by George Buehler

When you read this, the holiday season will be over and we’re in the vacation period away from our little trees. The only thing to do during January is to get our soil ready, clean pots, plan on which trees need to be repotted, sketch out how we think a different styling would look on one of our trees, make sure we have enough wire to do the needed wiring next month and think about what you need to do with the limb trimming that will be needed later – some vacation huh? As we all know, bonsai is almost a year-round task. I almost forgot to mention that this is also a good time to catch up on some bonsai reading material and write an article for this newsletter.

Hopefully you will notice a difference in the appearance of this newsletter. I am trying some new software to do the newsletter. I also said a few issues back that you should see some differences in the upcoming issues. Well here we go. You should see some additional changes in the upcoming months. I hope you will find the changes to be improvements. If not, let me know. I don’t hear much from the members on what they want to see in this newsletter, so I guess I will keep “tweaking” until people say they can’t stand the changes. Let me know what you want – please!

Last month I reprinted an article by Dave Bogan (Editor of the Greater Evansville Bonsai Society) on growing stronger ficus. One of the interesting things about the article was the statement that ficus ‘may not’ need as much water as we think. Last winter, when my ficus were in the basement under light, I made sure that they were continually moist. After reading Dave’s article, I decided to try an experiment. One ficus I am letting dry down more before I water it, the other I am keeping moist just like I did last winter. It is still early, but it appears that the one that I am letting dry down is doing better than the one I am keeping moist. By doing better, I mean the drier one is putting on growth and isn’t losing as many leaves as the other. The one that is moist is continually losing leaves, has no new growth and the leaves aren’t as green as the other. I am using the chopstick method on a daily basis. If the stick is moist after I pull it out, then no water. It looks like in my current environment (more lights and a higher wattage than last year), that the “dry” ficus needs to be watered about every 5th day. The hard part is trying to determine just how dry to let that one get. The moist one gets water every three days. I don’t have enough nerve to try to transplant them at this time of year into the fast draining soil that Dave recommends. I will do that later when the trees go back outside. As with most bonsai things, it takes a while to come to a firm conclusion but it looks promising. It is still early and I will report more on the effects later. If you don’t remember, go back and reread Dave’s article, it has some great information in it. Of course everybody will not agree (that goes without saying), but if anybody wants to write a rebuttal, I will publish it as soon as I get it.

I also want to take a minute to publicly thank my wife, Betty, for her help in proofing this newsletter every month. She tirelessly (and with little prodding) goes over every word of these newsletters to ensure that the spelling and punctuation are correct. She catches many ‘goofs’ that the spell checker doesn’t catch. Putting out a quality newsletter takes a lot of work for the ‘proof reader’.