I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season so far.
With a lot of life changes in the last 6 or so months including a new job and a move across state lines with a 2 year old my trees have had to take a real back seat to the rest of life lately. Thankfully, I had largely automated the day to day care process so other than everyone getting pretty overgrown all are well at this time. So far the collection has handled the move fine though I've yet to get a new proper setup going with any benches, everyone's on the ground in mulch for the winter which even though I'm now right on the border of 8A and 8B has been a bit chilly at night. We'll see come spring if any trees didn't take to the move into dormancy shuffle well. I have a huge Jade which as far as I know is flowering for the first time in the 3 years I've had it and the 15 or so total since it sat on a windowsill for many years at my in-laws so I must be doing something right!
Anywho, on to the subject of this post. As many of you have probably experienced, now having been quite into this practice for a few years my wider family has become aware of my love for the art of bonsai and I finally got that Christmas gift, the seed set from Amazon. It's quite funny how these are marketed, with beautiful, mature examples of each species as if by planting now you'll wind up with just such a tree by the end of the next growing season. Perhaps not that dramatic of a characterization but there is certainly no mention of it being likely to take 30-40 years to achieve such a tree from seed, particularly the tropical species that can't be grown in ground year round. All of that being said, the presentation and packaging for this particular set, which is the Garden Republic 8 species set, is impressive and feels of decent quality. You hear stories about planting what is supposed to be a black pine and it being a red maple with these things and I don't believe that is going to be the outcome here.
The set comes with Flame Tree (Delonix regia), Brazilian Rosewood (Jacaranda mimosifolia), Siberian Elm (Ulmus pumila), Colorado Blue Spruce (Picea pungens glauca), Crape Myrtle (Lagerstroemia Indica), JBP (Pinus thunbergii), Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), and Black Spruce (Picea Mariana).
There's a smattering of feedback on this company's products out there but I wasn't able to find much of anything comprehensive. The general consensus on the grow your own kits is IF it sprouts, and IF it is even the right species, than I hope you have a lot of time on your hands! Being in my mid 30's I hopefully have that aspect, so let's have some fun and actually see what this set is made of. I plan to document the progress of each species here and would like to A) assess the success rate of germination having had some modest success growing from seed thus far in my "career", B) determine if I am actually getting what I'm told I'm getting with these kits, and C) see what I can actually do with the trees! If I am successful with germination and initial growing I won't ultimately be able to keep all of them as I am limited by the better half on collection size
so maybe in a few years I'll be able to give some away to folks as well.
Well, there we have it. I'll post pics of the seeds themselves for some early ID verifications and start to stratify everything. There is some basic information on that provided on a master sheet and each individual seed packet but I'm going to do some research on each one to see if the sowing info is accurate.
I'll then keep this thread posted on progress and hopefully start to build some kind of useful profile on what we actually get with sets like this and whether or not they might actually be a good source for people at the right stage in their bonsai journey to be valuable. For what it's worth going into my 4th growing season I do think I'm a decent audience for this kind of thing if it is of quality, there are some potentially very interesting trees in here for me as up to this point it's been natives (Red Maple, Silver Maple, American Elm, Loblolly Pine), nursery usual suspects (Mugo Pine, DAS) and easily findable imports in my region (Crape Myrtle, Common Pear, Crab Apple).
With a lot of life changes in the last 6 or so months including a new job and a move across state lines with a 2 year old my trees have had to take a real back seat to the rest of life lately. Thankfully, I had largely automated the day to day care process so other than everyone getting pretty overgrown all are well at this time. So far the collection has handled the move fine though I've yet to get a new proper setup going with any benches, everyone's on the ground in mulch for the winter which even though I'm now right on the border of 8A and 8B has been a bit chilly at night. We'll see come spring if any trees didn't take to the move into dormancy shuffle well. I have a huge Jade which as far as I know is flowering for the first time in the 3 years I've had it and the 15 or so total since it sat on a windowsill for many years at my in-laws so I must be doing something right!
Anywho, on to the subject of this post. As many of you have probably experienced, now having been quite into this practice for a few years my wider family has become aware of my love for the art of bonsai and I finally got that Christmas gift, the seed set from Amazon. It's quite funny how these are marketed, with beautiful, mature examples of each species as if by planting now you'll wind up with just such a tree by the end of the next growing season. Perhaps not that dramatic of a characterization but there is certainly no mention of it being likely to take 30-40 years to achieve such a tree from seed, particularly the tropical species that can't be grown in ground year round. All of that being said, the presentation and packaging for this particular set, which is the Garden Republic 8 species set, is impressive and feels of decent quality. You hear stories about planting what is supposed to be a black pine and it being a red maple with these things and I don't believe that is going to be the outcome here.
The set comes with Flame Tree (Delonix regia), Brazilian Rosewood (Jacaranda mimosifolia), Siberian Elm (Ulmus pumila), Colorado Blue Spruce (Picea pungens glauca), Crape Myrtle (Lagerstroemia Indica), JBP (Pinus thunbergii), Dawn Redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), and Black Spruce (Picea Mariana).
There's a smattering of feedback on this company's products out there but I wasn't able to find much of anything comprehensive. The general consensus on the grow your own kits is IF it sprouts, and IF it is even the right species, than I hope you have a lot of time on your hands! Being in my mid 30's I hopefully have that aspect, so let's have some fun and actually see what this set is made of. I plan to document the progress of each species here and would like to A) assess the success rate of germination having had some modest success growing from seed thus far in my "career", B) determine if I am actually getting what I'm told I'm getting with these kits, and C) see what I can actually do with the trees! If I am successful with germination and initial growing I won't ultimately be able to keep all of them as I am limited by the better half on collection size
so maybe in a few years I'll be able to give some away to folks as well.Well, there we have it. I'll post pics of the seeds themselves for some early ID verifications and start to stratify everything. There is some basic information on that provided on a master sheet and each individual seed packet but I'm going to do some research on each one to see if the sowing info is accurate.
I'll then keep this thread posted on progress and hopefully start to build some kind of useful profile on what we actually get with sets like this and whether or not they might actually be a good source for people at the right stage in their bonsai journey to be valuable. For what it's worth going into my 4th growing season I do think I'm a decent audience for this kind of thing if it is of quality, there are some potentially very interesting trees in here for me as up to this point it's been natives (Red Maple, Silver Maple, American Elm, Loblolly Pine), nursery usual suspects (Mugo Pine, DAS) and easily findable imports in my region (Crape Myrtle, Common Pear, Crab Apple).
