Gathered Bonsai Material

Currently I have one of my seed beds reserved for last years gathered potential Bonsai material. All of these small plants are one year old. I gathered mostly Japanese Maple, Cherry, Silver Maple, and Red Maple Seedlings. Most of them look to have survived the winter to date.

Observing the different plants the larger Japanese Maples seedlings gathered from other yards seem to have done the best as they are already starting to bud out in similar fashion to their parent trees across the street and next door. The Cherry, Silver and Red Maples seem to still be dormant.

To bring the blog up to speed the small Japanese Maple seedlings that I collected from my backyard seem to be the suffering the most as they are very small and they did not grow much during the predicted second growth spurt in the back half of the summer. I think this was due to learning to water them and also learning about how much shade they require. Both of which I think I did incorrectly.

I did not provide enough shade and watered them too much. The shade was provided primarily from above using just window screen material draped over a square pvc frame. This let as significant amount of sun in from the side in the back half of the day as well as from above. Watering also was too much as I watered the seedlings every other day @ 6:00 am for 15 minutes. The seedbed became drenched. especially in the late summer early fall during a few rainy periods. The symptoms I witnessed that led me too this conclusion were the browning leaves from burn or overwatering and the stunted growth.

This year I plan to extract the trees from this bed soon and pot them up in their own pots to use for grafting rootstock or my first few deciduous Bonsai if they survive the summer. I plan to continue to use the bed for collected material this year until the end of the season where I will use this bed as a seed bed as well.

I plan to document this next year with lots of photographs of either success or failure. ;)