With Spring coming up, the daffs and irises are already out, can I ask what others use for slow release fertilisation of container grown Acers. This is more aimed at members from the UK and Europe as there have been discussions before but the products often recomended are not available to us over here (as far as I know). I am guessing that most use one of the Osmocote slow release fertilisers, but which I and in which form, or does anyone use Fish blood and bone? John
HNY to all and i hope eveyone is looking forward to the coming season. John i have always used Miracle gro 'Rose and shrub' slow release fertiliser 1kg tubs the one with the blue cap in all of my container trees. The only time i add this is when i re-pot or lift large trees into larger containers, the rest of the time i just feed all of the trees with a good drink of liquid seaweed concentrate usually around March time then again at the end of Autumn and thats it for my trees for the season with regards to feeding. Interesting to hear you have some early spring bulbs breaking , same here too have a large clump of daffs in the garden about 8cm at the moment quite amazing to see them coming up through all the water which is in the garden at present with the never ending rain which is just getting beyond a joke now six weeks + of non stop rain!!!! , plus quite a few of my container bulbs which are in total darkness in the shed are also starting to break cover. Today has been the first day that i have actually had a good look round at evey one and to my relief they are all looking mighty fit and healthy at present did quite a bit of tying back and re directing branches today. Quite a few trees which were cut back last summer are all starting to show new little red bud growths so that's encouraging to see, usually i cut back some of the old trees in November but decided to hold back last year because of all the rain and wait till the spring, think that was a good move with all horrible weather we have had, the wettest November and December in Yorkshire since records began, don't think i will be watering anything until around May time :) Mark
Hey guys, Happy New Year indeed, all the best for 2016. Mark @ROEBUK I hope you're not flooded out anyway, we've been seeing some crazy pictures on the beeb. Been wet down here but nothing comparatively, although continually very windy and warm with only a single freeze. Have daffs out and even Iberis as well as summer bloomers like geraniums and roses here and there. Many caudatifolium seedlings are still in green leaf, no doubt thinking they've come up in a tropical environment! Some of the early ginalla have already burst bud with small leaves, some of the other early maples look disturbingly close. I use the hydrangea osmocote when repotting but also dig a little into a pot if it's not getting upgraded that year. I also sometimes use the "repotting" osmocote but the hydrangea seems to be what they like most. The only other fertilizer I use (very sparingly in pots) is powdered seaweed, it's quite high in nitrogen and so you have to go easy. I really only use it if something in a pot seems "stuck." Worth noting that my purpose with pots is to put on root quickly so that the maple can get planted out, so not really container culture as such. The fish meal or blood and bone attracts critters, which is the last thing I want, so I don't use them. Foxes seem to like the smell of the latter a lot. -Emery
Happy New Year to all. Its sure been a wet one and I take 2 weeks off at Xmas, usually get to grips with pruning and other garden chores but its been way to wet. Mind you Roebuk, I cant complain after seeing the TV and how you guys up North have suffered. I have been starting to winter prune and the sap is already rising so need to get on a move on if the weather allows. I have some plants that bloom in May in flower now, Rosemary is in full bloom. I have never fertilized container grown Maples before, I just re-pot every 2 years and this was done last year. However I wanted to give them something as a boost as they sometimes stand still and stagnate. Put them in the ground and they take off. The ground planted maples just get a top up every year of organic Mulch, either compost or well rotted manure and they thrive. So thank you for the advice. I had been looking at Osmocote on-line but there are so many different variants and I wanted to ask what others use. Good point with the Fish Blood and Bone with critters. the squirrels already dig in some of the pots burying acorns. John
Emery and John thank fully we are at quite a high elevation where i live and also a distance from any rivers for which there are many in the West Yorks area, so we were spared the horrible house floods which many thousands have suffered. But i still have saturated ground to contend with, (of little interest to the people you have lost nearly everything) but all the ground grown maples seem to be coping well at this present time, no one looks to be struggling and even the container trees seem happy as well. One thing i have noticed today is the cold front starting to make it's way down from Artic, big dip in temperatures and it's supposed to get colder during the back end of the week. On a lighter note though my 30 +year old Honeysuckle which garlands our front door is making a marvellous comeback from last years attack of aphids which left it with a severe bout of Honeydew mould. Thought i was going to loose it , but after what can be only described as a major major pruning exercise which the likes of i have never done to any plant before i am delighted to see it's now completley full of new green shoots,so fingers