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bonsaiTALK Neophyte
Join Date: Aug-2003
Location: Fuquay-Varina
Country: US
Posts: 7
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Ficus Benj. Should I? Or Should I Not? (Long)
You guys are going to notice my posts are usually kinda Long...
I was tending to my primary hobby the other day, chameleons, and I noticed something that I have not before. The roots on my oldest ficus tree are AWESOME!. I never noticed it before, until reading up on Bonsai. Most of my older trees, sheff. and F.benj., are in dire need of repotting, and very rootbound.
The result is that the soil has settled down past the roots, exposing them. The oldest one, I've had about 4 years[and it was fairly decent (about 3 feet) when I bought it] and have never repotted it, just added soil and put it back in the old plastic, Lowes pot. It's about 5' high, but has many trunks, and some are over an inch thick. I also have several sheffelera that have gone through various stages of abuse, drying, overwatering, rootboundness, soil deprevations, and everything ele you can imagine. An older one, which has returned from thedead this summer, has three very nice, thick, branchless trunks about 3 feet long. There's no telling what the roots look like. I want it to recover a bit more before I mess with it.
This weekend, my in-laws are coming over, and they have a nice 3.34 million pixel camera. I'm going to take some pics and post them to see if you can give me a reccomendation on which direction to take, if any.
I have a surplus of trees for my chameleons, they prefer the bushy, tall sheffeleras to anything, so the long woody one and the ficus are "expendable" as chameleon plants. Both have nice thick trunks and roots to work with(although the ficus has one set of roots crossing over each other, which is, as I understand a no-no...but that can be repaired)
As you can imagine, the environment I keep for raising my chameleons is very good for growing these trees, so I figured I might as well try.
Let's say I'm going to do this. should the first step be to yank them out of their confining pots, trim the excess and bottom roots, then repot in a shallower, yet wider Bonsai pot? They kinda need more room to spread anyway.
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