When to Begin Fertilizing in Spring?
It’s likely not a good impulse to want to lasso students to slow down their spring fertilizing, but I admit to the urge. And yet I get it: the trees are growing, so we reach for the fertilizer by instinct. The problem with this is that by the end of summer everything, even old geriatric […]
Bonsai Heresy’s Chapter 25 and Last Summer Pruning Date
Chapter 25 of Bonsai Heresy is about the mistaken notions of avoiding nitrogen in our fall fertilizing by using 0-10-10. The problem it is trying to correct, frost damage from still soft shoots, is more often a mis-timed pruning in the summer. This is easiest to see in deciduous trees, which may be pruned in […]
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 […]
The Hype over 0-10-10
This is one of our grand leaps down the rabbit hole…0-10-10 fertilizer for bonsai. It has very limited uses, and yet it’s often touted as THE fertilizer for all bonsai in the fall. The 0-10-10 fertilizer is essentially for maximizing blooms, or perhaps, when you plant a perennial, you might get its roots better established […]
How not to fertilize…
Last year I wrote a post about fertilizing, Refine your fertilizing this year! I wanted to expand on that and offer a few more notes, since, after all, it’s a brand new year for dung related issues- Blogging is really a bit assumption-ridden, because we make one simple statement as if it’s unconnected to a million […]
More on Growing Wisteria-
Most of the time our hand-wringing about wisteria bonsai is when an otherwise happy tree won’t bloom. They can be obstinate and willful. Last year I wrote a post about a few basic wisteria concepts, Why Won’t My Wisteria Bloom? While those ideas might help getting some plants to bloom, when your tree gets very mature, be […]
Refine your fertilizing this year!
Nothing like a dogmatic title for good dramatics, right? I should add an ‘Or Else!’ but I don’t have the heart for it. Nevertheless, we should be duly chastised for broadcasting fertilizer as if it were an unmitigated good. Whatever that guy is using should obviously be applied with discretion- For bonsai, generally we don’t […]
Michael Hagedorn 