Bonsai Soil Mix

a number of you have asked me to speak about bonsai soils so this talk is going to be about the best substrate of soil for growing your bonsai in this talk is really about very down-to-earth matters the very word earth signifies the soil on which we stand and the plants which grow from the soil there's no real magic about soil because soil is so basic that we take it for granted but if we analyze the soil we will soon realize that there are different types of soil and different plants grow better in one type of soil or they grow better in other types of soil now if you ask a hundred bonsai grows what soil they use they will all have their own particular favorite recipe for soils so to say that there is a be-all and end-all a magic formula for soil would be very misleading there is no such thing as a magic formula because soils depend on the environment in which you live the climate in which you live for instance soils that we used in the tropics will be different from the soils that we use in the temperate regions and so on I will tell you basically about the soil that we use in the temperate climates and some of the soils that Japanese growers use because Japanese trees and also Chinese trees are now exported all over the world and I will comment about the soils which the plants come in but which you may need to adapt to grow bonsai successful to be absolutely Frank you can grow plants in any type of soil you can dig the mud from the garden ordinary garden mud put it in a pot and put a plant in it and it will grow it is as simple as that to say that plants were not going mud soil would be to tell a lie but yet you will find that different expert growth specialists nurseries they have come across the compost or the substrate to use a technical term which are ideal which are optimum substrates for the plants that they grow I brought here one of the nursery plants that we buy from some of our wholesale nursery supplies this is a he notice Cypress and I will be demonstrating on this in another YouTube video but if we take the plant out of this pot look at the beautiful roots that are growing in this pot and if you look at the soil carefully the song that they've used is nothing but a peat compost with a bit of bark nothing more to it than that so this tree is probably only a two year or cutting but it's growing so vigorously and this is the soil they use now you might ask why can't I grow bonsai in this type of soil of course you can grow bonds are in the soil there's nothing to stop you growing bonsai in this soil in fact it might go quite well a lot of the Chinese indoor bonsai come in a soil which is just like this either coco bulk and peat or just Spagna mas peat and the trees will grow very well the trouble with using just that is that it doesn't have body and it may not be able to support large trees it won't be able to hold the roots to make the tree stand up especially if you use a shallow bonsai pot the tree will not be able to stand upright so for that reason we use a mixture of size now most soils that plants growing consists of three basic elements you have sand or grit and then clay and then you may have like a long which is a very sandy type of clay but basically it's a mixture of those ingredients but when it comes to mixing bonsai compost if I just take you around and show you some of the compost that we use carefully we're in the middle of our reporting season this is you that we've just put it up and this is the standard compost that we use look at it it's not just peat although as I said you could grow it in pure peat there's no reason why you can't but this standard soil was our hair and soil has about five and sometimes six ingredients so we have akadama one third of that and then we have a type of pumice or volcanic grit and then we have Spagna moss peat an orchid bark so those are the main ingredients you can add other types of humus or crush brick in it as well and that will facilitate drainage so for bonsai we have a very open texture in the soil very open texture but we don't use just 100% akadama or hundred percent peat and a bark or even 100 percent crushed brick you could grow it in that but this is the optimum mix that we use we can put some fertilizer in it but we prefer not to add fertilizer to the soil but we simply put the soil as it is and then we add the fertilizer as the trees begin to grow so this is our basic Nassif will now look at the individual ingredients closely this is the Japanese akadama this is the standard size that we use which is from about three millimeter to about seven or eight millimeter akadama comes in different grades you can get very large particle akadama or this is the fine grade academia and then you can get the short end grade akadama which is almost like sand now in case you don't know what akadama is akadama is a Japanese soil akadama simply means red clay acha is red and done as the clay so akadama simply red clay it is produced artificially in Japan I believe somewhere in Saitama and they mined this clay from deep underground so it's almost inert and it is fairly sterile I was told so they dig this clay from deep on the ground and then they mix it with water into sheets and then they roll the sheets out let it dry in the Sun and then the sheets of clay are crushed and they're crushed clay is saved in two different particle sizes so you have a range of different particles for akadama now in Japan akadama is used almost neat they plant a lot of things in just akadama nothing else and the trees grow very very well but I have found over the years and we've been importing trees from Japan since the early 80s we find that if you bring akadama into the temperate regions like UK in Europe the akadama dries very quickly in Japan akadama works well akadama use neat works well because they have a very wet rainy season it's almost like a monsoon season and in that sort of very heavy rainy season the akadama drains extremely well so you don't have to worry about using academic meet in Japan but we find that if you use it neat in the temperate regions like in the UK and Europe it dries out too quickly and in the summer because we don't have so much rain it dries