paddles wrote:I was going to do a fused chinese elm..... (you need approx 100 pluss seedlings, and at roughly 3- each.....) So I was doing it by seed, I had roughly 100 chinese elm seedlings growing in the backyard, Then my father, a lovely helpfull man, decided to whippersnip the "weeds" of course in amongst the weeds were..... You got it, my elms. one of the things I found during this process, was that the seedlings grow at greatly varied rates, some shooting up, some seeming to stagnate, i can only recommend that the more seedlings you get access to the better, and also, make your frame VERY sturdy (Mine came appart while attempting to get the trees wired to it) obviously the thingys I used to tie the wires together was not good enough.
Oh, and if you can get a current email address for doug? (I'll look it up in a sec) he's very happy to talk about the fusing process. (Or he used to be anyway)
here is his website
https://www.dugzbonsai.com/
hey paddles
i was thinking of doing it with elm aswell, but the research i done discovered that they wouldnt fuse as easily as tridents. instead of getting a flatter fuse you would get more of a circular pattern through the trunk, its like they would fuse but keep there shape too
does that makes sense ???
so hence the tridents are what i got
i have 100 seeds to do this with so hopefully it works out ok as my frame is only 6 inches high by 6 inches across. going sumo style
and also my frame has been soldered together, i am a metal fabricator by trade so i got the gear
JayP wrote:i'm pretty sure this is the same guy i had read about in the magazine article, i think it may have been 'international bonsai'. i actually have a small taiwan trident maple with quite a lot of seed on it but i know nothing about maple seed, if you are interested in a future project maybe we could work something out..? i would happily collect as many of the seed as possible and send them to you for stratification, if say when they are ready for germination you sent some back.?? let me know
it would be the same bloke
and yea we can work something out mate
collect them up by all means. cant say no to free seeds which can be future trees
and the stratification process is quite simple but i would be happy to do it for ya and then send them back
here is a link to a thread that shows the process in detail to the instructions i received with my seeds.
viewtopic.php?f=103&t=2200&p=24114&hili ... eds#p24114
this shows everything i did, so if we work something out you could give it a go to, because ya know the more thats going into stratifcation the better chance that we have of getting things to germinate. i am going on the basis that ya gotta get a hit eventually if ya keep swinging
let me know ya thoughts any way mate
and ozz, ya got that right
jamie
taking the top half of trees of since 2005! 
