Growing Bonsai From Seeds
Most people start out with a young bonsai tree and learn to groom and care for it while gradually becoming more efficient at pruning and wiring. But sooner or later, most people want to grow their own bonsai from seeds. Here’s some tips on how to nurture bonsai seeds so that you get a healthy plant.
Trees can grow from cuttings or offshoots of other trees or from seedlings. When growing a bonsai from seed the first thing you need to do is germinate to seed. Nature has a way of helping the seed germinate. Outdoors, a seed will lay in the ground all winter long as spring approaches the wet ground softens the shelll of the seed making early growth easier. Bacteria in the soil also helps with this process.
But you, as a bonsai artist, will be growing seeds indoors so how do you simulate this? The first thing is to start your seeds up just as nature would in the fall. You can use a method called cold stratification which is a way of simulating the outdoors by preparing your seeds and putting them in a special container inside the refrigerator which would simulate winter.
Of course, you could also grow your plants outside by planting the seeds in the soil. They should be done in the fall as normal seeds will fall at that time of year. Whether planting indoors or out, your bonsai seeds will probably be dormant for year and a half and germinate 1 1/2 years after your fall planting. This length of time is different depending on the climate and species of bonsai plant.
Just like anything else, bonsai seeds need the proper nutrients to grow. Helping your seeds out with some fertilization once a month can nurture them. Fertilize in the early spying and till mid-summer with a 10-10-10 NKP solution. Start fertilizing them as soon as the soil warms up in if you are growing them indoors you can simulate this type of spring by using a heat lamp to warm the soil.
To help your seeds germinate you need to keep the soil moist but you don’t want it to be too wet as too much water will rot your developing seed. You might try using a moisture gauge which is a device that looks kind of like a thermometer and measures the water content of the soil.
Make sure you use good-quality soil for your bonsai seeds and monitor them periodically. Plant the seeds about one quarter to ½” underneath the soil. When you see a little tiny tree poking its head up above the dirt you’ll know that you’ve sprouted a baby bonsai!
Growing bonsai trees from seed takes a lot of patience, he can take more than a year for your seeds to even sprout. Along the way, you probably have some false starts and you’ll need to experiment to find the best way to grow bonsai’s from seed.
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