When just starting off with bonsai, it may all get a littla much. Roots, branches, trimming, feeding. What to do when and where with your bonsai. And of course. How to create a bonsai. In this topic I would like to show a little bit of the steps I have taken when dealing with seedlings. I will do this with a little experiment. Mind you: The time is not ideal for such experiment, with night time frost and all...

OK, let's take a simple seedling:


This tiny little plant is about one year old. It either slipped from the seed in late autum 2010 or spring 2011. If we pull plants from the wild as yound seedlings, normally you get one or two year old plants. These may however differ very much in development. See the picture below. Two plants of 1 year old, and 2 plants of 2 years old, which we will use for the experiment.





In order to develop surface roots, rather than a very strong vertical taproot, the main root is cut. Also, we are not interested in very tall trees. So we clip the top off.






Next, these are placed deep in full ground. The trees are planted deep, in order to ensure moist soild around the roots, and avoid te first frost. The top soil dries out more eaily than the layer at a few cm depth. Also, frost penetrates the soil slowly, giving our plants a few day (hopefully weeks) before the roots freeze up. When planting, the roots are spread out from the trunk in such an way that they are not bend at the trunk, or cross other roost. Then they are covered with soil.





This is how we will leave them. To be updated and continued in Spring.

Hi Jelle,

I'm not sure I should be posting a question here but, I have to ask...Could this proceedure also be performed on newly rooted cuttings?

Hey Leslie,

The nice thing about cuttings is.. THey typically do not have strong vertical roots, but the roots radiate from the stem. So I would say: Not really the same thing. Or are you asking about something else?

leatherback wrote: Hey Leslie,

The nice thing about cuttings is.. THey typically do not have strong vertical roots, but the roots radiate from the stem. So I would say: Not really the same thing. Or are you asking about something else?

Hi J,
I will PM you with my questions, ok?

One year later, the seedlings have shown some impressive developments. I will write a little more when I lift these plants. Probably in spring. Today the weather was not ideal for taking pictures of cutlines etc (Lots of wind). If weather stays warm, I might take the next step next weekend.

Dug them up today. Very nice to see how they developed! The two older trees showed very big growth in girth.

The two smaller trees have now reached the size the bigger once had one year ago.



All trees have made progress in the nebari area. One of the 2 years now has almost perfect radial roots:



In comparison the older trees:



And the younger trees:

Very well improved nebari, they're growing very well, also in thickness!

Thank you, good reading! I wish I had read this before but I didn't know about cutting the tap root and cutting off the top. Keep us updated please .