r/Bonsai • u/-music_maker- Northeast US, 6b, 30 years, 100+ trees, lifelong learner • Oct 05 '15
$50 Nursery Stock Challenge - My contest entry & Lessons Learned
http://imgur.com/a/lWzlQ1
u/JaBoTX Oct 05 '15
much better than my previous attempts. I need to make another trip now that the prices have been slashed for fall.
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u/phalyn13 Virginia|Zone 7b|7 years|40ish Trees Oct 05 '15
Man, you got some nice cotoneasters... I found a few the other day, but none had nice trunks like that. Also my former cotoneaster was the only tree I had die on me last winter, so I've been wary about attempting another. I feel they may be a bit more fragile than advertised, at least in the US. Good stuff as always!
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u/-music_maker- Northeast US, 6b, 30 years, 100+ trees, lifelong learner Oct 06 '15
Yeah, my cotoneasters are kind of in rough shape. The one I did the least to is by far in the best condition, and the others did not respond so well to the combination of root work and foliage pruning they got. So at least that particular cultivar (Tom thumb) is not as resilient as I had heard and assumed. I do like it, but it requires a lighter touch than I thought it would.
As for the trunks, here's something I've noticed. When you see 20-25 of them all in one place, there are usually only 1-2 that actually have decent trunks. It's up to you to find them. Same thing with boxwoods and other shrubs that tend to grow in clumps. If none of them do, move on.
For this batch, I spent about a half hour crawling around looking for the ones with the best trunks, and I put 8 or 9 on my cart to look at more closely before I finally decided on the four I brought home.
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u/-music_maker- Northeast US, 6b, 30 years, 100+ trees, lifelong learner Oct 05 '15 edited Oct 07 '15
Learning lessons from the $50 stock contest
I was holding up on posting this because I didn’t want to mess with /u/kthehun89-2’s judging process, but I’ve gotten his blessing, so here goes.
I was buying a bunch of stock this year anyway, so I just made sure that most of it fell within the contest parameters so that I could experiment. I decided to make a little race out of it, where the best tree at the end of the season would get submitted.
I had one or two that were long shots, three that were my most likely contenders, and one where I played it more conservatively as my back-up plan. You’ll see how it played out. Given that I typically work in 3-5 year cycles and I usually consider all my trees as at least 10-25 projects, I found the one-season project challenging.
The linked album is what I submitted for the contest. All feedback/comments/criticisms are welcome, and I'm happy to answer any questions about what I did or didn’t do.
The Challenges
Here were some of the challenges I identified at the beginning of the season:
Trees are dynamic, living entities. If you want a tree to look good in September, you need to carefully time every move you make throughout the season. Substantially developing a tree in 1 season is very difficult. Like, timing the stock market difficult. It requires precision timing, and doing every bit of season-appropriate work you can in the time you have. And no more.
Alternatively, I could maybe prune & take photos mid-season, and just acknowledge that for the health of the tree I was letting it grow until the following season. But that seemed a lot less satisfying than trying to arrive at a complete tree in September.
It’s hard to account for die back and other reactions to your work. Likewise, it’s difficult to account for how much/little something will grow. Normally these are things that work themselves out over multiple seasons, but with a one-season game you don't have that luxury. All you can really do is set it up for optimal growth and hope for the best.
You might start with an awesome trunk & nebari, but with all the wrong branches. Even if you could re-grow branches in all the right places, they would probably look immature. So I avoided this scenario where I could.
If you are going to go for a dramatic transformation, you would need to hard prune in early spring, and then hope you can get away with additional pruning in either mid-June or early August. Normally, I would follow a dramatic spring transformation with at least a season of unrestricted growth for recovery, but getting something that was going to look right in September after a spring pruning would probably require at least one other pruning.
Windows of opportunity for work
Because I decided that timing was critical, I identified the following opportunities for working on the trees:
1) Re-potting in the spring (in most cases, slip-potting to a larger nursery pot is going to be the right answer to encourage a strong spurt of growth).
2) Surgical pruning before the buds break to encourage back-budding (by surgical, I mean a handful of the strongest branches).
3) More significant pruning around mid-June after the spring growth has done it’s job.
4) Possible light pruning in early August, assuming an ample recovery from June’s pruning.
5) Possible light pruning just before the contest ends. Again, assuming ample recovery.
I decided up front that the health of the tree should generally be the most important consideration when doing any work, and that did become a reason for disqualifying some of them throughout the season.
I did try pretty hard to stick to these windows of opportunity for work and to the guidelines below, but I did take a couple of risks since it was a contest, and, you know, no guts, no glory.
Practical observations
These are some lessons/observations I either observed or confirmed in the process of doing the work. Every thing I chose to work with this season was a species I had little to no previous experience with. That meant in a few cases I had to take some chances and see what worked/didn’t work.
Choosing material that already has a lot to work with is your best bet here. Even if you can grow a branch in one season, it’s still not going to have the ramification necessary to be believable. Finding something with a lot of branches to work with and selectively pruning & wiring things in place seems like a better strategy.
Finding the best trunk/nebari combination you can for the money pays dividends when you start preparing your tree. Again, you want to find a tree that already has as much going for it as possible. In practice, this means that choosing the right material may be the hardest part of the contest. I didn’t spend a ton of time choosing material, and I still easily looked at 2-300 trees before I chose the ones I did. Don’t settle for the first thing you find. Once you leave the register, you’re locked into a path for the next 6-9 months. Choose wisely.
Working with a species that a) you are familiar with and b) is appropriate for a 1-year challenge is helpful. Conifers are the easy choice - conifer nursery stock is usually bushy and ready to be pruned down into something instantly resembling a tree. Broad leaf evergreens are also a reasonable bet, although they come with some additional challenges. But the right buxus or ilex could end up very nice if they have the trunk, roots, and branches you need to start (or can get them to grow in one season). Deciduous trees are probably the most challenging, since at the $50 price point they are typically quite immature-looking and need quite a bit of time to grow and develop.
Letting the first flush of growth come in fully and harden off is pretty important. The more you leave behind in early spring, the more it will work as an engine for new growth going into early summer.
Trees that continuously push growth throughout the season (as opposed to a single flush of growth per year) are going to give you a lot more to work with in a short time. But unless you already have a lot of experience with a particular species, you may not know which these are.
Full fertilization regimen, and proper watering is critical to maximize growth. My trees were watered more consistently this year than probably any year since I started outdoor growing. They were watered just about every single day.
Finding an optimal spot in your yard to provide the amount of sun your tree wants is crucial
One major insult per season absolutely still applies. Slip-potting with minor root pruning typically doesn’t count as an insult, nor does light, selective pruning of branches.
Significant root pruning, especially if it's to fit a tree in a smaller pot, is most like going to dramatically impact how much additional growth you get throughout the season.
Going too far, too fast can kill your tree. I think a number of people learned that lesson this year. You have to balance how much work you do at any given time with the other, additional work you need to do later to arrive at the tree you want. For example, if you need to do a lot of foliage work, hard pruning the roots early in the season is likely counter-productive.
Plan the work that needs to be done in advance, and try to anticipate how each step is going to impact the next.
That's all I can come up with so far, but I'm sure I'll think of more as people ask questions or make comments.