Turn Japanese Maple Seedlings into a Clump Style Bonsai, Part 1 | Bonsai-U

part

icularly large. so I'm going to put both of them next to each other here and in the future we can let one of these growths become the main trunk, but at least I want to bring them closer together and those will be our starting point here now. While you're doing this, you want to make sure you get the basics down. as close together as possible if they touch it is even better, if not it is not so important, because as they thicken over time they will actually grow together and fuse, but if you can get them together from the first year, that amount will later You no longer have to mark the base of each of these

seedlings

to really stick and adhere and fuse, so I won't worry about taking sandpaper or grafting knife or something and exposing that layer of cambium. to make them edit here over time, naturally, they'll just graft and essentially fuse together naturally on their own, so now that we have them, it doesn't really matter how we build the rest. this, but I'm going to follow a radial pattern for the most

part

and again I'm going to work with these guys to get them as close as possible here at the base and if we need to cut off some of the roots that are sticking out, we can, but if we remove most of the soil here and we're just dealing with

seedlings

, you really shouldn't have to cut off too many of those roots, a little more soil here that we could potentially take out. although okay, so the radial surface roots in the larger one here there are some spaces between those surface roots, so I'm going to stick some of the smaller seedlings through those spaces again so they're nice and closed and again We're trying to build this kind of radial pattern around those larger trunks, there are larger seedlings, but there's really not much rhyme or reason to this overall, it's just a matter of putting them together and trying to fuse them together or attach them at the base.

From the beginning, well, now that we have them all very close together here at the base, what we are going to do is join them at the base so that they do not fall apart in the pot or during the transplant. process here in a few minutes or over the course of the next year now there are a couple of ways to attach them, one would be using a zip tie like this, this is a decent option although it does tend to bite into the base of the trees. a little bit now a better option in my opinion is to use a piece of rubber and a piece of aluminum or aluminum wire depending on where you are in the world now the reason I like to use the rubber here and the aluminum wire is so it doesn't actually bite into the base of the tree, it's much less likely to bite than the zip tie, so today we're going to use this around the base of the plant, now that I cut a piece of rubber out here. that's much longer than the actual size around the base here when we actually stitch this together, the reason is I want this to overlap here at the end.

I don't want the wire to touch those little new seedlings or the trunks of the seedlings at the base, I just want contact with the rubber, so this piece of rubber is a little bit longer than the actual circumference here of the base of these seedlings, so the first thing we're going to do is stick the aluminum wire through the rubber and this is size 2.5 aluminum, which will hold up pretty well, it's about the right size for seedlings of this size, if you're working with seedlings, they are a little smaller, you can use 1.5 mil or 2 mil, but for these Since they are a little bigger, we will use these two hit points here.

Now what I want to do is make sure we place this right at the base, right above the nebari, so we can get those trunks will merge right at the base of the trees here again, let's take this and rotate it at the end right here and then I'm going to use the ginning pliers here to really twist this and twist it and I'm right-handed so I always go clockwise when I'm doing a twist which applies to this type of thing or if I'm securing a tree and a pot with the wire or if I'm using a wire as a tension wire for For example, always pull and twist clockwise, it's much easier that way, so it will be nice and tight right at the base, now it won't You'll want to squeeze it so hard that it ends up biting into the trunks or seedlings. and potentially kill them, but you want it tight enough that those guys will stay together and stick together for the next growing season, so what I'm going to do here is just shorten it so it looks a little cleaner.

Okay, and that looks pretty good right now. The reason I leave this extra long here is because again we left that rubber wrapped inside the cable. If I cut it, it's probably going to spiral and fall apart, so I'm going to leave this extra long, it looks ugly, but it doesn't really matter, this will all be buried underground anyway for the next year, so that's it. takes us to the next step in this process and that is to plant this in a container, so let's do that next, okay, so the next step in the process here is to plant our new little cluster right here.

I recommend you use something that drains quickly and provides plenty of aeration or oxygen penetration to the root system. We will get much faster adhesion of the trunks, much faster thickening and better development in general, so for the first pot what I am going to use here is a net pot or a strainer, this is often also called pond basket. These will be dropped into ponds and plants will be planted there to grow to the surface of the water. In any case, they work very well. Here you can get them at various points of sale on the Internet, so I'm going to plant. this in a very free draining soil mix and the soil mix I use is a kelp mix from Japan, it has a particle size of about 3/16 of an inch and is 50% akadama, 25% cue which is sand of river and when I say river sand, I am not again referring to very fine cobble sand, the river sand will have a particle size of 3/16 of an inch and then 25% lava rock, this will give us a mixture very fast and free draining that will allow the roots to search.

