Welcome to Appalachian Bonsai! Today is going to be a video from last spring
that I'm only now getting ready to edit. Thank you for your patience
while I finish this school business, and I hope you have a really Happy New Year.
Welcome to Appalachian Bonsai.
This is the basement edition, since I can't go outside and play.
We have this viburnum here, which we collected two years ago
up in the top of my field, and it's recovered extremely well since that time.
It's had a lot of growth since then. You've seen several of the update videos,
and now we've put it into a brand new pot. The root system looks beautiful.
Let's take a look at that.
Look at that, ladies and gentlemen.
Very strong.
That's good!
I'm cleaning out this soil from the roots, so that way, we can see how those
roots have progressed over the last two years. I can do a lot of this with my
hands as opposed to using the chopstick. I kind of like the feel of dirt. I always have.
So, this feels pretty good. It's nice to get with a chopstick if you have some
areas that are tough, especially areas that are fully compacted with
roots and soil. Like that. There, now you can tease it out.
Oh, yeah, that's good.
It's the first time we've seen the roots since we transplanted this out of the ground
and I'm really excited to... Look at all that growth - whoa! Last year, when we took this
pot out of the winter bed it had a lot of these growing from the base of the pot
and we had to clip those in order to get the pot off the ground.
So I knew it was strong then.
Okay. Let's prune some of this up.
Boy, isn't that nice.
Just kind of going around and pruning the long ones like this.
Anything that's hanging down way low, we can remove a lot of those.
It'll help it sit a little lower into the pot.
Let's look on top now.
We had a dead spot on the back of the tree
over here and we hoped to promote root growth.
You can probably... maybe you can see...
that this is the area and we've got good roots coming out.
We're okay, ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah, there's the dead spot, right there.
There's no roots growing directly up underneath this line, but we
have roots just off to the side. Those will fill in very nicely, I hope.
I don't mind a little shake as long as I'm not damaging this bark.
I think I'm doing an okay job.
This root right here is okay. It's growing outward and away.
This root underneath is a little awkward. It's kind of growing in between them and it's
going down that direction. I will remove that.
If I can get in there.
There we go.
[dog bumping door] Rocky! No!
I could probably reduce this by quite a bit but I like how compact that is.
This root appears to be the main problem from this viewing direction.
It's just rests so high from this view.
From this view, it's not a problem. It's a kind of in line with these other three.
We'll just have to make sure that's positioned well in the pot.
Looks good!
Sure.
That little extra mound is so... whenever I press the tree into the pot it'll come
up underneath, and when I squish it down it should hopefully fill in some of the
areas and the air gaps below.
It can be hard to get your chopstick underneath on this side of the tree
So let's see how this works this time.
There we go. Alright.
Like that.
Make sure you position your tree the way you want to,
Hopefully I can... let's see if I can work from this direction...
A quick and easy twist
I'll prune that back.
Let's try this next one.
Maybe you can see a little bit better if I do this.
Give that a quick prune.
It's still loose in the pot. Adjust your tree.
This is leaning a little bit that way.
It's hard to see because of my camera angle, but it's leaning back this way.
I want to move it forward a little bit.
I'm going to tighten that down.
Pull and twist.
Because it's still got a little bit of a lean, what I'm going to do is, I'm going
to take some soil, I'm going to lift this up a little bit on the backside,
and I'll work some soil in underneath.
There. It's kind of holding itself for the time being.
I can tighten this up. Pull and twist.
It feels good without cranking too hard on it. That's nice.
Push these down out of the way
and let's go ahead and add soil.
Work your way from the base outward.
You can chop it in and out of the roots.
You can wiggle a little bit and watch that soil work its way down.
It shouldn't take you too long, especially once you start getting in a
little bit of a rhythm.
Add some more soil. Let's come on this side.
And we chop in here.
Work the soil down into the roots.
I can feel... especially as I'm getting down here...
that some of the roots are gonna start to peel up.
That's why I'm putting pressure on top with my hand.
Trying to work the soil in
without popping those roots back up.
We have this exposed root. This is that high
root I was talking about.
It might be okay, so what I'm gonna do...
Your see where it's up?
Try to press that back in with a chopstick.
I still have other roots down here need to get.
You can actually feel the soil and the roots move down.
My fingers are moving down with it. That's good.
You don't need to dump all of it on at once. Work a little bit at a time.
[dog bark]
Sorry for the dog noises. They want to play.
This soil mixture is a combination of, we'll say,
three scoops of Turface, three scoops of, no, two scoops of
diatomaceous earth, and three scoops of pine bark,
with half a scoop of coarse mason's sand.
All of these components have been sifted
to try to remove as much dust as possible
as well as the largest particles that I could.
Not bad everybody.This is looking good.
Alright, let's tighten up the bottom
and then we will water it,
while getting wet in the rain.
Thank you very much, everyone, for your patience.
I hope to have more videos for soon.
Like and Subscribe, because there is more to come.
Happy New Year, and thanks for watching!