Indoor Bonsai

Wintertime in the South is a time that my house fills with all the tropical plants from my bench.  Growing indoor bonsai can be a very rewarding experience especially if your new to bonsai and want to keep it close to you.  Unfortunately, it can be the most frustrating start to your bonsai career.  I started like many others have, with a juniper “mallsai”.  It was a gift from my lovely wife.  I made the classic bonsai beginner mistake and kept it inside for a couple of weeks.  After reading through many of the sites linked to on this site, I figured out that a juniper is for outdoors only.  My second purchase was a Ficus Microcarpa and a much better choice for indoor growing.  Since then, I have purchased several tropical bonsai that I have enjoyed taking care of.

Each year, I experiment with lighting conditions for these indoor bonsai, and this year is no different.  This year, I am trying a 24-inch fluorescent grow light for my smaller bonsai that was actually pretty cheap at Wal-Mart ($9.95).  My ficus gets it’s own 100-watt 6500K daylight CFL and my jade gets a 75 watt desk lamp that does a terrible job.  This seems to keep them barely happy for the winter months.  I really can’t wait for the summer months to put them back outside.  They seem much happier in the sunlight.  I fully intend to create a new setup before next year that would include 3 24-inch fluorescents of different color temperatures.  Apparently, when using florescent, you should try to vary the color temps to cover as much ground as possible.  From 2700K to 6500K.  Here’s some articles that I run across while doing my research:

Indoor Bonsai – As Difficult as You Make It

Fuku Bonsai

Growing Bonsai Indoors

Growing Indoor Plants with Success

Grow Lights (Wikipedia)

Ficus: Growing Indoors Under Light

Bonsai Bench

Bonsai Bench is a well put-together site that let’s users input care information for plant varieties used for bonsai. It’s an excellent concept and needs more user interaction to cover all the different varieties and zones that exist. If you have experience in bonsai and would like to contribute care information for a specific variety, I’d encourage you to do so. Hopefully, beginners will be able to use the site to find their tree in their zone and get specific information on the best times to prune and feed.

http://www.bonsaibench.com/

Air Layering Resources

Bonsai Bark did a nice series in the past couple of months on air-layering. If you have mature yard trees, a well-developed branch you need to remove, or would like the chance to start over with your nebari, then air-layering is definitely something to look into. Here’s the links:

A Simple Air-layering Technique Part 1
A Simple Air-layering Technique Part 2
A Simple Air-layering Technique Part 3

Here’s an explanation of the process and why it works over at EverGreen Garden Works:  What is Air Layering?

Some other resources:

Layering Techniques for Bonsai

Ground Layering at Bonsai4Me

Airlayering by the Texas Agriculture Extension Office

If you have any other resources about air layering and it’s relationship with bonsai, send me the links and I’ll add them to this post.

Fall is here

Highs this week are in the low 80′s signifying the end of the really hot temps that we’ve seen all summer here.  Some of my trees are slowly coming back to life with some fall growth like the boxwoods, junipers, and even some late growth on my crape myrtles.  Not all of my bonsai made it through the summer though, with this azalea struggling for the past 3 months and finally giving up the fight in the past month or so.  I have repotted trees in almost every month of the year, but got entirely too brave with this repot.  I repotted during the flowering period, put it in too shallow of a pot, and there was just too much of the root system above the soil line.  I started out with sphagnum moss covering the top part of the root system, but it kept that part too wet.   The other part stayed way too dry due to the soil being about 80% turface.  I guess you could call this a progression picture, but it’s certainly not progression in the right direction.It’s an understatement to say I still have much to learn about the art of bonsai.

I give you…the bonsai lineup

Finally got moved to a new house with a lot more room inside and out.  The yard is a blank slate of possibilities for planting and I’m really trying to ramp up my landscaping skills.  Hopefully, this will translate into a better yard, and some better collected bonsai specimens in the future.  My bonsai are not in the best of spots, but it will do for now.  After over 4 weeks of high temperatures being between 98-100 degrees, several are showing signs of severe stress.  The southern climate can be a tough one, but I’ve chosen trees that have proven themselves to be winners in this area.  It hasn’t been fun watering every single day without fail for over a month, but it will hopefully pay off with some prized bonsai specimens.  Here’s the lineup: