Trip through the nursery.

white ume

pink ume

San Jose juniper

Yatsubusa black pine

Today I continued transplanting trees.  I placed several 2 and 3 gallon trees into 5 gallon cans.  Part of the reason for doing this is to use up the nursery mix.  After using up the soil, I weeded the area and used my torch to burn away the fine weeds and the weed seeds.  Now I am ready to get 6 yards of fresh nursery mix.  After all of the hard work, I walked around the nursery and took a few pictures.  Two of the pictures are of the ume.  The white one is extremely fragrant. The pink one barely has a scent.  The white one is almost completely flowered.  The pink one is less than half flowered.  I also took a picture of our San Jose juniper.  The juniper has a diameter of around 6-7 inches.  This juniper started out as a bonsai that was given to an elderly lady by her daughter.  When she received the tree, she was told it was around 35 years old.  When she moved from Los Angeles to Santa Maria, she didn’t know what to do so she planted the tree next to her garage.  She planted the tree about mid way along the wall of her garage and planted the tree about 18 inches away from the wall.  There the tree sat for about 20 years before she called me.  I get this call from the lady and she asked me if I could help her shape her bonsai.  I was relatively new to bonsai at the time, but I decided to go to her house to try and help her.  I asked her where her bonsai was?  She told me that I was standing next to it.  What I was standing next to was this rectangular juniper hedge that was yellow from neglect.  Yep, that’s my bonsai she told me.  This hedge was 4 ft tall, 4ft away from the garage and about 12 feet long, (almost the entire length of her garage!).  I told her I could work on it but that I would have to come back with a chainsaw.  A few days later, I fired up my chainsaw and began to work on the tree.  After a few hours, I was able to see the trunk.  Since the interior of the tree did not receive any sunlight there was hardly any foliage.  Just a few small shoots near the interior of the trunk.  When the lady came out to see the progress, she gasped!.  ” This tree looks awful!”  I told her that it would look bad for about 3-5 years until it filled in.  She asked me if I could remove the whole tree.  After an hour of digging, I was able to remove the trunk.  Now I had my full size pickup truck completely full and about 3 feet above the cab.  I tied everything down and went to asked the lady if I could keep the trunk.  She said that I could and she paid me $300.00 for my work.  I took the trunk home and put the tree into a 25 gallon can with washed river sand.  There the tree sat for about 15-20 years while we worked on the tree.  I wish that I had taken a picture of the tree when I first got the tree. I would still like to wire some of the heavy branching and make the tree look fuller.  The other tree is a yatsubusa black pine.  This is a tree that my Dad bought from a local wholesale nursery over 20 years ago.  This older Japanese nurseryman had 4 of them and my Dad would always ask if he would be willing to sell one.  Finally after about the 5th trip, the owner said yes.  My Dad paid $300.00 for the tree.  We have been using it as a Mother tree for our grafts.  My Dad began working on the tree many years ago.  The person that grafted the tree did a poor job of grafting and the tree had horrible reverse taper.  The large gouge you see on the front of the trunk is an area that my Dad carved out to improve the taper.  If the wound heals over, I might have to gouge the tree out again.  I am also thinking of doing grafting some young saplings to the base of the tree and to let them grow uncontrolled to fatten up the base to balance the taper.  Hopefully we can correct all of the trees problems in my lifetime!