Rjoyce
Mame
Hi Nuts, I am fairly new to bonsai and have no experience with air-layering. I have been reading quite a bit about it, but I still have a couple of questions. There are a couple of crab-apple trees at my work which the building manager has mentioned need to have a major trim, so I am hoping to ask him if I can air-layer off some branches first. I want to check and see if these air-layers would even work before asking him and starting a big project that is destined to fail. Here are the main potential problems I see with trying to layer these particular trees:
1) The trees are quite big and the majority of the branches are at least 10 feet off the ground. If I use sphagnum moss and wrap it tight with plastic wrap, and maybe a layer of foil, would it be entirely necessary to water the layers often, since I don't really want to have to get out a ladder and climb to each branch every week or two?
2) Most of the branches, except those in the crown almost 20 feet up, have bent and sagged downward from the weight, so most of the sections I would want to layer would actually be upside-down. I am assuming this would be the biggest problem, but I am hoping someone with experience will tell me it is worth a shot. There are still some smaller branches at the end that are facing upward, but they are rather skinny, straight, and uninteresting.
If anyone has any advice, I would greatly appreciate it. And if the possibility of successfully doing these layers is zero, I could always just try some smaller layers and cuttings. Thanks in advance!
-Ryan
1) The trees are quite big and the majority of the branches are at least 10 feet off the ground. If I use sphagnum moss and wrap it tight with plastic wrap, and maybe a layer of foil, would it be entirely necessary to water the layers often, since I don't really want to have to get out a ladder and climb to each branch every week or two?
2) Most of the branches, except those in the crown almost 20 feet up, have bent and sagged downward from the weight, so most of the sections I would want to layer would actually be upside-down. I am assuming this would be the biggest problem, but I am hoping someone with experience will tell me it is worth a shot. There are still some smaller branches at the end that are facing upward, but they are rather skinny, straight, and uninteresting.
If anyone has any advice, I would greatly appreciate it. And if the possibility of successfully doing these layers is zero, I could always just try some smaller layers and cuttings. Thanks in advance!
-Ryan