Bonsai, baby, and barbecuing!

The post is pretty self explanatory once you read the title but I thought I’d share a few pictures of the bench at the moment. I’m of course not the first to BBQ and blog bonsai, Adam has already done that, and his posts are much more entertaining but I thought I’d post an update on how the bench was doing at this point in the spring. First I threw some burgers on the grill.

Then I snapped a few pictures in between playing catch with my son Jacob. He’s got quite an arm!

My yard has a pretty steep decline to it so while everything looks a little wacky in the pictures, the table is actually level. I put the taller trees on the lower (but higher on the hill) left bench and the smaller trees on the right. This keeps everything close to eye level. The tropicals in the last picture were outside way too early and are alive but struggling.

Then I decided to take a few night shots including my korean hornbeam which was decapitated this spring, my itoigawa that needs tweaking, and my japanese maple forest that is looking pretty good.

Thanks for reading, and happy Memorial Day.

Pines from Seed

On February 22nd I sowed about 25 seeds of Japanese red pine as well as Japanese black pine. I planted similar to how I did a few years ago except that I didn’t use a seed tray. I also poured near boiling water over the seeds on recommendation from a Bonsai Tonight post. I first noticed a JRP sprout about two weeks ago and today I noticed a JBP sprout. The plan is to make seedling cuttings with about half of the seedlings I get this year.

First JRP sprout:

There are about ten sprouts now for JRP:

I have been checking daily to see a JBP sprout which for some reason are about two weeks behind. You can barely see it in the middle of the below picture:

Updates to come in the future!

More Angles of Itoigawa and Other Spring Shots

There was a request for more shots of my itoigawa so I decided to have another post. I thought I would also attach a few more varied spring photos.