10 Ways to increase the size of your Bonsai Trunks

in today's video I want to talk about how to thicken up bonsai trucked in ten different ways okay so let's talk about how to go from this tiny little skinny zelkova to this guy in about three to four years there are several different methods and it's not by putting this little tree into a bone okay I know I'm oversimplifying this but the first thing you want to do about growing a large trunk on your bones eye is keeping the tree healthy so learn the holder cultural side of keeping bones eye and learn about the different species of plants that are using bones eyes so that you know when to cut when to feed them when to water them if you learn all this and keep the tree healthy they will continue to grow add foliage to the top and in return grow a larger trunk so if you have an unhealthy tree you'll be stunted and a wealthy grow seems simple that's the number one thing to do first keep your tree healthy [Music] okay so let's talk about net pods and why or air pruning pots and why they're so important now in a regular pot like this the roots do not ramify they do not air prune and they tend to get root bound and wrap and grow thick and long and wrap around the pot and in pots like this what happens or the net pot is that the tips of the roots will get air prude and then it divides and then it multiplies until you get this huge mesh of roots that mesh of roots are the type of roots called feeder roots so those feeder roots will actually add to the health of the tree and you see these feeder roots are here that I've dyed up the surface those feeder roots will add to the health of the tree and let it be able to uptake all the nutrients minerals and water that it needs to sustain healthy growth so this in combination with all the dense foliage that you can grow on the tree will help to thicken up the truck [Music] this is my Japanese black pine this right here would be considered a sacrificial trunk this is another Japanese black pine right here and this right here would be considered a sacrificial branch so sacrificial branches and sacrificial trunks do the same exact thing they increase the girth of the trunk that is supporting those branches and they actually are not using the final design and you can have multiple sacrificial branches that are cut later on however the only drawback for doing this method even though it grows the trunk very fast is that can leave large scars in the final design however it might be worth it if you can shave off several years of growth from doing it [Music] so developing radio routes it's more of a technique to creating better than a Bari in your bonsai and it does thicken up the base of the trunk right around the nebari the idea is basically when you repot i'm you clean up the root structure so that every single root radiates out like a bicycle spoke and when you do that they spread evenly instead of clumping together in certain spots to create a nice even nebari in this method I'm just gonna show you as a demo in here off obviously what you can do to get your new bar eating kind of spread and grow horizontally versus down is let's say you were to bury this little tiny maple right here's the vine maple you take it out of the pot you bury this into the ground by I don't know four or five inches or whatever and take the tree you put it on - this could be slate I have a piece of board here but ideally probably like a tile or something and then put soil back over to the plant and just kind of plant it right on top of the tile and what it does then is roots can't go down they will go laterally so it causes the nebari to spread at that point so that's another method to fatten up the trunk when plants and trees grow in the wild the wind constantly keeps them moving this causes a stress in the wood lowing load-bearing structure of a tree so to compensate the tree manages to grow something call of the reaction wood or stress wood this stress would usually has a different structure in terms of cellulose or lignin content and more and is able to position the tree where it get the best light or other optimum resources this is the reason why trees are able to contort towards the light and still survive loads and even awkward shapes this is why some gardeners were actually brush their seedlings so that they don't become too leggy that movement of the seedlings helps to reinforce and grow stronger trunks so if you had exercised a tree you can do so no not like that been little softer yes softer there you go much better so by exercising your tree the tree will basically act like it's being blown by the wind and then grow stress wood and reinforce those areas and develop a thicker trunk in return it might be worth it so you could do this I don't know what's every few days [Music] let's talk about scarring as a method of thickening up the trunk so this is a large cut that was down on my zelkova and you can see how the growth the scar has created a very kind of bulbous very undesirable feature to the tree that actually need to fix and carve out however if you did this and scarred the nebari down here I said you made a big cut and then it scarred and healed over and did it in a proper way what would happen then is that bulbous growth or the scarring will add to the base of them up in the nebari and and give you kind of a quick way of increasing the size of that trunk so that's another way it's scarring so some people will go in and either poke a million little holes around the nebari or actually just scrape off the bark and that will work most of the time it depends on the species mostly deciduous for the most part but that's another way it's scarring the trunk will create more growth and I guess bulbous scars around the area that you cut [Music] you can kind of see the roots here no it's in awhile rangy actually this would be a good candidate for root over rock they may do that as well as dude oh the wire binding on the roots I don't want to break any roots right now I just want to loosen it up so that I have room to play with and all I'm gonna do is just take this two millimeter wire and create a tourniquet around this big giant tap root so that I can restrict the flow on this tree so I'm going to restrict the flow on this tree I'm gonna wrap this around twice nice and tight and it's probably blocking the view and then twist it up I've got my pliers wrap it around here twist it as if I'm tying in a trade to a pot good and tight by doing this method the area above the tourniquet will begin to swell and flare out so and it's a good idea to do this right around the nebari because that is the part where you want to be the widest here's a lesser known method of thickening the trunk it is to use silica as a supplement