How to Care for your Bonsai Tree : Bonsai Maintenance

Part of the Video Series How to Grow Bonsai Trees

Viewing videos requires the latest version of Adobe's Flash Player.
Get the latest Flash player.

Maintaining a bonsai garden is fun and easy with these DIY tips from a bonsai garden professional - free video.

Rating:
Views: 21,795
Comments: 1 (read)

Favorited: 4 | Add to Favorites

Tags: bonsai, garden, japanese, juniper, maintenance, seed, tree
Bookmark at:

All Videos in the Series, How to Grow Bonsai Trees

Member Comments

Video Transcript

How to Care for your Bonsai Tree : Bonsai Maintenance
Here we have a small Chinese Elm that has kind of been in bonsai for quite some time and it needs a hair cut. What I’m going to show you right now, in this segment, is how we keep the tree small. So many times people ask is how do you keep the tree small. It’s very very simple. What we do is prune the tree, it’s very analogous to getting a hair cut. If we never cut our hair we’d probably have quite long hair. On trees, if we don’t prune these little trees they will grow up to be large trees. The process is really as simple as this. Here, all along, we thought that this was an ancient Chinese secret that as being withheld for a good reason. As you can see while I’m pruning, you can see the shape of the tree is getting restored. One of the secondary effects of pruning is that the tree leaves remain small. You can see the scale just by the leaves against my fingers they’re quite small. Where as, if this tree were allowed to grow to its full potential in the ground it would have full size leaves. Another thing that doesn’t escape bonsai is weeds. Most of our bonsai trees live outdoors, so we use a sturdy pair of tweezers that’s very handy to remove the weeds without taking too much of our moss away. The moss looks kind of pretty looks like grass. It just looks a little tedious, if you were pulling weeds in your vegetable garden. I’m messing with these tweezers so I can get down very easily amongst the moss and remove the leaves. And now she’s back and in good shape again and eager to grow a little more.

About the Expert

Expert: Mike Hansen, owner of Midwest Bonsai, has been growing, caring, selling, and instructing others in bonsai care for years. Mike is an expert bonsai master. Read More