What did you do today? Show us Pic Required

- Applied lime sulphur to a neglected small Itoigawa. I am planning to wire and shape it next month.

- In order to decide about the final design, inspected a yamadori Austrian Pine for two hours from different angles, making sketches (with the quality of an 7 year old) . There is an apartment building nearby and neighbours can see me, so if anyone was watching, they probably thought that I am totally crazy. At last, I decided to wire a few branches to see whether I can get away without grafting (and I think I can). Decided about the front, which branches to remove / jin and the inclination angle of the tree. Probably the soil is mixed with original growing material. So I will just keep it alive at the moment, repot at next spring and see how it responds.

Finally renewed an airlayer which did not work on a Japanese maple, but using substrate instead of spagnum moss this time, though I kept some moss at the top to keep moisture.

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My kids took me to Chanticleer garden in Wayne, PA. Beautiful place. I've been before, but they change plantings often and keep it immaculate.
Did not take too many pics... and not of flowers...
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And they let me root through their back yard and flower beds.
Got a dawn redwood seedling, Japanese maple seedling from the neighbor's trees and a bunch of silver maples from who nows where...
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What a cool little ficus! Im on the lookout for a tiger bark next...
I have one. Honestly im not too happy with it. It just refuses to back bud to get denser foliage so far despite feeding and pruning it back as odd as that seems. It just extends the last leaf left on the branch instead of giving me more foliage behind it.

I might try just hard cutting it back next spring and if it lives, it lives, if not I don't consider it big loss at this point. It might be they are better for bigger bonsai than I'm trying to do with it idk.

Willow leaf seems to be more agreeable with back budding.
 
Do you remove all growing tips from the tree when you try to get it to backbud? That is key.
I don't remember how I pruned it last year but I just did that to it today, cut off all emerging buds at the end of every branch but left a leaf or two.
 
Today I bought about 20 bonsai pots for €50 on the local classifieds website. Varying sizes from very tiny to 2 absolutely huge pots.
I think it was a good deal but that's not why I jumped on them. I don't have any pots yet, been growing a bunch of stuff in training pots and baskets of sorts for a while now, but nothing worthy of a nice pot yet. I've been eyeballing several really nice pots locally but some cost more for one than I paid for this lot.
It was about time to get some cheap beginner pots so this deal came just at the right time.
They are all unmarked pots and nearly all are made of cheap materials and are of inferior quality. They are banged up and have chips and dents but that's how I like them to be honest.

Despite being cheap pots some of them are kinda nice (when choosing the right angle hehe). Coincidentally the nicest of the bunch (in my opinion) is the only Japanese pot.

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My neighbor is Chinese and although I think they're kinda hideous he will go wild when he sees these two big pots:

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Repotted my Dwarf Schefflera banyan attempt into a smaller pot. If it lives I'll work the branches more. After seeing what Nigel Saunders does to his Schefflera I'm not really worried about it. :) I still have a long way to go before it's finished but I wanted to put it in a smaller pot to slow it down.

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The hardest part was identifying and removing the surface roots.

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The base started to get flimsy, and that made it difficult to pick up properly, This is the last picture I took of working the roots but they got another hour of separating the aerial roots and removing surface roots.

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The front.

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Back

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Got an Arakawa JM on my trip to Texas that had about a 2’ leader on it. Decided to trim it down to slow its growth and spread the wealth to the rest of the branching. Removed the top 4 inches and then took two 6” cuttings. For the cutting mix I used 40% perlite, 40% vermiculite and 20% peat moss. 6” pots with domes. The pot on the right actually has two cuttings in it, but I only expect the tall one will root. The other little cutting is still soft wood and not the right time of year for it. It will run out of energy before it can developed roots. That was that top 4” I cut off.

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