Fish out of water

kalei

Hi Everyone,
I'm new to the sport of Bonsai, and before I unload a barrage of questions, thanks for being here. I feel an addiction coming on, so its nice to see there is a support group for my newfound affliction. *I've been a fish geek(aquarist) since I was a kid(I'm 40 now), but my experience with horticulture has been limited to mowing the lawn. Probably should start with a spider plant.
Anyway...
My wife bought me a 'malsai' juniper for my birthday a couple weeks ago, and true to my obsessive compulsive behavior patterns, I'm now the proud parent of: two small azalia's about a foot tall, a 'miniature' ficus(the leaves are about an inch long) about three feet tall, a small boxwood eight inches tall, and a three foot pinion pine which I dug up and potted.
My first question concerns the ficus. The plant has five distinct 'trunks'. Are they all from the same root ball, and if so, can I separate them? *I guess the same question goes for the boxwood. It also has multiple trunks.
I want to repot them and can already see myself staring cluelessly at drying roots.

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ripsgreentree

Kalei: Dry roots will never be a problem if you keep a spray of water near you while you work. I personally use five gallon buckets of water to hold soilless plants befor and after being root pruned. The ficus is probably a clump of cuttings that may or may not have inarched together and seperation is very possible. The boxwood will be a single trunk with long spindly limbes comming from a single trunk and seperation will be much more difficult and much less common. The trick with the box wood is to remove the correct trunks to create a single tree or a 2 or 3 trunk arangement. I hope that this helps.........ripsgreentree

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ripsgreentree

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