lifting field grown trees

[craigw60]

Heres a glimpse of the work I am doing at the moment. This is preparation work for pre-bonsai, field growing for me is just about getting some nice basal flare and a good trunk any sort of refining is done once the tree has moved into a pot. These trees are all going straight back into the ground again this is just their annual check up.
Craigw

[Jow]

Some nice work there Craig,

I guess it is proof that you cannot just plant somthing in the ground and forget about it. To get good results you have to work at it, and if you do you are rewarded with results like you have shown.

Joe.

[kcpoole]

Nice stock there Craig
Congrats on the hard work you will have some excellent stock to pass on soon

Ken

[Jarrod]

Its good to see what these look like out of the soil. The hard work is paying off! And the root work is doing what you want it to do!

Cant wait till the lindens are a bit bigger!!!!

[Scott Roxburgh]

Awesome work Craig, this is the root work that'll bring these trees up to top quality show trees in 10-15 years time. You are to be commended for putting all of this work into these trees.

A few questions though:
Are they from cuttings?
Were they planted on/through anything?

When are they for sale?

[bodhidharma]

Excellent work Craig. It is nice for people to see the work put in and what it takes to produce good Bonsai.

[daiviet_nguyen]

Hi Craig,

I like the trident that you show here. I have put just put down 10 small trident. They have have root radiates around the trunk. I trained them into shallow pots for about 2 years to get kind of roots before grounding them. I hope that the roots will get fat evenly in the ground.

What I also found, even though two tridents are of equal health in the pots. Yet on the ground, just half a meter apart, one will grow like mad, the other can be very slow. This did happen to me on more than one occasion.

Thank you for the info Craig.

Best regards.

[craigw60]

Thanks for the comments
Scott the lindens were bought as bare rooted stock 10 years ago, they seem to be quite slow growing but the scars heal very easily
The palmatums I just dig up seedlings from my garden, in some parts they come up like a lawn
The tridents grow from cuttings, cuttings seem to work better for me as they throw out a radial root system and any that don't get binned
The elms are grown from root cuttings
I find that if I get a nice radial root spread going before they go in the ground there is no need to plant them on anything
David, I have never had that issue with my trees they all seem to grow very well with no special care, I grow them in pots for 2-3 years before planting them out to get the roots sorted and chuck out any that don't have good root bases. I lift and root prune them every year to keep the roots balanced. If you leave them too long without root pruning you will find a couple of roots become very strong and the nebari will become lop sided, the other advantage of annual root pruning is that it makes them much easier to lift.
Craigw

[anttal63]

Yes it goes to show that True Bonsai is not for the lazy or non committed. Like everything, you want results, you gotta work for them, no fluffn around! You are the man and the inspiration thanks for sharing !!!

A close friend and I are about to put 200 trees in the ground. All have been either collected or prepped in pots over the last 3-5 yrs. Lookn forward to some kick arse material too !!!

[craigw60]

Thanks Antonio, its really not that much work, pretty full on at this time of year but I have a couple of months to do the root work. In summer I go over the trees and cut back any branches that are growing back into the proposed trunk line and strip the sub-branches off the sacrifice branches which are growing in close to the trunk all to get light into the centre of the tree. The worst job is keeping the beds weeded, how I hate weeding and this spring is going to be an explosion after all the rain we have had.
Craigw