[lol wow
this is what you get when you start writing in a word-processor and make a post over 3 sessions, at least I covered all the bases I could think of for you
Hope this helps get you going
]
Good morning all!
My wife and I are new to the bonzai hobby. We started with a dragon willow cutting (receiving a 40mm wide branch from Amazon) and just got what I believe is either a boxwood or tea tree from a local plant supplier. Our goals are to learn from several sources and work on our patience with these trees and grow some beautiful display trees from these starters.
Have a great day!
Aaron
Welcome to BN and to bOne-sai ("hard O" is, I think, how it'd be expressed- 2yrs in and I still say 'bonne-sai' by default if not careful ;P )
Glad to hear you found the hobby/art-form, it is one of the greatest niches I've found for an expressive-outlet as an adult, cannot see myself ever stopping!!!
I'm happy to hear you've found this hobby, it changed so much of how I lived when I found it but I kinda went obsessive with it lol, it sounds like you guys are planning to do a more minimalist approach? Are you planning to get more specimen or just wait a while on what you've got? For making bonsai you're kind of doing a "grow out long branches, then cut them back to very small branches, then work
some of the resultant growth after such cuts" (for deciduous material like what you've got), so in the most precise way of putting it, you really won't be practicing bonsai for a while but, instead, will be working to grow-out those trees
until the point they're ready to start being treated / worked as bonsai, this can be very annoying in the sense that you're talking about waiting a while before you can really do anything 'bonsai', so with that said I just want to mention / bring-up the concept of trunk-chopping, as it's what got me eagerly jumping-in to this hobby- trunk-chopping a mature specimen you found in-ground (or at a nursery) and then working that is fantastic for bonsai because you basically have a finished trunk&surface roots from the get-go and
then you can immediately start bonsai-work IE developing a canopy on that trunk/stump!
Regardless of how you approach things, welcome to the site & congrats on finding/starting-out in this art, it really is amazing you will likely have a blast if you keep at it!!!!
(I'd be remiss not to mention, based on your location, that bougainvilleas, bald cypress, crape myrtles, and ficus-species are all things that you can collect
massive specimen from, for me the best feeling is to be at some client's house / job and see an unkempt bougainvillea bush, or - especially - something with a thick trunk that's been haphazardly cut-back as if they're just not wanting it but didn't care to spend the time tearing it out, these are gold for me- "you don't like that? I'll happily dig it out for you!", actually if you see my most recent (2nd most recent?) thread you'll see an awesome large Ficus Benjamina I scored a couple weeks ago this way! Here's it in-ground, then an hour later, then the following morning, to illustrate how simple it is to get "much of the way 'there'" by collecting (or propagating large stuff) material instead of growing-out
This is what I seek:
, I hide my excitement and offer to remove it for them as they clearly aren't wanting it, get permission and go home with it
and get it ready to pot-up at my place (properly wrapping its root-ball for the ride & misting it anytime it's exposed!)
, and a short while later it's done
and I'm in a position where I've spent some hours, almost no $, and now have a trunk that, once I grow-out a new canopy on it, will just be awesome!!! There's a lot of things like this in the link in my signature to this post, sorry my galleries are all out-of-order right now but everything is there, countless examples ('progress albums') of big trees in FL that I collected and have been training towards bonsais, in fact at the end of the '19 growing-season I'm confident I'll have plenty of specimen that'll have graduated from the pre-bonsai stage to just 'bonsai' so pretty psyched on that
That ^ cannot be done on all species but for the ones I mentioned you can do this pretty simply, feel free to ask here or in other subs for help on timing/collection but yeah this lets you get material/stock that, once developed, will be insane compared to anything you could grow-out because you're starting-out so much further down the road, in your instance it'd be like taking your cuttings and growing them out to this
then starting the bonsai process - not that that's bad, different strokes / different folks and all that, I'd just be remiss not mentioning collecting/trunk-chopping to a fellow Floridian considering how darn easy it is to find & collect the species I'd mentioned
Again welcome to the hobby and site, never hesitate to post here there are great people to help you and also for more help I think you may find value in some/all of the following resources:
-
Walter Pall's must-read article on substrate/fertilizing/watering, it's a must-read IMO and will help people understand the serious difference between container-horticulture for bonsai compared to 'regular' (soil-based) container-horticulture. There's a TON more to be said than the article covers, as it's a basic/summary article, but IMO it's very important to truly 'get' every last morsel of info in there!! One thing that, if you want to aim for optimal conditions, one thing that isn't mentioned there is pH and pH makes a FAR bigger difference than most would just think by default (for instance, if you had an iron deficiency that caused iron chlorosis, you ID the problem (even get substrate-tests done and find low iron), but you then apply iron and it doesn't help- this is a situation I and others have been in, and it's because the pH was too-high, see plants like a slightly acidic medium to grow in (ie below 7/neutral), rainwater is in the 4's (4.7pH where I live, 4.2pH up in MA where I have some family), so when using relatively inert & pH-neutral substrate-components (ie a typical 'bonsai mix/substrate') with tap-water, you can find yourself in a situation where the pH is so far off that the roots can't function properly (or, a lesser problem but still an issue, is that they're functioning/growing but only at 50 or 75% of
what they could be!!! With how long it takes to even do something like develop a good canopy on an already-finished trunk, you want to maximize your vegetative growth rates and improper pH will be a major detriment to this!
-
AdamAskWhy's blog, by Adam Lavigne, is an absurdly great resource, he's been working trees here in FL for ages and that blog is the better part of a decade old, there is virtually unlimited resources there for us Floridian (or any tropical) enthusiasts! Plus he's an awesome guy and, if you're in FL, there's a half-decent chance that at some point he'll do a workshop at a club near you, he's done them twice at my local club (the only times I've ever gone to a club were when he was going!) and it was great!!
-
Reddit's Bonsai-Subreddit, this place is real solid **but**, of particular relevance for you (or anyone not 'advanced', really!) is how active, friendly & helpful their stickied Beginners' Thread is, I mean you'll get replies VERY quickly there and they've also got a Wiki in that subreddit with tons of info to check out
Youtubes that are specific to FL but great in and of themselves too (these are the channels for people)
- Jason Schley's channel
- OrlandoBonsai's channel
- BonsaiIligan's channel, although I should mention he's in Iligan (Phillippines)
however I've found his channel incredibly useful being that I collect tropicals and like out-of-the-box approaches, many of which he's taught me
He died in the past year sadly so RIP buddy
Well I think that's the most I can think of for now but will post again if I something comes to mind, anyways congrats on having found the art you will almost-certainly not be disappointed
so long as you give it a serious try ;D Good luck!!!!!
