Coming along, a ton of work to do still, did some wiring, and going to wait for it to root a bit better before I carve more out of it, and wire further.

This past week I was in Gardena briefly, and had been reading about a nursery out there that other bonsai artists had been raving about. Chikugo-En nursery is nicely tucked between buildings off Western, and I was greeted by an extra large Akita, which didn’t seem happy to see any strangers.

Here are some photos, they man (whom I forgot his name) seemed pretty friendly, and as I spoke with him found out that many of his junipers are grafted, especially the Shimpaku’s. This nursery has the biggest selection of shimpaku’s I have ever seen.

Photos below!

So I picked up this Bougainvillea at a local Bonsai nursery, and can’t wait to get it moving into a nice bonsai. However, I am still undecided. Thoughts?

I have been wanting to try my hand for a while at air layering, especially a nice upright from the sequoia/redwood world. I had picked up this sequoia a few weeks ago and repotted it as it was pretty well root bound. After a few weeks of letting it recover, I decided to take a few cutting from the point of where I was going to air layer. Funny enough, there was another post just made on another blog a few weeks ago, about air layering an older redwood.

I wanted to leave the other branches alone that are below the air layer so I wouldn’t shock the tree too much, although I will probably be air layering those later as well since they are thicker.

Found this gem recently in a local nursery. I was snooping around the nursery for some older material, and wasn’t finding much, then I happen to stumble upon this. I can’t quite determine the age, and believe it’s a California Juniper (maybe). However it had a great trunk, need some nebari work, but a lot of potential. I see a lot of deadwood-ing, potentially in my future.

First, it needed some serious cleaning, pretty messy as you can tell, and it must have been sitting on some sort of pine, probably a black pine, for years.

Lots of great wood to work with, first step is to remove all of the old bark, and expose the more red colored wood underneath.

A bit nicer of a cleaning around the trunk, but still tons of work to do, and not to mention to find the nice roots below, which are completely buried in hard clay, in later photos you can of course tell this juniper hadn’t been repotted/touched in years.

Some possible nebari beginning to peak out, it took me almost 30 minutes just to scrape
that little section away with a chopstick. I will more than likely do more work on this later, however, I did cut down the tree’s rootball to begin training towards a bonsai pot down the road, and didn’t want to shock the juniper too much more. Although it is late Spring here in Southern California, the sun here has a tendency to smack junipers pretty hard. Of course, as old as this one is, I would like it to survive

I cut down its original nursery pot, and broke down the rootball, however with the heavy main portion largely intact. Added some bonsai soil in the pot as well, and watered it well. As you can see there were 3 branches that just were not working. They had a ton of dry foliage, and the spacing of the good branches wouldn’t have been very pleasing to the eye. I decided to remove after them, and you will have to just wait to see my plans for them later. I left a lot of the good foliage on the other side however, that way, again the tree won’t go into too much shock, and it gets a haircut to at least look half way decent. This of course is a long term project and it will probably be a while until I start applying any wiring to it, as I am letting it recover in a shadier spot of our yard.

Currently sitting in our yard. Til next time!

As I am starting out in bonsai, I have yet to try my hand at a grouping. So decided to try a juniper grouping with some Foemina’s that I picked up. We are in Southern California, and it hasn’t been extremely hot here consistently yet, so repotting wouldn’t be the worse thing to do right now, especially if I kept them in the shade.

The Junipers pictured have been plucked a bit, but not wired, you will see the wiring below (which I could have done a cleaner job of. The pot I liked as it wasn’t too shallow, and allowed me some error room with the roots.

Now to just wait for foliage to come back in the proper places, and once the roots take hold throughout the pot, I will wire, and maybe play with a few small pieces of deadwood.

It’s been pretty hot here in Southern California this past week with temps touching the low 90s. Keeping maples shaded is pretty important in our weather, and I mist them daily. Would love to connect to more maple folks and here your stories! Below are photos of some of the maples I have (need to look for and add an Aureum):

Acer Palmatum seedlings

Katsura & Orange Dream

Tamukeyama

Red Dragon

Waterfall

Crimson Queen

Seiryu

Orange Dream

Decided to have some fun trying my hand at growing Maple seeds (this should be interesting). I have recently picked up a few Orangeola, Bloodgood, Aoyagi, and Trident Maple seeds.

Of course I also have my green maples that I started not too long ago, and they are currently gaining their 3rd set of leaves.

Currently in Southern California, it is beginning to get warmer here, albeit we are still having lots of sporadic cool weather and rain.

This means major protection will need to be given to prevent these little ones from burning. Especially after lots of my younger Pine seedlings last year go torched when they were accidentally left inside of a smaller green house that didn’t have adequate shade.

