If you would have slowed down a little and looked at the page for a minute or two, You might have noticed the word "bonsai", not bonzai, 10 or 20 times:-).

You ask questions that require a book to answer. Hit the library and check a few out.

It's a total waste of time to put a seedling in a bonsai pot. It's much too shallow for anything that small to thrive in and bulk up to end up being something worth working on. It will be years before your twig is ready to play with.

Move it to a container where it can grow for a few years. By that time you'll have done some reading and know what to do with it:-).

I love growing from seed and find it very fulfilling. But I also have a long term approach and I'm not a newbie wanting to learn everything about bonsai in one paragraph:-).

You need a number of cheap things to play with and learn what you can and can't do. Seedlings don't fit the bill. Cheap stuff dug out of your yard or things purchased from a garden center are what most people learn from.

randy

Hi, first of all, would you mind calling it bonSai? Thanks. Yes, absolutely, get it into a larger pot for a year or two (not hugely bigger, but definitely somewhat). It won't get meaningfully bigger otherwise. Second, water only when ~ half of the soil is dry from the top down (leave an unvarnished chopstick in the soil halfway out to the pot edge and every couple of days lift it out like a dipstick and see where it's still moist. Keep it in as much sun all and every day that you can. When you repot, stay far away from peaty soil, but coarse loam is good, but it should be only half or 1/3 of the mix, the rest being that smaller, roughish gravel you can buy in an aquarium store (and do mix it all well). Don't use a pebble layer on the bottom, do use a pot with 1-2 decent sized holes and don't try to grow moss on top. Bring it in only when night time temps go below 40 Fahr., and try to supplement lighting 6" under a good full spectrum fluorescent x 14 hrs/day in winter. Good luck, and I suggest you do as much reading (books, not just the web) on bonsai as you can before thinking about styling or anything else. Root pruning is for when you want it to go into a bonsai pot for display, when training's finished, but that can be years, though if you use a b. pot that's larger than you'd normally see your tree in on display, that's ok, as long as the roots have somewhere to grow into. You'll need to check it every year re being rootbound, but once it's the size (and has the great fat trunk olives are grown for) you want it to be indefinitely, then you'll start gearing back on pot size - but by then you'll have learned how to do it.

MAAAN RJJI you need to take a chill pill...Jesus...you treat this like it was a life or death situation...calm down or you might end up causing yourself a heart attack or something...

************************************************************************************************************************
Lucy - You are a Gemm, thanks for the help. I will take on your advice and get my little "twig" as RIIJ liked to call it sorted out. - Dont know what his/her problem was.
Anywya, again cheers for your advcice/help

Why rob3188, thanks for the concern for my health. It's certainly made my day.

Good luck with your bonzai:-)

randy

Your welcome,
Thought this was supposed to be a friendly site n so on...
one only asked for advice...

It is a friendly site. All the things you seemed to take offense to (other than twig) were said in jest, tongue in check, on the lighter side. Unless things have changed in the last couple of years, that's what ":-)" is supposed to denote.

If you choose to get your knickers in a twist over it, no problem with me there.

Sorry if twig offends you, but that's what it is. Even the most gentle of experienced bonsai artists will find a way to convey that to you.

But there's nothing wrong with owning twigs, I have a few thousand of them:-). Just don't get the mistaken idea growing that seedling is the road to learning about bonsai unless you are a slow learner and you're waiting to make decisions in the process after your plant finally gets some size to finally do something with it.

You need to get something you can start working on now or have someone else show you what can be done with it. That's the process most go through.

