San Pu Kai Club

Joanie

The San Pu Kai Bonsai Club meets in Vista on the second Tuesday of every month, at 7 pm. Meetings generally run until about 9 pm and include snacks. It is a very small, friendly club which welcomes newcomers and makes them feel at home!

San Pu Kai has one show, in the spring, held at the Buddhist Temple nearby.

Our next meeting, on Tuesday, October 11th, will be highlighted by a guest speaker who will give us a powerpoint presentation on soils. His name (I hope I remember this right!) is Joe Dupont, and he is a professional who works in the field of soils for a large grower.

Please feel free to add your comments, insights, information, and whatever else about San Pu Kai to this thread!

Joanie

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Joanie

We had our meeting tonight, and Joe Dupont and his wife and two adorable (but bored) daughters gave the presentations. Joe works for Heinz Nursery as a soil professor. His lecture was about the differences between bonsai soils and nursery soils.

Why would we want to know this? Well, first of all, anything we can learn about our trees and their growing conditions previous to our receiving them, helps us understand the environment they were in, what they may need from us for continued success, and what we need to do to change their soil for the better.

Joe had a slide show with a lot of pictures of the nursery operation, showing us from start to finish how a really large nursery operation works. He explained the special challenges in our local area... such as the Colorado River water that we import, which is full of salts. He clued us in on the reason that our local nurseries use in-soil slow release fertilizers... (hint:EPA) and explained the delicate balance between cost effectiveness and the results that you need to achieve to survive in such a competetive business. Even the smaller nurserymen in the audience appreciated Joe's knowledge and asked many questions. He was an engaging and friendly speaker, and we enjoyed it immensely. He brought bags of soil components for us to "touch, stick our noses in, and play with". He brought plants from home that he knocked out of their pots while talking about fines and soil horizons, mychorriza (sp?) and the difference between the mixes for different trees.

We all came away from the presentation with a greater appreciation for what nurseries have to consider, why they use the mixes they do, why the mixes are successful for their conditions but not for our bonsai conditions, and why bonsai soil would be utterly impractical for a big operation to use!

Our next meeting should be Tuesday, November 8th, but that is election day so I will confirm that beforehand. Our scheduled speaker is Ted Matson, who is a dynamic, exciting man... he is as much a motivational speaker as anything! If you don't just want to grab some pruners and wade into your trees after Ted's demo, you must have been out of the room! I don't know what kind of tree he is scheduled to do, (hoping for a maple or liquidamber, those are Ted's specialties I believe) but whatever it is, it will be exciting!

Joanie

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Joanie

I guess I didn't update for December or January... oh well.

Our next meeting is Valentine's Day, Feb. 14th, 2006. We are going to get a truckfull of "Bob Knox Rocks". Bob is bringing some great DG (I think it's DG) to share with club members, who need buckets to reap the harvest. FREE SOIL INGREDIENTS... always a good thing.

We are also going to do ACCENT PLANTS, a sort of kusamono potluck. Bring your extra grasses, reeds, alpines, steppables, moss, etc. if you have them to share... and bring a couple of accent pots or rocks to plant on. Cindy Read will discuss the aspects of kusamono that we need to know to present them to full advantage. We will have soil available to use. While we're at it, we will be making some to sell for the spring show to raise funds. ('Nut, if you read this, I'll be calling to see if you have accent pots to sell)

Joanie

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