Hello everybody! how was your weekend? We continue with our future bonsai project, this time learning about pruning roots and dry branches . We are in the middle of the spring season, and in many areas we are already beginning to notice until summer, although we are not the only ones: the plants are growing in such a way that their need for water is increasing. But we will talk about that later.
This time it’s time to do small pruning. For this we only need scissors that we will have disinfected with alcohol from the pharmacy. Shall we start?
root pruning
In many tree species, the roots can grow in an inappropriate place on the trunk, taking into account the design that we want to give it. In bonsai everything must be ordered : both branches and roots, so we cannot let the root grow that goes to the opposite side. When we find ourselves in this situation, we can do two things: either prune, or cover with a porous substrate such as akadama and kyriuzuna (or volcanic clay and vermiculite) at 70 and 30% respectively. As a Chinese elm is being worked on, and it is a very resistant species, it has been decided to prune.
Very important: we will only remove those roots that, as in this case, have sprouted from the same trunk. And we will only do it when the tree is in perfect health.
Once we have cut those two roots that bothered us for the style we want to give it, we have left like this:
Finally we have to put healing paste to prevent the appearance of fungi.
branch pruning
Do you see that twig that has no leaves that I touch with my hand? By this time you should already have, at least, buds awake. But the truth is that it has a somewhat different color than the other branches: it does not look very good. For aesthetic reasons, we proceed to prune it with scissors . We will do the same with each dry twig that we see.
And for the moment we leave it here. Next month, as we said at the beginning of the article, we will learn everything related to irrigation in summer for trees in formation. Are you going to miss it?
One thought on “Design a bonsai step by step – Pruning roots and dry branches”