A place to talk about bonsai plants. Share your bonsais!
Started this from a random seed found on a street about 5 years ago. Today is the first transplantation, if it survives, it's brothers and sisters will follow! Not sure it's optimal time for spruce transplantation, but the previous planter was 4 times smaller (soil footprint could be seen in center, with intact moss layer).
This is awesome! I've never had luck getting trees to grow from seed.
The best time to transplant trees is usually in the late fall or early winter. You want to do it after letting the tree acclimate to the temperature. So a few weeks before you want to transplant it, put it out at night and bring it back in during the day.
Oh, these plants are outdoor bonsai, these trees are perfectly accustomed to this climate (thick snow, -30C, some sunless days, etc) and totally do not tolerate indoor tropics.
I tried transplanting some local trees in the fall, as textbooks say, and they perished pathetically. The best time must be some other time. I suppose the best time should be early spring when roots did not wake up enough, but then I might need to break ice. Then now is fast growth slowdown moment, I suppose it must be the next best bet. I'm doing one at a time now!
I had (still have) huge problems growing from seeds. The only things that help are:
Then things start to move.
Unfortunately, this way I can't get anything exotic. Even the places that seem decent enough, like Palmatum, send the seeds that just do not work (I had better - order of magnitude better - results with seeds from supermarket apples than from apple seeds they sent me; I wish they sold 5-needle pines and sequoias fruits in supermarkets!). Things are so desperate we've made BAP-6 growth hormone and I'm going to try it on purchased seeds, it must work, I just didn't try yet (someone told me it does exactly the right thing - germinates strong seeds - after trying it, it's my turn now). Here, you can buy some from my store if you like to try it too https://store.zymologia.fi/hormones/24-37-6-bap.html#/17-weight-1_g - it's just as hard to cook 1g as 1kg (apart from reagents cost and work of putting this stuff in jars), so why not share.