Bonsai Mums In Small Spaces, How Do You Do It?

[Slippy One]

2 hours ago, Amarillo slim said:

Look at those faces and tell me you'd rather give the money to an overpriced nutrient company 

 

I don't really care, the pellets are pricey but per pot is pennies. I'm sure beanstalk isn't the only 90 day feed out there, but your scraping the barrel on nutrient cost/ethics in comparison to electric costs. 

 

 

[MindSoup]

4 hours ago, Amarillo slim said:

Don’t froglet, unless otherwise stated,  peat based mixes have a shit tonne of lime added

 

Yeah true, although on the bag it says about it being formulated for unfertilised mediums, does added lime/calcium (or whatever) not class as fertilising a medium? 

 

3 hours ago, Amarillo slim said:

Ive sent them an email, see what they say.

 

Great minds think alike . Was just about to do the same so thanks for saving me the bother . 

 

3 hours ago, Slippy One said:

beanstalk

 

I'm glad your getting on well with it, but there's no way I'll ever pay their premium. Even the way they've tried  to market themselves as some sort of revolutionary product winds me up, they're  not even the first canna company to have the idea ( grow dots were). It's a perfect example of everything that turns me off about the canna specific horticulture industry, 

Edited October 1, 2023 by MindSoup

[Slippy One]

We spunnk hundreds on leccy but fuss over the pennies per pot plant food? ?  oh dear 

 

[Amarillo slim]

Just now, MindSoup said:

does added lime/calcium (or whatever) not class as fertilising a medium?

 

Nah, I think they just mean a medium which doesn't already have NPK feed in it.  The lime added to peat is primarily for adjusting and maintaining a suitable PH (naturally its quite acidic), so whilst it is obviously adding some nutrients I don't think it 'counts' as a fertilised medium in this case.  

 

 

[MindSoup]

1 hour ago, Slippy One said:

We spunnk hundreds on leccy but fuss over the pennies per pot plant food? ?  oh dear 

 

 

Nah my grows tiny as well, probably costs more to leave my amp on 24/7 . 

[MindSoup]

1 hour ago, Amarillo slim said:

Nah

 

Oh right yeah, I'm with you know. 

[Crow River]

I'll be interested to see how you get on. I have grown mums but they were not exactly bonsai...  I used 2 litre fabric pots, which felt about right. Maybe should have used 1 litre, but didn't have any fabric pots that size. Fabric pots at least mean the roots don't have to be pruned... 

 

Am planning to bonsai my chilli plants for the winter, so any system you come up with would be transferable knowledge...  

 

 

Edited October 1, 2023 by Crow River

[a handful of grapes]

This is all from a dozen years back, grains of salt for every caveat lector and so on. I'll go on at length but ask away regardless.

 

My bonsai mums were born from cuts of a reg plant taken during veg stage and rooted in a jiffy cube, thereafter maintained in a 2-liter square pot in the shittiest possible discount brand dirt I could find. I'd prune them regularly to discourage apical dominance and create a "flat top" aesthetic, so as to get a heavily lignified treelike main stem and a radically branching top half, like on pics of trees on an African savannah. Just the pruning alone would produce 10-15 throwaway cuttings every month. The key is to leave growth on every branch you'd like to keep (i.e. those that should turn woody) and just cold hack off the ones you don't want, while giving the plant a day or two in between to rest for every two or three snips. This seems like effort until it goes half on autopilot like "is this bit ugly? off with her head" marie kondo style.

 

Feeding was kept to a minimum, what's left on the bottom of the watering can when veg-stage plants were given their biobizz grow and a bit of plain water to dilute it down even further, and every time I fed them they'd sprout a fair bunch of new shoots. Cos of the starvation regime the regular leaves were light green but the pruning would keep them from turning yellow and dying off. Roots were also pruned around once every two months: I'd take the root ball out of the planter and chop about a centimeter and a half from four sides & the bottom too with a bread knife, then replace with fresh dirt and feed very lightly. This would also encourage lots of new growth which would need "management". Eventually I switched the side parts to a coco/dirt mix which improved water retention a good deal so I could leave the mums alone for a week or so at a stretch.

 

Lighting was 2x 18W fluoro tubes on a 20/4 cycle (night for keeping temps reasonable), temps around 22°C and higher during summers. The mum cab was located above a yank-style fridge with the freezer compartment on top, not sure if that made a difference. Together with reduced transpiration cos of very little leaf material on there this let me bring the watering schedule down to every other time I'd handwater my production tent, so about once every 10 days cos it was still the bad old HPS era.

 

What I liked about bonsai mums was first, having weed plants that didn't look like weed one bit, and second getting several clones at a week's notice by adding the tiniest dregs of veg stage feed. It was as though the plant had dark purple balls & would gush forth with its magic given any nitrogen at all.

 

It's often said that bonsai mums should be kept to a 1l planter. I don't agree with that, I think that's got too little water in it which means too narrow a safety margin. But aside from that the classic guides are bang on, might want to have two mums side by side and try things out, maybe play some bondage games with one to spread her branches out a bit. Most stuff online about general non-weed bonsai maintenance is also somewhat applicable with the caveat that weed is a single-year plant that grows very quickly compared to maples and oaks and whatever else people use for more traditional bonsai, so it needs more nutrients and artificial light close by.

 

Ultimately I wanted to try even weirder mum stuff like grafting to create a multi-mom with strain A on one side and strain B on the other, but circumstances had me move out and the mums got flowered out and smoked.

[latigid aikon]

14 hours ago, Crow River said:

Fabric pots at least mean the roots don't have to be pruned... 

You should still be root pruning mothers in fabric pots, otherwise you're not gradually replacing the 'spent' soil. The root pruning also helps trigger the bonsai response, the leaves stay much smaller which makes them easier to manage.

[Crow River]

@latigid aikon good point. I should maybe mention that when I potted up to the 2 litre, I did trim the roots back. But yeah, I need to do it properly next time...