Last time I was in Asia, I brought back a large octagonal pot, the size, color, and type fits perfectly my blue spruce. When purchased from TaoBao, it was very nicely packed inside a wooden case, so I just brought it back as another checked-in luggage. Glad to say that it traveled half a globe and arrived safely without any damage.
Pot from TaoBao
The blue spruce’s buds has started to burst out, so it’s an excellent time to do the repot. When I took the tree out of the pot, there were a lot of fine roots since it was grown in a colander for a few years. It was so packed that water was having a difficult time penetrating the soil. I’m convinced that this repot will help revitalize the tree.
Blue Spruce Prior to Repotting
It’s no easy task repotting this tree. It’s way too heavy to lift up with one hand, so combing out the roots was very challenging. After wrestling the tree around for an hour or so, I was successful in breaking lose the very dense root ball, and repotted it into the new pot. I’ve also mixed half of the old soil into the new when repotting, this will ensure that some of the Mycorrhiza gets transferred into the new pot. I’m quite happy with this repot. One issue is that this tree now weighs a ton. I can only hope to move it after the tree has soaked up the moisture in the soil. After watering, it’s impossible to move by myself.
Last year, I gave the Blue Spruce a rough styling to lay out the placement of the major branches. This spring, I’m happy to see that the tree is recovering well, and putting out many new growths. It’s time to further refine the placement of the pads, and trim off some of the very dense foilage to make room for more ramification. After spending 6 hours of pruning and wiring, I’m quite happy with the result.
I was surprised to find that the weaker branches tend to be more brittle, and cracks/snaps easily when bending. I simply bend them back in place and have the wire hold it up in place. I hope the branches recovers and I don’t end up losing a few branches. But even if I do, they’re at the backside of the tree, and wouldn’t affect the overall design. These branches are the lower left corner of the aerial view below.
The blue spruce I acquired last year is doing very well, putting out a lot of healthy buds. As the buds are elongating and sap is running through the tree, I decided to style the tree now, hoping the sap will enable a speedy recovery from the stress of styling. It took a lot of elbow grease to get the thick branches in place, but after a few hours of wiring and twisting, I’ve finally got all the pads located at the places I want. After styling, it looks like both the front and back can be the front, I’ll decide later as to which one I’ll eventually go with.
For now, all pads are at its individual column, ensuring now overlap between each pad, which in turn ensures maximum light hits each of the pads. This tree will be in recovery mode for the rest of the year, and next year, I’ll be doing some minor pruning and maybe even wire some of the secondary and tertiary branches.
July 2018, TBS organized a nursery crawl at Glen Echo nursery. The nursery is located on a huge plot of land, with trees planted right in the ground. We drove around in a buggy, and I ended up purchasing two trees. They were a Hinoki Cypress and a Blue Spruce. Since it was the heat of summer, it wasn’t favorable to dig up the trees at that time. I had to come back for them.
Fast forward to Spring 2019, it’s the perfect time to dig up these trees, and move them into a pot to further develop the root ball for Bonsai. This weekend, I drove a long way to Glen Echo to pick up my trees, it took some muscles to get the trees into the car, mostly due to the clay soil that’s weighing down the trees. There wasn’t much soil stuck to the Hinoki, but the Blue Spruce had a lot of wet clay stuck to it.
These trees are not your typical straight up garden plants, so I got them for a pretty good deal of $50 CDN each. Over the next few years, I’ll be slowly bringing down the trees significantly to provide the illusion of an old tree. Even as they are now, the trunk is massive. It’ll be even more impressive after I reduce the height of the trees.
In additional to these two purchases, I also went to their “burn pile” to look for discarded trees. Usually trees that are damaged over the winter, are thrown away in the burn pile for disposal. To my pleasant surprise, I found this lovely Juniper in the heap. After cutting off some useless branches, I was able to carry out one more tree for free. The tree was split in the middle, leaving this very appealing deadwood. The trunk on this one is massive, even thicker than my thigh!
Since this one has been sitting outside in the open, bare rooted for a while, I decided to work on this one first. I got these 49cm (diameter) colanders from my local Korean grocery store, such that I can fit these trees in them.
With some minor root pruning, this tree fits perfectly into the colander. The air movement in the colander should help it quickly develop some roots. Other than some thick roots which didn’t have any feeder roots, I was surprised to find that there are significant amount of feeder roots at the base of the tree. I hope these would develop into a nice root ball in the coming years.
I then proceeded to pot up the Hinoki Cypress. The tree was pretty much already bare rooted, it’s just a matter of combing out the clay soil that stuck to the roots.
The roots were very compact. Looks like it came from a nursery stock. I didn’t do any work on the roots, since it felt like there was little roots to support a lot of foliage. I proceeded to pot this tree in a colander. I had a medium size colander that fits the root ball, so I put it in there rather than the huge colander I bought. This not only saves me some bonsai soil, but also ensure the roots don’t stay too wet. I plan to air layer much of the forking branches of this tree. Hopefully that will net me a Hinoki forest in the future.
The final tree to pot was the Blue Spruce. Since it came in a wire basket, I first have to saw the wire basket loose, then proceeded to remove the clay soil. There was a lot of soil, and not that many roots. I guess the roots was so dense and wet, the tree was having a difficult time putting out roots.
Potting it up in the large colander should help with the roots development. I’ve noticed a large root at the left of the above pictures, so I figured this tree will do well as a cascade/semi-cascade. Therefore, I potted it as such.
There you have it. All three trees potted up in a single day. I’m glad I spent the previous day sifting all those bonsai soil. I ended up using a bag plus some of bonsai soil. Now all that’s left is for these trees to strengthen up, and I’ll probably start working with them next spring, or the year after.
Bonsai Workshop 