Just ask your entire extended family to collect their nail clippings. Problem solved!
Reminds me that in A Brocade Pillow it says to collect your own excrement and to fertilize with that.
The thing with keratin protein is that it releases way slower than manure. And that bone is a lot of carbonate minerals. Feather meal would maybe be very similar. The Japanese like to make their fish meal & cottonseed meal fertilizer.
I found it strange that I can't get any cottonseed meal fertilizer here in the EU. I have a bag now of pelletized dried clover. But it is extremely low NPK.
Not sure at all what this guy is doing fertilizer-wise is ideal. But it seems way better to put small pellets of keratin protein inside your kanuma than to put dried chicken manure in there.
@leatherback
I really liked your video. Content creators that do 1.5+ year progression videos are so valuable. The way you set up the nebari for the azalea is completely how I always undertood it they do it in Japan.
I did hope you got more healthy growth off your azaleas. Maybe it was just the season where you recorded, because the root volume looked good. Azaleas often have a sorry look late winter even if they are healthy.
But, I have struggled myself with my kanuma plants. I have a few that did amazing, then some dissappointlments.
Then this winter I put a while bunch of Kozan and Chinzan cuttings in both peat and 100% kanuma. to see if I can set them up for proper nebari and proper whip growing. And they rooted so well in my indoor system I let them dry out several times and most are bust, but the entire pots were completely filled with roots.
I bit off more than I can chew with all that work load. I am pretty lucky now that the weather is rainy now so far, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to repot what I did.
What I like to see is this:
You'd want those long thick water sucker shoots that grow at least 20cm long after they start in mid June. But I myself rarely get them on satsuki. Give me a greenhouse, automated shade cloth 0.0 EC water, automated fertilizer, mabye I can do it in the European climate.
Which is why I think that if my cuttings didn't go bust, I would also have grown them group planted in a tray. That's what they do in Japan with whips too. I must have pictures scans from my own Satsuki Kenkyu scans or from the ones translated by Koyo Bonsai (went offline but I have most of them. I never saved the 'Satsuki Whip Shaping World Championship' ones, though). Bu I am not sure I can find them within 5 minutes if I try now.