For that water that we put out, we do it over and over again, you're going to get very rapid plant growth for the first few years, so I'm going to fill this up and we're going to put the tree in. on top of this here, okay, so I filled the basket a little more than half, so we're going to put this down here and this is a nice flat bottom for this here and we're actually going to bury it. in the pot, so I'm not too worried about tying this up, but I'm going to move it down a little bit to make sure that if there are any little air pockets under the root system, we get rid of them because that could potentially kill the plant if we have air pockets in there now, after moving this down, I'm just going to fan the nebari on the surface a little bit so it's a little bit radial that way again, we get that nice kind. of lateral movement with the roots and an extension of the base of the tree and then the final step here is just filling this with the same seaweed mixture on the top here and I'm going to work it in a little bit with a toothpick.

Well, that's enough to put together the initial setup for a Cappadocia

style

bonsai

clump

. Now the next step here is going to be to take this out and obviously water it until all the water

turn

s from brown to clear and then we're going to put it in the bank and in about a week or two weeks we'll start fertilizing this tree next year. I'm just going to let this tree run all year and then in the second year I'll take this tree to see if the roots have fused and then we'll start making selections in terms of trunk heights and potentially putting wire on the trunks as well. trunks to give them a little extra movement and fan them out to make them look a little more aesthetically pleasing now what I want to do next is take a tree that I made last year in the same way, we're going to take it out of the pot and see if those trunks have been merged into the base part and then I'll show you the next step in the development process, so let's move on to the next one.

Well, this is one of those projects we put together last year. It's actually a Trident

maple

, but it was made in a very similar way to the last tree, the only difference with this one is that we actually used the flange here on the base and the really cool thing about this is that we tightened it up so much that in It actually started to bite a little. because this was buried a little higher it actually started to layer in the soil, in other words it started producing roots above the flange and is starting to really produce it in a radius pattern which is cool , so this is a benefit of using a zipper. tying or just a piece of wire without rubber is that sometimes you can take them into the soil layer and essentially create a nice nebari or a 'new nebari on top of that zip tie or that wire, so in the case of this tree that is exactly What happened?

The logs are almost fused at this point, but I think it will take about another year to hold together properly, so we're going to leave that bridle here. I took it out and trimmed a little of the longer roots that were coming out. from the bottom and we're going to put this back into another net pot like the last tree now, once I put it in that net pot, in the case of this tree, since it's a little bit taller and a little bit further forward, I'm actually We'll wire it up to that net pot and then we'll

style

some of the trunks here, but just to put a little bit of movement into them and show you what it looks like, one more note here if you notice this tree.

It only has four trunks right now, when we put it together last year we used five seedlings and one of them died. That's why you want to use more than you think you'll want to end up with as many. Many of you know that the number four in Japanese is a bit of a taboo number because it is pronounced the same way as the character for death, so it is like the number thirteen in the West, so you know that having four trunks is not necessarily an ideal. situation, but for now I'll leave them as they are, we'll replant them and then maybe at some point I'll cut one of those logs that won't work in the final design, but next step, let's lock this guy up, okay, now that I know We have it locked and secured in the container, what I want to do is add a little bit of cable to all of these trunks to get a little bit of movement and movement.

Take them out to make them look a little more interesting, so what I'm going to use here is aluminum wire. Now it's a Miller 2.5, of course, depending on the thickness of the whips you're working with or the seedlings you're working with that will determine the thickness of the wire gauge you're using here, but in this case, 2.5mm okay, we may have to double it on the thicker seedlings, but this should work pretty well now. What I want to do is cut this wire about 1/3 longer than the length of these here because what we're going to do with this is stick it into the ground so I'm going to go right up against the base of the tallest tree actually this is the tallest tree right here, so we're going to crash into the base of that.

I'm going to come from the back here. I'm going to push this to the bottom of the container here. and that will give us a good secure hold for this cable, so that when we actually move the trunk it doesn't slip and slide all over the place. Now as I place this wire I do it at about a 45 degree angle which is pretty typical for working with broadleaf material, they tend to be a little more brittle than working with conifers or at least most conifers anyway, so a 45 degree angle will give you a little extra holding power if it were a conifer.

