this is part of a long term project on over wintering plants in a refrigerator or somethign similar my long term goal is to get a solar panel array to power a 1000 watt metal halide bulb and attpemt to grow bonsai trees that need a winter indoors in a closed temprature controlled hydroponic system, my progress is slow due to lack of funding and time due to the millions of parts we have on order in the family owned and operated factory I work in with my father.
I read something somewhere that deciduous trees can survive up to a full year or two without a winter dormancy, this summer will discover if I mis read or mis interperated that information.
this fall I tested weather or not plants need colder weather than the discribed 50-32 degrees F for dormancy and they seemed to not need more than two months in the fridge at 40-25 degrees F to come out of dormancy.
There is a thread in this forum titled "Hello I Recently"
http://bonsainut.com/forums/showthread.php?9934-Hello-I-recently
that basically turned into me bullishly arguing with most active forum members, has some pictures of me just starting out, list of links I have saved in my email.
I have basically sense then been using this forum to document my progress on the experiment in case A my hard drive crashes and B I lose my email address.
I've done a lot of reading sense I started and fear I may have muddled some of the information and the only way to test it was to go out and do it so this is basically a progress report for the approximate 6 month marker.
but sense I started growing plants I found that the best way to fertilize is 1/4 strength fert every watering during the active growing season, I was using half strength every other watering and was getting poor results, I switch to the quarter strength method and had an explosion of growth, some of my trunk grew by four fold, I also have some plants 4 of them actually that where grown in natural light all winter (an oak a weeping willow a pine of some sort and some decidous tree that grows pine cone looking seed pods when it's adult) those grew the most, the oak under artificial light made it 5 months befor it died, the oak that was under natural light seems to be going into a stress dormancy the pine is growing more slowly now that it's been active for 6+ months aswell as the pinecone broad leaf tree. the weeping willow started to slow down but I hadn't noticed that my wire holding it up was cutting off the circulation to the crown (where the growth had stopped) wich I fixed yesterday.
all these plants have made it thru 3 spider mite infestations 2 indoors, one chemical burn from pesticides, a dormancy in the fridge and being ripped out of the ground like weeds with the exception of the cuttings and seedlings (the oaks the pine and the pine cone where all pulledu p like weeds along with a total of ten trees that only 3 survived) on top of being grown indoors under less than recomended light.
hope you can make some sense of this lol I'm kinda all over the place while I tend the machine and write out these posts.
