WNC Bonsai
Omono
This pair of trees got their first pots this week. The small one is a slippery elm that I picked up at the WNC Bonsai Expo last fall. Although it was in a standard nursery pot, fortunately the fellow I bought it from had placed a circle of 1/2” plywood directly under the roots. So when I slipped it out of the pot there was a nice mat of roots all in the upper couple inches and some stragglers that had grown down below the plywood circle. This made it very easy to repot without disturbing a lot of roots or having to hack off a large circling root or tap root.
The second one is a tall bald cypress (~32”) that came from a nursery in Miss. It too was in a nursery pot and reportedly had been for 3 years. Unfortunately there was no plywood circle, tile, or other restricting device. Consequently when I slipped it out of the pot I had to deal with a bunch of gnarly thick roots that circled the bottom of the pot and were connected to a thick tap too that had not been cut when it was potted up.
This certainly was a good lesson in the value of tiles or similar devices to restrict root growth to a relatively flat zone near the soil surface. I am really glad now that I used a similar approach when I potted up some trident seedlings and used old CDs under them to restrict root growth and cut off the tap root as it expanded. This stuff really works!
The second one is a tall bald cypress (~32”) that came from a nursery in Miss. It too was in a nursery pot and reportedly had been for 3 years. Unfortunately there was no plywood circle, tile, or other restricting device. Consequently when I slipped it out of the pot I had to deal with a bunch of gnarly thick roots that circled the bottom of the pot and were connected to a thick tap too that had not been cut when it was potted up.
This certainly was a good lesson in the value of tiles or similar devices to restrict root growth to a relatively flat zone near the soil surface. I am really glad now that I used a similar approach when I potted up some trident seedlings and used old CDs under them to restrict root growth and cut off the tap root as it expanded. This stuff really works!
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