Newbie questions about root over rock and other stuff

[Qmagds]

Hello! I am very new to bonsai, I just started getting seriously interested in january. So I don't even have a single tree. In this post I have a bunch of different questions about different subjects, and maybe they would be better asked in their respective sub-forums. But since they are probably very noob-ish questions, I thought they could work here. Please tell me if I should do something differently! This turned out very lengthy, so I have a TLR at the bottom if you don’t want to listen to me ramble, heh.

Alright, so I know that the best idea would be to buy some nice nursery stock that I can work on immediately, and I plan on doing that, (right now I am thinking either a cotoneaster (Cotoneaster lucidus), hawthorn (Crataegus flabellata var. grayana), or purple chokeberry (Aronia x prunifolia) as they all are very hardy for my climate, relatively easily accessible, and flower and carry fruits (which I love the look of) but I haven’t had any opportunity to go to a nursery. In the meantime I haven’t been able to resist buying other plants. Currently I have three variegated Ficus benjamina, (in the same pot, got them from a grocery store) and five tiny bay leaf saplings. None of them are mallsai, they were just in normal pots. All of them are very small, their trunks are all less than 5 mm (0,2 in.) thick. I view them as future investments, that I will hopefully be very glad I got them and let them grow in a few years.

1. I thought I could take advantage of the undeveloped nature of the ficus, since I would really like to turn at least one of them into a root over rock. From what I understand it is best to start with a small sapling for that, so that it develops with and into the rock. Ficus benjamina are also well suited for root over rock, I read. My question is, how would you recommend I go about this?I have found a lot of different ways to do it online, but all of them included guiding the roots into the cracks, and filling the cracks with moisture retaining soil to coax them to follow. Then it is covered up with soil and left the heck alone for at least a year. But I saw one person cover the roots with tin foil to stop them from growing away from the rock, and another method was to fill up around the rock with plain sand. I am a bit sceptical of the foil method, for some reason it feels like it would cause a lack of breathability which might be harmful? I don’t know. And will the roots truly avoid growing into the sand?
   The rock that it will be planted on is also a work in progress. I don’t have any pet stores that carry cool textured rocks close to where I live (which was a tip I saw for finding suitable rocks), and the local rocks are not great either. The ones in the pictures are the most promising ones I have been able to find. The first one, with the blue drawings marking the potential placement of the sapling and roots, is the one I feel has the best potential. I don’t really like the color of the rock, but the shape feels interesting to me, and it feels plausible that a seed could sprout in it naturally. I think I might have to fill up the cavity a bit though. I also like the dark color and white streaks of the rock in the second set of pictures. Do you think any of them have any potential, or should I bite the bullet and order some better rocks online? In any case, I wont do anything with it until it is warm enough for it to be outside in the sun.
   
   
2. Regarding the bay leaf (Laurus nobilis), I mostly bought it because I would really like to have access to fresh bay leaves, and having it in a pot means that I can grow it where I live despite the harsh winters. The question is if it has any potential as bonsai? I have found some nice pictures of bay leaf bonsai, but not many. How come? Is it a bad idea to try to do anything with them? I have five tiny saplings, the rest of them I promised to give away (and I really don’t have the space). I trimmed the top when I planted them, as they were in squished together in a small pot, and I thougth it would help the roots recover if I removed some foilage and the growing tips.
   
3. I mixed a small bag of perlite, some regular potted plant mix, and aquarium gravel to make a hopefully decent well draining soil mix. It’s what I planted the laurels in. I now know that pumice is generally better than perlite and serves the same purpose, and I think it might be a bit heavy on the organics, but I suppose I will find out. I heard that finely crushed bricks/terracotta could be good to add, what is your perspective on that? What can I do differently the next time I mix soil? It’s all very overwhelming. Oh, and in the bottom of the pots I put some leca and shards of terracotta, which should help drainage, right?
   
   
4. Can you recommend a good resource about fertilizing bonsai? I can’t seem to find any consensus about what to use. A chain nursery has a store close to me, and they sell a liquid fertilizer made of fermented organic matter. From my understanding natural fertilizers are generally preferred, but it doesn’t list the NPK. Could it be a good option? Maybe I should try comparing it with another type.

So, TLR:
I am an extreme noob, who currently has some Ficus benjamina, and many bay leaf saplings. I plan on getting a bigger plant from a nursery
I want to turn at least one of the ficus into a root over rock, how would you recommend I go about this? And do you think any of these rocks could make a good ROR?
Are bay leaf trees even suitable for bonsai?
Can you make a decent soil mix using potting soil, perlite, and gravel? Would adding crushed terracotta help?
How should fertilizing be approached?