I would probably raise it to a sixty degree angle because you don't really need to have such a narrow pitch again in a piece of coniferous material depending on the species, so let's take this all the way. and as you can see, we had a little left over, which is totally fine. I'd rather have too much than too little, and we're going to go ahead and do that with the remaining trunks here and then I'm going to put them in a better position, so I ended up folding three of the four trunks with that Miller 2.5. Normally what I recommend is that you do that instead of putting in a piece that is super thick and can bend.

I know it's one piece because if you put a very thick piece of wire here you run the risk of damaging the bark or splitting the seedlings in half, so I recommend that you use a size smaller or half a size smaller and then double Just for reasons of security, now the next step here is to place these trunks, so what I want to try to do is create a sort of sinuous look, something that you know looks like it's supposed to fit, basically, in other words, I don't want to. some of the trunks go in one direction, some of the trunks go in another direction and then the movement doesn't match.

I want everything to look consistent throughout, so what I want to do is start with our main trunk. This is the tallest and thickest. it's actually slightly on the back since it's now planted again, this thing can move completely, we could end up using the other side and the long term is the front, but for now we'll look at this as the potential front for thetree. so I want to start with that main trunk that I want to take it back first and then forward and then some movement on this side, this will give us depth and also give us side to side movement, if you look at it from the front it looks quite interesting.

So for the depth part, we're going to take it back a little bit here, then back up, and then take it forward with a little bit of side-to-side motion until we get to the top. It looks pretty good to start with. Now the next step is to place the secondary trunk here, the one that is the second largest, so we are going to do that and what I want to do is try to imitate at least the first part of the movement. that first trunk here, so I'm going to take it inside here to get a little bit of movement, we're going to bring it back in this direction and again I'm going to take it to the side and this one is going to move forward a little bit more since it's at the front of our main trunk, that way we're building depth from front to back so it doesn't look so one dimensional or two dimensional, we want that kind of 3D look for this. trigonometric when we look at it from all angles, okay, that feels pretty good right now, the next step will be the next smaller Strunk, which is this guy here now.

I don't want everyone to go in the same direction. Yes I want. have them fan out and away from each other so they have a true group look, we are not trying to create a windswept look, we wanted it to look like a large broadleaf tree that you might see growing in a field somewhere. place, so I want it moves in this direction, but I also want the movement of this trunk to again mimic the line of the main trunk here, so we're going to pull it back a little bit and instead of moving the apex back in the same direction to the Left I'm going to have it finish coming out to the right here and that's going to give us that outward motion that we're looking for here that feels pretty good right there, and the final trunk, of course, is our little one. over here, so I'm just going to mimic the inner curve or the first curve here of that secondary trunk and again, since the tree on average moves to the left, I want the vertex of this to move to the left as well. something like that is a good start to, you know, setting up a tree like this and getting that general movement in it now.

The next step here is to make sure that we don't allow this wire to bite into these trunks if you have ever worked with deciduous trees, you know that if the wire bites, you will always have scars that will never heal and will always look pretty ugly, so We really have to keep an eye on this to make sure. that doesn't bite, what that means is that the leaves come out here once they harden here in Tennessee, anyway mid May, that's the right time to cut the wire, sometimes they thicken faster and you have to cut it first, but ideally you want to leave that wire on during the first wave of hardening growth, it is usually enough to secure the logs or at least have them stay in position a bit, of course you will have to rewire them , For example. you know, next year, for example, at the same time, just add a little more movement to them, but hopefully we can get it to essentially stay in mid-May at that particular time once the leaves start to harden.

At that time we will start fertilizing this tree, blowing it up and trying to thicken certain trunks, especially the main trunk here. I want it to be thicker than your trunks in the future, so I hope you enjoyed this

bonsai

episode in the next one. episode where we're going to jump in to look at that fully grown cob adachi style Japanese

maple

that I showed at the beginning of this episode and I'm going to walk you through the steps of transplanting that Japanese maple by looking at the underside of the roots and really showing you how to develop a nice radial spreading nebari on an adachi cob style tree.

Thank you all very much for watching this episode. If you like what we do here, be sure to LIKE and SUBSCRIBE below and if you really want to support us. If you can click the link in the description below it will take you to our website where you can make a donation to support Bolin. In the future, we want to thank you very much for watching this episode and we'll see. next time take care of yourselves