Spring Bonsai Care

 Basic advice? Watch your watering, check for swelling or blooming buds and start planing how you are going to wire last years growth and what you might want to do with this years new growth potential.

So, this will be my second spring with trees in the works. This does not necessarily bode well for the trees.

I have gone through them and removed some of the obviously dead branches. I also trimmed back my mulberry bush a little. I also cut back the grapevine.I checked everything for swelling buds and they seem to be ready to put out leafs.

I had a good amount of frost damage. By keeping things in my Florida room I had hopped to avoid this, but because of the "freeze, thaw and oh look it's below zero again" weather we had I am not surprised. What did surprise me was how many things I didn't get to prepare that survived.

The junipers I'm not too sure about because they can be dead/dieing and not show it. Two look purple so they are the ones i think might have died. the third is a different variety and looks like it is alive. so it's a toss up with them.

I have a few seedlings that look like they survived the winter. Some are the last ones I have of one plant variety.... I might try looking in Lowes for another one because they look nice and grow fast. but I don't want to spend a lot, or any, money.

My Stupid Beech Bonsai

And it really is stupid. We had on day last week of 50 degree weather and The tree opened up the a few buds. Then we were back down to 22 degrees and the newly opened buds look bad.

The good news is I know it survived the winter.
The bad news is the tree is stupid.

Over all this shouldn't do anything harmful to the tree. Beeches are very strong growers and it should bounce back. I was constantly cutting back new growth that was longer then what I was looking for. Plus I defoliated the hell out of it and it was still growing fine.

If I was smart I would try and make this into a large bonsai. However I attempting to make this into a small to medium sized bonsai in the root over rock style.

I think If I happen to find another beech that I can easily pull out of the ground then I will try for a large bonsai. But for now I wait for spring.