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

 

[dbonsaiw]

First off, welcome aboard.

The internet is your friend and you should use it as much as possible to learn. For example, I know nothing about bay leaves (other than I put it in sauce), but a quick Google search shows a number of bay leaf bonsai, so I presume it is possible. Also found a quick care guide - https://www.chinesebonsaigarden.com...prefers partial,diseases of laurel, leaf spot.

As you get deeper into this craziness, you will find there isn't necessarily consensus on many of the most prominent issues in bonsai - like soil and fertilizing, for example. Ultimately, you will need to understand the differing approaches, experiment and find your way.

The best advice I can give to a newbie is learn as much as you can, stick with it/roll with the punches and don't get attached to your first attempts at bonsai. Don't lose sleep over soil and fertilizing. Your soil is fine for now and I'm sure your trees will be fine if you just sprinkle some Osmocite on them. Think of at least year one as your apprenticeship and you will be pleasantly surprised how much knowledge one can acquire about little trees.

Always a good place to start for resources - https://www.evergreengardenworks.com/articles.htm

 

[Gabler]

Hello! I am very new to bonsai, I just started getting seriously interested in january. So I don't even have a single tree. In this post I have a bunch of different questions about different subjects, and maybe they would be better asked in their respective sub-forums. But since they are probably very noob-ish questions, I thought they could work here. Please tell me if I should do something differently! This turned out very lengthy, so I have a TLR at the bottom if you don’t want to listen to me ramble, heh.

Alright, so I know that the best idea would be to buy some nice nursery stock that I can work on immediately, and I plan on doing that, (right now I am thinking either a cotoneaster (Cotoneaster lucidus), hawthorn (Crataegus flabellata var. grayana), or purple chokeberry (Aronia x prunifolia) as they all are very hardy for my climate, relatively easily accessible, and flower and carry fruits (which I love the look of) but I haven’t had any opportunity to go to a nursery. In the meantime I haven’t been able to resist buying other plants. Currently I have three variegated Ficus benjamina, (in the same pot, got them from a grocery store) and five tiny bay leaf saplings. None of them are mallsai, they were just in normal pots. All of them are very small, their trunks are all less than 5 mm (0,2 in.) thick. I view them as future investments, that I will hopefully be very glad I got them and let them grow in a few years.

1. I thought I could take advantage of the undeveloped nature of the ficus, since I would really like to turn at least one of them into a root over rock. From what I understand it is best to start with a small sapling for that, so that it develops with and into the rock. Ficus benjamina are also well suited for root over rock, I read. My question is, how would you recommend I go about this?I have found a lot of different ways to do it online, but all of them included guiding the roots into the cracks, and filling the cracks with moisture retaining soil to coax them to follow. Then it is covered up with soil and left the heck alone for at least a year. But I saw one person cover the roots with tin foil to stop them from growing away from the rock, and another method was to fill up around the rock with plain sand. I am a bit sceptical of the foil method, for some reason it feels like it would cause a lack of breathability which might be harmful? I don’t know. And will the roots truly avoid growing into the sand?
   The rock that it will be planted on is also a work in progress. I don’t have any pet stores that carry cool textured rocks close to where I live (which was a tip I saw for finding suitable rocks), and the local rocks are not great either. The ones in the pictures are the most promising ones I have been able to find. The first one, with the blue drawings marking the potential placement of the sapling and roots, is the one I feel has the best potential. I don’t really like the color of the rock, but the shape feels interesting to me, and it feels plausible that a seed could sprout in it naturally. I think I might have to fill up the cavity a bit though. I also like the dark color and white streaks of the rock in the second set of pictures. Do you think any of them have any potential, or should I bite the bullet and order some better rocks online? In any case, I wont do anything with it until it is warm enough for it to be outside in the sun.
   