crossed i might have just saved this? going to spray this one as well just to make sure i don't get a repeat attack. John have a little try with various Osmocotes and see which one suits your trees, one thing i did try last year was the micorrhizae on around six re-potted trees so i will look forward to see if i get any marked improvement on root growths etc. We had one squirrel last year that seemed to like burying wheat/corn which we put out for the wild birds etc,now i am finding various little patches of wheat growing in the containers where he burried it then forgot where he put it, not the sharpest squirrel in the box !!! Emery i seem to be putting more of my trees in the ground also where i can find space, but am limited to what i can put in the ground owing to the fact that the trees i planted out over a period of years all seem to be growing at an alarmingly fast rate, so i now have the dilema of lifting a few certain cultivars over the next few years so i can stunt their growth and keep them at an acceptable size for my garden in containers, all of my Viridis are now in containers plus a few of the larger leaved varieties which were lifted last year. Sad to say but i am officially full up in the garden now, well i can just squeeze in a Shigitatsu sawa and two more Amber ghost's and that is it no more !!! :):)
I know the full up feeling well, most of my pruning is to keep my maples within there bounds although the younger ones are pruned for shape. My wife says no more, where are you going to put them, but there's always a maple or two that catches my eye and finds its way home. In fact there are 7 new cultivars by the back door that the wife hasn't yet seen. I also take the time to train branches to the shape I want, especially on young maples. I've used micorrhizae since it was over the last 5 years and am not so sure it helps with in ground planting. I always mulch if you lift the mulch there is extensive white fungal threads so I reckon the garden soil is healthy. However in pots after root pruning I reckon it helps. I am usually quite aggressive with root pruning new maples where the roots are a tangled circling mess and have never lost one using micorrhizae
John bet you would love to get your hands on this one for a good root prune? that's one big root system for a small tree, just trying something with this one from last years lifts. Maybe it will work then maybe not, will know in a few months time though . Had a fun few hours with this one last year. What i tend to do if i bring a new tree home is leave it in the car in the garage, then bring it into the garden under the cover of night fall :)
Cover of darkness, lol, she has learned where to look and keeps an eye out now. Mind you, when we have people round she likes showing them around and has taken an interest to some degree. Separate bank accounts would help hide the new aquasitions. I'm running out of excuses for new purchases. Maybe we should have a new thread, reasons to buy just "one more maple". Wow, that's a real monster. There's some real girth at the trunk base and some nice twist in the trunk. The roots are very impressive. I have cut back into the root system thinning out much more than the example in the photo when putting into a pot and never had any problems. Just need to stake for 9 months if too heavy. Roots then end up very fibrous and easier to trim back in future. I use a saw and cut away from each side and the base on future root prunes. Obviously need to keep an eye on the watering. I installed drip irrigation on all my container maples last year, buried a ring main around the edge of the patio and put a riser to take off from where groups of pots are placed. That's given me more time to attend to other things. John
Just an update on this tree 'Garnet' which i was playing with last December, decieded it was planted in the wrong area of the garden so i thought i would lift and containerise for this year.Was really going to do a major root prune on this tree so wasn't really to concerned wether it made it made it through the winter as i already have another two garnets, plus i was given this one for free years ago so i had nothing to lose. The first pic in this thread was #7 on Jan 8th see above, just dug this up and it was caked solid in thick hard mud tried teasing the mud out with various blunt impliments and was getting nowhere,so thought i would take it to my local car wash and give it a good spray down with the jet lance (got a few strange looks) but it did the trick, removed every piece of remaining mud stones etc and was left with this rather immpressive looking root structure on the tree. Managed to trim the fibrous and thin roots out with the secateurs but needed to cut the remaining thick ones off with a bow saw they were that thick, removed quite a substantial amount of roots see pic then the only thing i had to re pot in was an old storage box which is only 400 x 480 x 250cm, drilled a few holes packed with fresh new medium and re potted. Left the new growth of branches from the summer on around the broken branch wound, but these were then removed in Feb of this year, last two pictures are of the tree today seems to have pulled through ok and there is also new growth around the old wound, so it goes to show some of these old established trees can take some drastic pruning and still bounce back.
Well done! It seems to be thriving now. Had you left it where it was in the ground, i think it might have died: judging from the second photo, the roots were kept too long circling inside a pot and were beginning to "choke". Planted in a badly-draining soil, that means death in the short term.
