Further Thoughts on Turface
A couple years back I wrote a post which became one of most viewed posts I’ve ever written. It was about Turface and similar soil ingredients like Oil-Dri and Profile, and my skepticism about their qualities as a bonsai soil ingredient, following 30 years of experience with many different soil types. The post was meant to […]
Holiday Bonsai Video-
…well, it’s not really about the holidays, but this video is in celebration of something… It’s Bonsai Empire‘s 15th year anniversary, and they cooked up the idea of having bonsai experts answer your questions in videos…there are nearly 30 of them, and every day this month a new one is being posted on YouTube. The question I received […]
The Difference Between Plant Hardiness and Chilling-
Chillin’ isn’t just for teenagers…plants need it too. Spelled a bit differently, though. For temperate plants, this is serious business. Without chilling, the plant won’t be able to grow in the spring. Without hardiness, the plant may be damaged by cold weather. Let’s break this down a bit. There are two things at work here. […]
Seasonal Care for Cold Weather…
Every year I try to wrap a blog post around the snarly issue of protecting our trees from cold. This year we’ll try a new approach, and take it in a few bite sized chunks, in a couple of blog posts. Firstly, we need to bear in mind that the top of a tree or […]
Juniper Live Veins and How They Move…
…or get smaller, to be more accurate. When we style a juniper, very often the live vein changes in size. It’s normally an adjustment to foliage loss, or branch loss, or even root loss, all which happen in the early years of initial work on a juniper. Most commonly, the sides of the vein will […]
When to Take Off Japanese Maple Leaves in the Fall?
This is a tangly question…there’s what’s best for the tree, and there’s what we might want to do because fall leaves are rather nice looking. For Japanese Maple, the fall color is often the most eye-catching thing in the yard. We want to see it for a while. But, if we wait until the leaves […]