   
2. Regarding the bay leaf (Laurus nobilis), I mostly bought it because I would really like to have access to fresh bay leaves, and having it in a pot means that I can grow it where I live despite the harsh winters. The question is if it has any potential as bonsai? I have found some nice pictures of bay leaf bonsai, but not many. How come? Is it a bad idea to try to do anything with them? I have five tiny saplings, the rest of them I promised to give away (and I really don’t have the space). I trimmed the top when I planted them, as they were in squished together in a small pot, and I thougth it would help the roots recover if I removed some foilage and the growing tips.
3. I mixed a small bag of perlite, some regular potted plant mix, and aquarium gravel to make a hopefully decent well draining soil mix. It’s what I planted the laurels in. I now know that pumice is generally better than perlite and serves the same purpose, and I think it might be a bit heavy on the organics, but I suppose I will find out. I heard that finely crushed bricks/terracotta could be good to add, what is your perspective on that? What can I do differently the next time I mix soil? It’s all very overwhelming. Oh, and in the bottom of the pots I put some leca and shards of terracotta, which should help drainage, right?
   
   
4. Can you recommend a good resource about fertilizing bonsai? I can’t seem to find any consensus about what to use. A chain nursery has a store close to me, and they sell a liquid fertilizer made of fermented organic matter. From my understanding natural fertilizers are generally preferred, but it doesn’t list the NPK. Could it be a good option? Maybe I should try comparing it with another type.

So, TLR:
I am an extreme noob, who currently has some Ficus benjamina, and many bay leaf saplings. I plan on getting a bigger plant from a nursery
I want to turn at least one of the ficus into a root over rock, how would you recommend I go about this? And do you think any of these rocks could make a good ROR?
Are bay leaf trees even suitable for bonsai?
Can you make a decent soil mix using potting soil, perlite, and gravel? Would adding crushed terracotta help?
How should fertilizing be approached?

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

I like those first three rocks. Ficus are best repotted in early summer when they’re outside getting lots of sunlight, so watch some videos on YouTube about making ROR bonsai, and then take a look at your ficus trees’ roots in about a month to pick the best one.

I don’t know anything about bay leaf trees.

Skip the potting soil and gravel. Perlite and crushed ceramic can make good soil components. Add in a bit of pine or fir bark or maybe chunks of coconut husk. You’ll be growing out these trees, so an organic soil component will improve your growth rate. Later, when refining trees, you’ll want to minimize your use of organics to slow your trees’ growth.

 

[Paradox]

Choose one of the seedlings to do root over rock.
The best root over rocks are started with a seedling that has roots that can be molded/grown over the rock and you can wire the trunk to give it movement and make it a convincing picture. Trying to strap down a larger straight trunk tree onto a rock never works. The roots will not mold to the rock and it just ends up looking contrived

 

[SWfloirda]

I tried a root over rock with a small leaf variety of benjamin. It worked fine but the big roots looked like carrots wrapped around the rock so I took it off. I have several projects but my two best are from Ficus Microcarpa sold to me as Green Island but have been told they are green mound, green emerald, long island, etc.
Simply planted both of them as small cuttings with the rock in a large pot and uncovered the rock over time. Both of these projects were started in Dec. 2018

Another ficus on a rock

This project also started December 2018 with no pictures. This one was two hairy sticks in a pot with a rock. March 2019 April July 2019. Decided there should be only one tree per rock.

www.bonsainut.com

Green island ficus on a rock

This project started December 2018 but I have no pictures until June 2019. It started as a stick with aerial roots all over it buried in the pot with potting soil. September 2019 January 2020. It had a good hold on the rock. It had more roots than I thought it would but they were all very...

www.bonsainut.com

 

[SWfloirda]

I started this project early last summer. The top of it partially broke off in the hurricane I was able to secure it back in place but my hopes are not that high. I plan to wait until at least the end of this summer to do anything else with it other than water and fertilize.

 

[Shibui]

I can assure you that the foil method works very well despite any misgivings you may have. I've been using foil for root over rock plantings for nearly 20 years and it has definite advantages over all other methods I have tried before.
The blue marks on the rock look good for potential root over rock as roots on at least 3 sides are needed to hold the tree stable on the rocks. The real question is whether your tree will have the roots to match. I generally start with a selection of rocks and trees hoping that some will match because chances are that a single tree won't have the right shape, roots, etc to match the single rock. The rock is also a good shape.
Given it is a first attempt it probably doesn't matter too much if something is not perfect. As most others here can attest, not every attempt results in our ideal bonsai so it is likely most firsts will be trials in which we learn and then start another, better attempt.

