Spring trip in bear country

Nice trip. I walked around take few pictures of trees and early spring flowers. And in one moment I spotted footprint, rather large and I thought for a while, "it could be bear". But I kept walking and admiring country. But when we have found few other footprints, I had strong feeling I would like to have cup of tea at home, as soon as possible :)










First spotting...

..maybe second...

...time to go ? :)

Acer palmatum repotting


Preparation of new pot.



Removing on of the larger roots.

Fixing small roots in position with extra large zeolite rocks as spacers.






Repotting Vincent's forest

During the weekend I was repotting hornbeam forest. Too many roots, so it was time for some reduction. Thing went back to its current container made by Vinco. It easily could go into something smaller but nothing of that sort is available so far.  New substrate is pure Teramol plus rough peat. I hope it will make it easier to carry around. I still prefer mixture with zeolite but they are heavier so I try to avoid them in larger containers, since I'm getting older and weaker. 


Group as taken from winter storage





Double root was little annoying so I cut the top one. 



Quite a lot of removed roots on left, hmm? 


In new substrate, thoroughly watered. Sorry for lousy picture but with water in to heavy to move around. 

Cornus mas "Vesna"

I was not blogging for a while. Up until today trees were in winter storage and I was focusing on other projects and took sabbatical from bonsai. But spring is here and it was time to put gloves on and start to work on trees again. My cornus was flowering for some time and I think it was time to repot it. Thing is, tree is sitting on hill which is obviously too high. One problem with it is that it is hard to water well core of the root ball with such hill. Reason why hill is so high is that there are old thick roots inside root ball and some rocks which prevent tree from being potted deeper. So task for today was remove some mass from bottom and try to pot the tree in more shallow position. Unfortunately one of the rocks embedded into roots is grown so hard that I did not dare to remove it toady. It has to wait for next repotting. Till then new roots in upper parts of the substrate will be grown hopefully. 

Before repotting




Preparation of substrate, zeoilite 4-8mm plus Terramol 3-6mm, plus rough peat





removing old thick roots. typical job on yamadori material, sometimes it take time to do it safely

Very thick roots removed by saw

Cleanig pot from mineral deposits on bottom

Wires prepared for securing tree

Fixing tree in pot with wires

With fresh substrate and few cm deeper.




Prunus spinosa "Katharine"