very quickly so it is not ideal among the other soils we've got before I talk about the mix this is a Japanese volcanic grit that we import and it is literally a volcanic grit and this is just used for drainage and because it's volcanic I would say that the pH value must be slightly acidic then this very interesting material in different countries you get different colors to this this is a fired brick is a brick clay which is fired to a very high temperature is fired to about 1100 or 1200 degrees almost stoneware temperatures and when the clay is fired to that temperature it becomes like ceramic particles and it never breaks down so extremely good for drainage so this is very good in places like India you can use ordinary red crushed brick if you don't have anything else but if you can get clinker which is the very high fired you break usually when the temperature goes very high it fuses and it doesn't become very useful for anything else so that can be crushed so the crushed clinker is also very good as a potting medium some of these other materials that are brought here this is called Hyuga this is another Japanese soil which is like a very light Japanese pumice it almost weighs nothing it is so light it absolutely is light it doesn't weigh down on plants so this is sometimes used as a drainage layer or if you put a large plant you can mix it with the bonsai compost and this lost material I want to show you here this is the famous economist oil the Japanese have found that growing azaleas in this kanuma soil which is acidic very very light and they mix 30% of 1/3 Spagna Moss to this and that is the idea potting medium for satsuki resilience it is so light and the daily roots are so fine that the roots can penetrate the soil very easily I will just show you what Spagna moss looks like and the SPAC the moss we buy this from that's wholesale suppliers who import this all the way from New Zealand and this is a swagman Moss that is used for mixing with the kuruma soil so you mix 1/3 Spagna moss with the kuruma soil and that is the ideal potting medium this is our standard compost which we use for putting up our seedlings and this is 50-50 of Perun crushed pine bark and speculum moss Pete we don't use Coco fiber but we can still use Moss feet so we use that in our mix so the mix that we sell for bonsai in fact the outdoor bonsai we use equal parts of this material the fresh brick akadama and then we probably add some promises well so the mixture I showed you earlier on is the standard hairless bonsai mix number of you may have come across articles that I wrote 20 or 30 years ago and people in the bonsai world call it the peter chance moss trick I have found over the years that plants which are sick when they put it into spagna moss if you have a sick tree when you plant it in spagna Moss the tree will revive very very quickly so sometimes when the tree is not doing well this is what we do this juniper wasn't doing well about two years ago so we put it in a large tray that has a lot of holes for aerating it and this was just plant in pure Spagna moss we can see the moss that we've used and look at the roots that have come out from underneath absolutely crammed with roots and a fee that had hardly any root by planting it in pure moss this is what we get I can't even get it out of the tray it is so tight just about look at it look at the roots in here and this is the sphagnum moss in which it is growing so spreading the moss is a very good medium for putting sick treason because it revives the tree no end and what made me think of using Spagna Moss was from my alluring experiments I found that because pendulum Moss sense or encourages the branches to send out roots I thought that if you put a sick plant to inspect no moss and generate roots so true enough if you do that you will find that any sick plant would inspect the moss but you need to keep it well watered and in a closed environment it will revive very quickly and send out roots sick so I put it in this time I did put it in spec no moss you can see there you can see the speck no moss but I've topped it with a bit of peat but this is what it's been going in spagna moss and see the growth you get from putting sick plants in pure Spagna moss so that is all I need to say about the soils so don't be afraid to experiment because in different countries you need to adapt the soil to the growing conditions if you have very wet and rainy conditions like in the tropics you may need to use more drainage material and then in countries like Western Europe we use a mix that I just talked about why we use equal parts of akadama Brick spagna must peep and pine bark but just experiment and you'll find that trees will grow in virtually anything the indoor trees because they grow in a closed environment in the house we find that using a more PT based compost helps to retain the moisture better whereas these composite have large particles of grit and clay they are more suited to the outdoor trees and then remember to add the fertilizer or the nutrients after you've potted the tree up so don't need to mix nutrient or fertilizer in the bonsai soil that you use so I hope that has been helpful it may not tell you or give you a secret recipe but basically it's a mixture of different materials to encourage drainage so drainage is the key to growing bonsai successfully because the roots need to breathe air don't forget you look at this trace these are trays that have a lot of aeration you see they're just baskets in fact so the more air you give the roots the better they perform so roots not only take up moisture nutrients but they also need air to breathe so that's very important to remember so there you are have a go and your bonsai will grow successfully [Music] [Music]

Channel: Herons Bonsai

Views: 624,772

Keywords: Bonsai, Bonsai soil, bonsai uk, bonsai seller, bonsai substrate, bonsai food, temperate bonsai, outdoor bonsai, indoor bonsai soil, outdoor bonsai soil, Herons Bonsai, Bonsai Soil Mix, Garden Centre, Bonsai Nursery, Bonsai Centre, Bonsai mix, what soil should I use for bonsai, How to create your own bonsai soil mix

Id: gcuYHllBmaM

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2019