My dad has also got into the maple swing, and he noticed tons of seeds on his red maple. We decided to try as we can still cold stratify and plant for this season, as SoCal’s warm weather sticks around much longer than most.

Let’s hope we get a lot of sprouts from these.

Junipers can be dangerous, especially if you can be somewhat allergic to their prickly ways. I was smart enough to wear along shirt and gloves, however I didn’t keep my sleeves rolled down. Smart move. This past weekend my parents wanted to remove their old Junipers that they have had planted in their garden for about 15 years. Of course, my dad and I being bonsai enthusiasts saw this as a cool opportunity to get some practice in with some older material.

Before we dug out these black widow infested plants, we paid a visit to the San Gabriel Nursery to have a look around. I ended picking up a flowering almond, a nice white Japanese wisteria my dad found, and small Sweet Gum, which is getting stuck into a bonsai training pot.

This nursery is pretty nice, it has been around for a while and has a pretty nice selection. It also carries the very hard to find Yoshino Cherry tree, and will be a target of mine soon.

They also have a pretty large amount of your normal nursery materials from veggies, to azaleas, to some pretty nice orchids. However, the elder age of their bonsai are pretty nice. Some are even not for sale, and only on display, and look pretty well aged.

A few favorites were the rafts, and multiple forest displays that they had, from maples, foeminas, and shimpaku’s, they were nicely well done, and prices on them weren’t that bad. I was also trying to peak at their maples to see if I can find the ever elusive (to me at least) fireglow maple around, as they had mentioned in a newsletter that it was. Unfortunately, we were unable to find it, and will have to wait another day.

A quick stop was taken at the House Of Bonsai, mostly to pick up soil material and a quick peek at their pre bonsai material as well. I ended up picking up a 1 year old Katsura maple, as it was fairly priced. They have a huge selection of Japanese Plum Trees that have been reduced to bonsai size (drool), although no longer flowering, you can picture how nice these look when in bloom.

They have a pretty wide selection of bonsai, especially pines and junipers, and I don’t really mean just the junipers that are just a few years old. The owners are super knowledgeable, and they even give classes on certain nights. Check their Facebook page to find out their calendar of events, and explanations of what to do if you are interested in attending.

Back to digging up junipers. We ended up pulling up 5 junipers in all, with humongous roots that stretched a few feet across, and looked liked (and felt like) rebar poles when removing. My forearms took a beating, but it was exciting enough to ignore the pricks and itches that were being inflicted.

Thankfully, although we didn’t see them at first, I wasn’t attacked by any of the black widows that began to crawl out (at least I don’t think I did, perhaps I will be lucky enough to gain super powers from it if so?)

There were a couple that were super nice, and just needed a lot of clean up work to begin with, others that would have to be trained even longer.  A particular one that I really can’t wait to see what my dad does with, has a trunk that is at least 2.5 inches thick, and super heavy.

He will have fun. The potted ones in the photos are the ones that I brought home, and will be left to recover their root systems before I do anything with them.

Happy that it looks like there will be a few that will turn out to be pretty nice bonsai later. I also posted more photos of the random material, etc around the house, as well as the Green Maple seeds I planted, and are now sprouting their second set of leaves.

It will be nice to see the black pine seeds begin to sprout, as they were planted this weekend, and the last batch that I had were burned pretty badly last Summer. Fortunately, out of 40 of them, 3 survived, and are now beginning to sprout more needles.

Set up a Flickr account with some old photos and newer photos. I will take more soon once we get out of the cold and rainy weather. Flickr account can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/trayculture

Japanese Maples have become a big interest for me. Currently I own 4.
1. Red Maple – being used for bonsai
2. Red Maple, repotted into a 5 gallon pot
3. Waterfall Maple – an awesome maple, thats just starting to open up.
4. Red Dragon Maple – purchased from a local nursery by my dad as a gift. So awesome.

I am still looking forward to adding a few more, hopefully an older emperor, orange dream, Aureum and Seiryu; just to name a few

I had put some Green Japanese Maple seeds, Chinese Elm seeds, and Yoshino Cherry seeds through a period of stratification, and planted them about 2 weeks ago. So far in the past few days I have had 11 maples come up, and 7 chinese elm sprouts. Unforunately, no cherry sprouts as of yet, although I know they can take a while, I normally don’t have much luck with them.

Took a trip this past weekend to a nursery I had been wanting to go to in San Gabriel, CA. San Gabriel Nursery was pretty nice, a vast variety of bonsai as well, which even left her jaw on the ground. They have a website at: http://www.sgnursery.com

More updates soon.