Care Of Your Bonsai Trees: Pots, Plants and Tools

Once you've decided on what type of tree to use, go buy a sapling, ideally with a skinny stem and some small branches. Since trees naturally grow better outside, it's a good idea to plant your sapling in an outdoor garden for awhile to let it mature. Once it's matured a little bit, enough to survive a move indoors, it's time to transfer the sapling to a pot. Before transferring, make sure the sapling doesn't have too long of a tap root, if it does, just cut it off about half way down.

Before transferring, it's a good idea to mix up a nice potting compost. You can use two parts sand or grit to help with drainage. Using the same soil from your garden can work out fine as well. Just be on the lookout for weeds, since we don't want to put any chemicals into the compost at this time, because they may be harmful to the tree.

So, at this point we've got a little runt of a tree sitting in our pot. Not to worry. With the proper care your bonsai will flourish into a beautiful miniature tree in no time. Of course, the most obvious thing your tree needs to flourish is water. Always keep the soil moist, but not too wet because we don't want to damage the fragile root system that is currently growing. You should generally be watering your bonsai at least once a day.

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At this point, it's not a good idea to keep the tree inside. Let it grow out in the garden like a young tree should. It will go through all the normal seasonal cycles that a tree goes through. If you planted your tree in the spring time, it should survive the winter months just fine. Again, this will vary by geographic location, so you may want to perform further research on your own.

Once spring rolls around, you can start to get creative with how you want to sculpt your bonsai. The first thing you want to do is pull it from the pot and have a look at the roots. Generally, you're going to want to trim away around a third of them to help control the growth of the tree.

Next, be sure to replace the potting compost, as well as adding in another two parts of some sort of drainage aid, such as sand. Now you can really get to work on shaping your tree. Get a pair of decent gardening shears, and carefully start trimming the branches from your tree to make it look the way you want to. It'd be nice to get it perfect the first time, but it takes some time to really master the art of sculpting. It isn't difficult to get the tree to look good, but it is difficult to get it looking exactly the way you want.

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