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Scooter the Mighty · 19-01-2007, 03:53 AM posted to rec.arts.bonsai

wrote:
"Scooter the Mighty" wrote:
wrote:
My wife heard me singing "Just lie there by the Juniper." When she came
back from Chinatown today, she brought me a small Juniper (?) bonsai.
How do I care for/train it?

The main mistake people make with these is keeping them indoors. The
Juniper is an outdoor plant, it needs a lot of sun and it needs to get
cold in the winter.

A correctly potted bonsai is usually in a very shallow pot with many of
it's roots cut off and a fast draining soil. If this is true of yours,
you'll want to water it a lot more often than you would a house plant
that has soil that holds more water. Most of the small bonsais that
people casually buy in chinatown (i.e. bonsais that don't cost hundreds
of dollars) probably are potted more like house plants and require less
water.

You'll want to repot it every few years.

Thanks, Scooter. It's been below freezing here the last few nights, so I
brought it indoors to avoid root freeze. It's in one of those 2" square
thin black plastic 'pots'. It's now on a west facing windowsill in our
bedroom, which runs around 50°F this time of year. Once the frost danger is
past, I'll move it back outdoors. I don't think the soil is well drained,
as it's still quite moist. I'll repot it into a proper Bonsai pot in the
Spring, if I don't kill it first, as I did with a Bristlecone pine some 20
years ago. It needs a lot of Sun?

50 degrees is too warm, you should move it back outside or it'll break
dormancy.