Hello, and welcome to Appalachian Bonsai!
Today's video is part of an ongoing series to discuss air layers.
I hope you enjoy it.
[Bluegrass music]
Welcome back the Spring 2018.
Here's our trident maple. It spent the whole winter
inside of this.
I don't know what the roots are gonna look like,
but we'll find out.
Beforehand, I want to go ahead and prune some of this extra growth back.
I'm about to prune its main root source away, which means there's gonna be a
little less nutrition coming up into the tree.
All of these extra branches are
going to require that extra nutrition so if I leave them on then the tree is
going to suffer.
Let's go
[Banjo music]
All right. So there are little spots here. I'm gonna clean them out a little bit.
The reason I'm gonna do that is because trident maple is notorious for getting
these big chunky callouses.
You can see one here, how it's kind of big and bulbous and I'll be
trying to clean that up over the next couple of years.
But that was a cut that was made...
...seven years ago, I think?
Six or seven years ago, and it's still callousing over.
But, because it's so chunky it could be bulbous out here if I'd left a flush cut.
So I'm gonna try and clean this down some.
You can use a pair of knob cutters to get in there and kind of
hollow out that cut which will allow the
scar to smooth over some.
This isn't always useful for pines and things like that
because if you look at a tree that has been cut with a pair of
ball knob cutters you know it's a pair of ball knob cutters, and it kind of suspends
the disbelief, or the belief.
So sometimes it's nice not to use these ball knob cutters,
and make it a little bit more naturalistic.
That's all done.
Let's see what we have in here.
I don't know if you can see that in the camera but, lots of roots.
On the inside here. That's exciting, So exciting.
Let's look on the other side.
Lots and lots of roots. So so cool!
The roots have actually grown through the pot
and into this bottom substrate.
And on this side, too.
You can use a root rake. I think that these can do a lot of damage.
I like to use bare hands so I can actually feel what's happening.
Oh, it's a nice full root ball.
All the beautiful roots are still coming down below.
Going to clean some of those out, when I cut this off.
Look at that!
Now we need to transplant this tree into a pot.
We just took off its main supply
of nutrition from those bottom roots coming in and it's gonna have to rely
solely upon itself.
I need to protect these roots.
It doesn't make sense for me
to put this tree right now into a very shallow pot.
You can if you want to, but I want
to protect those roots and get them strong and healthy, and create a good nebari
before I put it into a beautiful pot.
This pot was made by MC2 Pottery.
They're fantastic.
I could put it into this pot, which is larger and a little deeper,
but again it's just a little too shallow for what I need right now to protect these roots.
This pot was made but my good friend Deb Tome.
What I'm going to do is I'm gonna put it into this deeper mica pot.
This was given to me by my in-laws,
so, thank you very much Jim and Betty.
This will allow me to this deeper into the pot
protect those roots by covering it with soil.
Once they grow stronger over the next year, two years; probably two years,
then we can prune them back a little harder and we can work our way into the
finer pots for review.
This tree is not ready to show off anyway so you don't
need to have our gorgeous show pot right now unless you just want it for your own self.
This is not going into an exhibition anytime soon
It works just fine to put into a regular pot
It's a little dusty. It's been pretty dry.
I want this up just a little bit more so what I can do
is tilt it, and then work that soil underneath it.
The more you can help yourself early on, the better.
Let's do it now
There. It's not falling back into place.
I could probably lift it up a little bit more
and work that soil down in there.
Okay,
This will take another couple of years for it to fill out a little bit more,
to ramify, and get those roots nice and strong.
I'm not exposing the nebari, because I don't need to.
I need to that root system to get healthy.
It's not important to show it off right off the bat.
Wait until it's good, and then show it off.
I'm gonna go ahead and get this into a bucket of water and soak it really well
and then I'm gonna keep it in a place that is out of the elements.
It's out of the wind, it's out of direct sunlight.
So that's pretty much it.
Let's go ahead and do that.
Stay tuned for the next video in this series.
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Thanks for watching!