Fertilizer is not difficult. Trees generally take what they need from any nutrient solution. The wide range of nutrient mixes available shows that plants can still thrive with a range of different ratios. My guess is that the mix you mention with no NPK is a seaweed based solution. Seaweed varies in nutrients according to time of year and place they are harvested so the company cannot legally claim it to be a fertilizer or post a guaranteed nutrient analysis however those products do have some nutrients and can be used to fertilize plants but are best used as a supplement to a known nutrient supply.
Plants are only interested in the nutrients they can take up in the roots. In essence those are chemicals, even if derived from organic sources so I sincerely doubt that the plants can tell the difference between organic and chemical sources. Hydroponics uses chemical nutrients exclusively and plants seem to grow exceedingly well. I would use the product you have found but also keep looking for a real fertilizer whether it be organic or chemical based.

Despite all the heated arguments about soils it is possible to grow good bonsai in a wide range of soil mixes. That's one of the reasons there are such widely differing opinions - everyone is correct.
Crushed terracotta is a viable component and provides good, long term stable, drainage particles, holds good water and nutrients.
Organic components are not all bad. In some places they can be very valuable as a water retaining component and definitely provide some cation exchange meaning holds onto nutrients.
Whatever soil mix you choose you must learn to water and manage the plants in that particular mix.

I have found bay trees to be very tough but also very slow growing and a bit reluctant to produce branching and ramification. You will also battle suckers constantly but we already do that with olives and serrissa so not a reason to reject the tree. As your main stated aim is to have bay leaf source it probably does not matter if the bay trees don't end up as show winning bonsai. They will be valuable for learning techniques and care of trees in post so I would urge you to keep going with them while also looking for other, better bonsai species.

 

[ShadyStump]

Ficus benjamina is a great first tree!
Resilient, workable and responsive, loads of fun to play with, and literally EVERYTHING you cut off and be turned into another tree to play with.

HOWEVER, they are not a great candidate for ROR.
They tend to grow big tuberous roots that can look just ridiculous in that situation.

Not the one I was thinking of, but this should help answer questions about bay laurel suitability.

Bay Tree?

This is a bay tree grown entirely in a very large clay pot. It was given to me when it was about 8 ft. high a few years ago. Last spring I chopped it down and wedge cut the right branch close to the trunk to pull it down. The some of leaves are starting to reduce well (#3 pic) on that branch...

www.bonsainut.com

I just eat mine, and for that you want the mature leaves, and this is one of the few herbs that really is better dried. The younger and fresher, the more bitter.

There's a search function at the top of the page you can use to find others' threads on most topics, as well as a section of the site devoted to learning resources. There you can check out MarkyScott's explanation of soil physics to answer all those questions. Once you've picked up the pieces of your brain from it being blown, you'll know everything you need to.

But always remember the most important rule of life: if it's stupid but works, it isn't stupid!

 

[Qmagds]

Thank you so much for your answers! It is humbling that so many experienced people are willing to share their knowledge with noobs on forums like this. I didn't notice the resources tab, I'll check that out before I go asking questions about things you have already answered a hundred times before.

Based on what you have said I think I will wait for it to get a bit warmer, and then split up the ficus in individual pots and let them thicken. I didn't know about the tuberous roots thing, I just figured since they have aerial roots they would be okay with having a lot of exposed roots, and thus be suitable for ROR. I'll save the rock for some other plant.

I skimmed through all the links and threads you sent, seems like I have a lot of reading to do. I thought I had made a decent amount of research, but there is so much I don't know. I look forward to understanding more and being able to put things to practice!

The consensus about soil seems like there is none. Whelp. I suppose I will have to try myself and find what works for my environment and plants, and then I don't have to feel ignorant when some of the experiments inevitably don't go as hoped

I have found bay trees to be very tough but also very slow growing and a bit reluctant to produce branching and ramification. You will also battle suckers constantly but we already do that with olives and serrissa so not a reason to reject the tree. As your main stated aim is to have bay leaf source it probably does not matter if the bay trees don't end up as show winning bonsai. They will be valuable for learning techniques and care of trees in post so I would urge you to keep going with them while also looking for other, better bonsai species.

This and the thread linked about bays is a very pleasant surprise! Yeah, I plan on trying different techniques with them and seeing what happens, little lab rats.

 

[Michael P]

A technique that may help you with ROR is to plant the young tree in a tube pot or a piece of PVC pipe with a very free draining mix. The roots will grow rapidly downward, giving you long stringy roots in a year or two. These roots are easy to arrange over the rock, then use any of the methods others have suggested. The roots will still need to be covered and slowly exposed over time.

I like to use vinyl grafting tape to tie the roots to the rock, then cover them with soil, muck, sphagnum, or even foil, lol.