Just goes to show how resilient maples are. I no longer worry when moving a tree or having to drastically prune and your pics show they just bounce back as long as not allowed to dry out whilst they recover. My first few trees were just planted with teasing out a few roots when pot bound. A lot of these had issues with girdling roots which became evident much later. Last winter I dug down and removed large girdling roots from 2 to these trees which would have gone on to kill them. Both trees have shown no ill effects and are putting on plenty of new growth. I always thin out some of the top growth if major surgery is carried out on the roots. I now never take a tree out from a pot and plant, I remove all soil from the roots, extensively prune and remove any problem circling roots, no matter how large. At times I have had to remove most of the root mass on young plants and they have always survived. I had a red Pygmy which was always struggling with weak growth and severe die back. I gave it the above treatment and cut it back to the main trunk, removing all branches and not expecting it to recover. That was 2 years ago and it's now a nice shape, health and putting on lots of new growth. Just goes to show how resilient they are.
Thanks for refreshing my English ;0) You're right about resilience: we, bonsai enthusiasts, totally remove the old soil before repotting maples and the roots can be pruned drastically. This is of course for the plain species, which includes the rootstocks of most cultivars. It's not surprising , take for instance this "accidental cutting" I have good hopes to see forming roots. It's the top of a bonsai whose top I chopped, and I discarded the cut in a bowl that is always filled with water since it stayed near trees that I water every day. several weeks later, I was about to throw it away when I saw it was beginning to form roots! So I did what I do with air layers: refreshed the cut, applied some hormone powder, wrapped it in sphagnum moss and put it in a plastic pot with a free-draining mix (60% akadama, 20% pozzolane and 20% composted pine bark). Photos taken on 10/05: Today, 18/05: I'm reasonably optimistic: cuttings taken before budbreak can grow leaves for months before they wilt because they feed on the sugars stored in the wood but never produce roots, though I already had some success with late-winter cuttings. But here, I'm quite hopeful. We'll see...
You will have to keep us updated on whether you have success with rooting. Fingers crossed and here's hoping, but I wouldn't be surprised if it takes. I am determined to have a go at bonsai at some point, it will get around the problem of running out of space with larger maples.
Here's a reverse scenario of my Omureyama from field grown to container then back to the ground with selective pruning and tying for straighter shaping and encouraging a better weeping effect on the branches. Saw this in the field where i buy the majority of my Acers in 2012 always stick with one nursery if possible then you know the quality of the stock on offer, go look at them over a period of time,went to see this tree on three seperate occasions before i was allowed to bring it home. Picked it out in the summer of 2012 was duly dug up in the fall and re potted , first pic is in the March of 2013 then the second pic is in the June of that year , only then would he let me take it home because he was happy that it had surrived with no stress and re budded and leafed out with no problems and it was good to go to it's new home. Left it as it was until the new year of 2014 then decided what needed to come off to try and create a lovely weeping tree. Firstly i removed all the lower branches because they served no purpose what so ever and just made the tree look unsightly and didn't contribute to the asthetic look i was after. Then i spread all of the three main branches apart and held them spread out with a wood frame pic 3 this enabled me to get into the tree and remove certain branches which were spreading in all directions and crossing over and growing upwards as well, trimmed all of these out and tied certain branches to go in new directions, gave the root ball a good trim removed the frame tied the top of the main branches with a large rubber tree tie which in turn created a small amount of uplift on the appearence of the tree, then planted out in a huge new hole with plenty of gravel on the base for better drainage. Last pic is of the Omureyama today certainly is growing more, lots of new buds basically every where, plenty of new buds where i removed branches from the inside of the tree and even on the old wounds where i removed all the lower branches just keep rubbing these off every time they come out. Two or three more good growing years and this should look like a good weeping tree, the branches are certainly begining to droop more now and give the effect that i am loking for.
That's one beautiful tree. Like you, I do a lot of tying, staking and using tent pegs to tie branches down to the ground. Never used a wood frame before, I may now borrow that the idea. Omureyama is one tree I wanted for a long time and now have one which I have been training for the last 18 months. If it ends up anything like yours I will be well pleased
Just giving an update on this thread the Garnet in 9# is having a make over for this year trying to make it look a bit more interesting ? maybe it will maybe it won't , surrvied last years experiment ok, so it's in a smaller pot now, a few branches removed then some wired and shaped out, see what happens "Garnet a la Bonsai" :) :) HYN by the way.
Very interesting post everyone, loads of detailed information and great photographs. Lots of character and shape your Garnet has Mark, will be interesting to see what it looks like as the year goes on.
It failed :( In August, the leaves were still green and looking healthy but there had been no growth so I checked the roots: there were none and the bark ad begun to rot.
There is an article upcoming in the Maple Society Newsletter discussing how to root JM cuttings. Not sure if it's for the Spring or Summer, but looks interesting, stay tuned! I've had some luck with winter cuttings for A. cappadocicum. This winter I had a lot of Chinese Poplars to do, so I'm trying cappadocicum ssp sinicum and X zoeschense at the same time. Will update if they come out. -E