Workshops are done with plants that have some potential at the moment, something you can visualize how it will look before you take the cutters to it. Not some seedling with a few leaves and maybe a branch or two an inch long:-)

randy

No worries...
must have read it wrong. Thats the problem with text, its sometimes pants to realize what is serious and whats not...
No harm meant anyway.
As for my 1 inch twig...it aint doing to bad, as said I was on holiday and just on the off thought of trying to grow a bonsai tree, this was about 2 years ago, so I took about 4 olives from a tree in the Nice area and planted them just before we had our little son, 2 well one of them started to shoot grew about an inch and then weathered away and at that time the 2nd one popped out and is now about 2 inches long, I can see the root coming out the drain hole of the bonsai pot that is why I thought I'd ask. Now - over the weekend - I will get a bigger pot and mix up some soil for it and re-pott it and see what happens. As to how I invision it - I have an idea what I want to do with it (if it makes it to that stage...) I also want to have a go at a red maple tree just need to get some seeds.
Anyway, no harm meant, just read your entry wrong - my bad!)

If you can find an apropriate species of micorhyzal fungus you can prevent your roots from growing too long and help your plant grow quickly and healthily.

Ummm Brendan - who told you that about mycorrhizae? That's a new one on me - the root shortening. If root growth is slowed, so is everything else, and while mycos are good in some instances (mostly conifers), they're not going to keep roots from growing.

Are you familiar with Mycorrhizal (I'm dislexic, the y and I got switched on me, sorry) fungi? they replace some of the root function and as an effect the roots do not have to grow as far in order to get the surface area they need in order to uptake water and minerals. A plant is like any other living thing, if the plant needs more sugar it puts more energy to leaf production, if the plant needs more Water and minerals it will put more energy into roots, which we then trim down once they get overgrown. While some plants rely more heavily on mycorrhizal's than others virtually all plants will get atleast 99 percent of there root systems surface area from them some plants go even further. Unless you are growing rhododendrons or Blueberries chances are you will never grow a plant that doesn't for that relationship. This is an area of Gardening that has vastly improved the relationship between man and plant in other areas and it can certainly help in Bonsai.

Brendan, I think that you and I have learned from very different schools, and I guess that whatever works for you is good, but not necessarily for everyone else. What's similar to me about rhodos and blueberries is their need for acid, but mycorrhizae are something else - literally (apples and oranges here). I think I'm just going to agree to leave this one (and the other post) alone for now - and thank you, but I wasn't referring to TM about the orchids (he never mentioned them), though never meant to offend, just to sort out one issue from another.

They do both like Acid soils, but more importantly to this issue is that they are the two plants that arent mindboggleingly rare that do not for symbiotic relationships with micos. I'm not sure if you can get his column but there is a garden writer Jeff Lowenfelds who is a big proponent of Micos, most of what I learned I learned from A botanists, Bio classes, Garden columns, and academic journals.

Hmmm,
I think I will stay on the slow path here and enjoy the progress my twig is making, I have now taken your advice and repotted my olive tree, in the process I have noticed that 2 more of the olive pipps I planted have now begun to sprout. So I left them as is and moved the other to its own pot...
Anyway, cheers for the help. I will be down my local book shop and try and find a decent book on Bonsai, problem is there are soooo many to choose from.

I do know that mycorrhizae is quite benificial for bonsai, but that's not going to keep the roots short (or short enough). You don't exactly dwarf a bonsai, you keep it small. Thus, roots are not kept from growing, but rather they a trimmed back periodically to encourage to growth of finer roots.

Not-so-long story short, myccorhizae's good, but don't depend on (or expect) them to keep your roots in check.

-Audric

Alright, Mycorrhizal Fungus will not dwarf the tree, or maintain the roots for you, what it will do is reduce the tendancy of your plant to produce those long roots that spiral in the bottom of the pot or the ones that come out of the drain holes. The link at the bottom is the first abstract I could find on the effect of micos on root length. They just allow your plant to do the same amount of work with fewwer and smaller roots.

Here is a link that might be useful: Its on Corn unfortunately

Go to google.com and type in MYCONOX. Its a cool product thats easy to use. AS we all are discussing here, Mycorrhizal inoculant makes plants grow stronger. Its just a power you apply to your plants soil

Here is a link that might be useful: Myconox