygen between occupied and unoccupied substrate.
2. Give yourself lots of time. Every repot I did took longer than I expected, and our goal is to do a great job, not just to get the job done. Make sure you won’t be rushed toward the end of your work. You wouldn’t want your heart surgeon rushing through their work, and your trees deserve the same.
3. I need to learn more techniques for tying trees into their pot and supporting them. Since most of my trees are coming out of nursery soil or their collected native soil, I was usually not securing trees with dense root pads. I often had to improvise and try to come with something that would work for securing a tree with only a few little roots while not damaging what little I had. I will focus on learning new techniques for next years repots so I have a better bag of tricks.
4. Not all trees should be repotted as the buds swell. One of the first trees I repotted was a dwarf Sitka Spruce that had its buds swell very early. The repot went very well so far as I could tell, but I lost a few branches (fortunately I have gone slowly in pruning this tree and I still have a lot left to work with). At the last Bonsai Society of Portland meeting Scott Elser, an award winning bonsai artist, presented on his repotting techniques and shared some great info. Among his many great bits of info was the idea that with a deciduous repot, there is some leeway around timing. In the pic below, if the top of the arc is the moment buds begin to open, this is the time you can be the most aggressive, and you have time before and after when you can still do this work, but must be more cautious. With elongating species, such as hemlock, spruce, cedar, and fir, your repot should be done just as green begins to emerge from the buds for the best results. He said there is a lot less leeway before and after this. My guess is that if I had waited to repot my spruce until I saw green, I would have avoided the branch loss. Picture below is to help illustrate this idea.
He did not mention pines in this discussion, but I believe they fall more in line with deciduous in terms of bud swell to candle elongation. (Feel free to chime in on this!)5. If I let the tree grow all season to bulk up, I will follow up with root work the following spring. There were a few trees, especially a root over rock trident, that I was letting run wild for the past two seasons to build the trunk. In this time some of the roots grew in less than ideal ways that will now take more time to correct. With the ROR trident this meant that there will be a gap between root and rock that I cannot correct, but if I had done root work last year as well, I could have placed it exactly where I would have liked it.
6. Problems don’t get easier to fix over time if left unchecked. As with that trident root, there were a number of trees I wish I had done root work on earlier in their lives. This is of course a natural part of learning this craft and we can’t go back in time, but I won’t make this mistake in the future. For deciduous trees that have vigorous root growth I will try alternating work each year between work on the canopy one year and root work the next.
7. Don’t wait to get trees into good soil! Not everything that I repotted went into a fully inorganic mix, but everything got into soil that will allow for a much better balance of water and oxygen. I collected a few vine maples last year that were mostly left in their collected clay, with pumice surrounding. The more pumice that was there, the more roots I had to work with. The trees left totally in clay had very little root mass, making securing them difficult, and likely meaning that they simply didn’t grow as well as they could have over the last year. Again, problems don’t fix themselves, and the earlier the tree has soil that promotes good growth in a container, the sooner we will reach our goals.
8. Learn the chopstick method of getting existing soil out of the root ball, and new soil back into the root mass. This was the technique that I learned from my mentor last year that really gave me the confidence to step deeper into repotting.
9. Sometimes things just don’t go the way you expect and we may or may not ever know why. One trident maple that I repotted as the buds swelled, that went as smoothly as any repot I’ve done, has shown no further signs of growth. No leaves, no nothing. If it doesn’t survive I’ll look at the roots again and see if I can find a reason. Sometimes despite our best work, things don’t go according to plan. That doesn’t mean you stop trying. More knowledge and more experience will hopefully bring more great results.
I hope some of this is helpful to people new to repotting, and I hope a lot more people offer what they’ve picked up this year. I’m sure I will learn a lot more from this experience as I watch each tree respond to the work done, and I will update this as time goes by and I have further realizations and deeper understanding of this process.
Thanks for reading and sharing.
Josh
