Brazilian Ironwood Hydroponic Project

[Katie0317]

Generally referred to as leca balls. They're the same thing.
If you don't care about the color and the size being uniform, you can buy them very inexpensively. They'll be grey-ish and irregular in size. We have 150 orchids so I've considered using the ugly ones but so far we've stayed with the standard leca ball. They hold water and release it slowly so they're used in all kinds of gardening projects. Primarily orchids from what I've seen.

 

[sevan]

This year went pretty well for these trees. I started the spring with 7 trees and finished the summer with 6.

By early summer they were all putting out tons of new growth, but they were getting very tall with almost no low branches. Knowing that I was going to need bring them all in for the winter, I trunk chopped 6 of them below the lowest branches to see if I could get them in a better shape for winter. The smallest one did not put out any new growth, but the rest did just fine. I also had one that I decided to move from water to soil, I'll document that one in the next post.

Here are all of the trimmed back survivors in their winter home.

The 4 smallest of the group, trimmed back to fit. The smallest of this group took almost 2 months to put out new growth, I thought it had died.


This is the one that was moved from water to soil.


Crayon for scale? I didn't notice it was there until I started this post.

 

[sevan]

The roots on one of the trees were growing out to the side in a way that was making it difficult to get it in and out of the jar. I couldn't see any way to fix the issue, so I decided to move it to soil. I thought it would be a good learning experience to see how that process went and so far it seems to be doing very well.

This was the tree at the beginning of September 2022 when I was cleaning the jars and giving them fresh water and fertilizer.


The roots were growing out of the sides of the basket and were starting to get thick enough that they were difficult to pull through the neck of the jars.



I cut the basket away to minimize damage to the roots.



After carefully extracting the roots from the basket...I cut them away ruthlessly to fit into a pot.


The bamboo is there to separate the roots, not for support.


6 weeks later and it is looking reasonably healthy and has been putting out new growth.

 

[sevan]

Not much happened with these this year. The weakest tree struggled through winter and died in the spring, the rest grew well.

I chopped them back to bring them inside a few weeks ago and new buds are starting to show. Another one is starting to get roots too large to fit through the mouth of the jar, so I will need to move it into soil. Hopefully it can wait until late spring.

End of season view.


After chopping


In their winter home


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