silica actually alleviate stress in the plant and it helps to lignified and fortify cell walls you can look at the two plants here one sa look up one was grown without it and you can see the difference in size all this was actually done in research my professor Lawrence Tattnall is a head of Plant Pathology and crop physiology out of Louisiana State University so before I even got into Boone died about three or four years ago I I got a zelkova from Arbor Day and it was one of those free trees that they gave you if you've bought like fruit trees and other things like that and I didn't know what to do it with the the tree so I kept it in a one gallon pot just like this I left it basically next to my garden beds and for about three or four years it grew so to grow and it started to root outside of the pot into the ground I didn't realize that was happening and it became this and about a little over three years so this is a nice big thick powerful trunk but a big Temari here at the bottom I didn't realize I was growing a you know future bones i when I was doing it so it was pretty cool to see this I did a lot of research watch a lot of different things talk to a lot of different people including Dan Robinson on father's day I had a chance to visit man and he started on to a topic which I'm very kind of passionate about which is you know how to grow bigger bonsai in a faster time and it's definitely not my growing bulls eyes in both a pot so check out this clip of Dan talking about his process in his method of growing bones eyes oh so about ten years ago Triton's maples so it's kind of like and half of my foot in the ground and half of my foot it pops and so now it's ten years and I've got two of the ones that are in the boss I've got a bun warm at home yeah all have trunks about this big yeah and ten years in the pots but the ones in the ground have trusted that thing and and four of them I dug up two years ago so it only had eight years in the ground and of course I'm training both of them the ones in the pod someone to the ground are trained from the control and so I'll show you them for the ones and pots to catch up with the ones that growing on the ground will be a hundred years right if it catches up then you know now that it's in a bone side pot yeah of course it won't get much bigger but they've got great trunks are all true yeah let's go because it's free and some new wood that's added it makes trees have a big trouble yeah get through people's minds so what's gonna add a trunk thickness here is this volume of wood in here this year cumulatively yeah so if you added all of that new wood together that's how much it is spread out over the trunk Oh so when you have growth like like this you get nothing yeah right so now here's one of them so I love these things grow kind of free and this is two years growth but it's only added this much thickness okay yeah so in ten years that's what I've got which isn't bad yeah and this is what people all get because they put little trees and paws yeah and they keep them pruned and when you prune it it stops it from getting bigger thicker another one is back here you can see it back there yeah it's great curves on that tree okay yeah and you can see how much growth there is up there on that top color is this tree down ten years Wow yeah you know so hey pretty nice right yeah I mean here's the new top right here you know so it's all you know part of the plan but this is what you get which again from a board size standpoint whoa hey fabulous yeah looks great but I'll share you what's fabulous okay [Music] so I've got that of these so that was half trunk this big yeah this one only spent eight years in the ground so for two years I've been printed as a bone side this one oh yeah hey gears of the ground at two years at the pond yeah beautiful okay so you can see once it's in a bowl set pot look at the size of the new wood that's added it's nothing right yeah take that little bit of wood in that stem and spread it out over the trunk yeah so you don't get any game it stands still yeah and so for those trees over there to catch up with this once you start training them as a bone side they'll never catch up because this is gonna get bigger anyhow but what I what happened with these in the ground as they sent suckers out that wood this big me I said that this big yep or like over there that big and there were multiple ones yeah coming off the trunk and so each year I let them go free yeah and they'd hide the bone size out there I mean this is awesome it hid the tree behind it you know overnight just and then in the winter I cut them off yep and then kind of trained a little bit how to do the same thing the next year yeah so you can see there's some powers in their seed where you can see through the trunk and there oh yeah yeah alright so these were big rigs scars on here that you Clark those yeah okay course these were all scars from the from the suckers and then I hollow them out yeah so they become value-added yeah I mean I love a hollow truck right I mean I you doesn't have to be any other but so that's the deal and gives you a lot of character yeah yeah it's awesome and so anyhow take your trees take them out of the pots and put them in the ground I totally agree I'll show ya I'm fine over here this it was ten years ten years Wow ten years and it's gotten that big yeah it's amazing this that was the shoot they're not that girl yeah so it got eight feet tall yeah and it's sending out candles these things that are this big right adding drug size absolutely and then I cut it off and then I carve it other pain you're wrong here yeah look at that look it down the Bari yeah I'm seat that is amazing yeah ten here but like I said everybody else I'm sorry they put him in boats icon yeah then your candles aren't like this well that's pretty good but you can see how much wood it's gonna add just a little bit compared to that shoot on there oh yeah this one had well there that was my leader yep so I get the bottom branches wire because I knew that's where my tree was and this would just pick me yeah that's awesome hey wish everybody did that [Music] you thank you for so much for watching don't forget to Like and subscribe I really do appreciate it take care of yourself until the next time bye bye

Channel: Ben B. Seattle

Views: 643,215

Keywords: Fig Reviews, gardening, fruits, figs, fig, trees, cay sung, garden, seattle, pnw, renton, ourfigs, addiction, how to root figs, bonsai, koi, ponds, koi ponds, pine tree, black pine, white pine, japanese white pine, kohaku, bonsai pot, maples, junipers, nursery stock to bonsai, ben b, crystals, moldavite, phenakite, danrobinson

Id: UaKD-uDMDyQ

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020