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With a new year upon us it marks a good time to change things up a little.
At the start of spring, Evan Marsh put me onto a cheap dosing attachment available from our friendly, faceless multinational hardware chain.
It has been a good addition to the garden so far as it’s ease of use has really upped the regularity of my feeding and all my trees are showing excellent health and growth as a result.
I always liked to think that i fed regularly but when i though back to when my last weekly feed was it was often months ago……. This new dosing attachment makes the process so simple and convenient i have been able to feed as i water and it has kept me to my intended schedules much more easily.
For those interested, THIS is the product in question, the Holman ‘Quickmix’ spray gun.
After the Quickmix discovery, then came the task of deciding what fertiliser to use. I tried some of my usual go to liquid feeds but their paste like consistency clogged some of the jets and just generally didn’t feed out very well in the Quickmix.
So after very little experimentation I have landed on the below system:
The fertiliser itself is intended for Hydroponics so has a good spectrum of nutrients and minerals but requires some preparation prior to use. It is a 2 part system where you need to mix a ratio of the crystals and water into 2 parts prior to combining the two into the Qickmix before you feed. It is my understanding that some of the minerals will re-crystalise if you leave the 2 parts mixed for any period of time so best to mix the two prior to feeding.
To use the Quick mix i add about 5mm of each 2 part solution tot he Quickmix and top up the bottle with water. Then i simply water using the gun. The gun has some adjustment for the dosing rate but as i have lower pressure from my water tank’s pump i just use the maximum rate. (more details about the dosing rates on the Holman website)
I have made my pre-mixed solutions in 2x 500mm bottles. I have been feeding each week and have so far used less than a 1/4 from each bottle. This stuff goes a long way! For $25 i think i will get several years worth of feeding done so i cant complain on the value side of things. All in all i am very happy with the system thus far. This combined with a slow release seems to be covering all the feed needs i have for now.
Things have been a little slow on the blog of late. I have been busy with work and have just had a wrist re-construction on my dominant hand. It is slowing me down but I have a bit of time off work now to recover from the surgery so hopefully I can get a few posts written.
My wrapped up hand.
As for my bonsai, they havent slowed down a bit. My new fertiliser regime seems to be working as I have a whole lot of healthy growth.
A well fed pine.
The problem this time of the year is finding room to add more fertiliser. Most of my pines have their soil surfaces pretty much covered. I will be starting to replace the older fert bags with new ones in the coming weeks.
With all this feeding I have got strong healthy pines with lots of new growth. All this new growth will be coming off in a few weeks once de-candling time arrives. I am still not sure how this will work one-handed but I should be able to get it done one way or another. I will make sure I have a few pics taken to document the process, in the mean time I will try to get a few things done around the yard and get a few posts uploaded.
Most years i make fertiliser cakes from a range of ingredients (usually what is cheap or on special when it comes time to buy them) although the cakes that I have previously made have never really lived up to expectations.
For those that have used the fertiliser cakes in Japan I am sure you would have noticed an interesting thing. When the cakes have been on the soil surface for a few days they begin to get a white felt like mould on the underside and begin to omit a pleasant fermenting kind of smell. When I worked with Mario Komsta, he always got excited when he saw this mould as it was a sign the cake was breaking down and feeding the bonsai.
The cakes I have been using here in Australia have never got the mould that those in Japan got. I put this down to a couple of things. Firstly climate. Japan gets a whole lot of rain over their summer where as here in Australia we are usually hot and dry for most of the summer. The problem I was having with my cakes was that they were drying out and were then hard to re-wet and get them breaking down again. Japan was always so humid over summer that the cakes once wet stayed moist and were able to break down.
To try to combat that this year I am trying using my ingredients loose inside tea bags. The idea is that they will be much easier to re-wet each watering and hopefully break down much more quickly and hence feed my trees better.
Tea bags, for making your own tea blend bags and a pair of scissors I need to re-profile.
I found a cheap supplier of tea bags in the form of a Japanese 100yen shop called ‘Daiso’ which has just opened a couple of stores in Melbourne. $2.80 for 100 bags.
The mix I am using this year is fairly basic:
- Cottonseed meal – 5 part
- Blood and bone meal (including trace elements) – 5 part
- garden lime – 1 parts.
Filled bags.
The process of making the fertiliser bags is fairly easy and mess free. I fill the bags with a large spoon full of my mix and fold the bag shut. The cakes are now pretty much ready to go on the trees, but I do one more step prior to putting them on my bonsai.
Soaking in fish emulsion.
I soak the filled bags in a fish emulsion solution to fully wet the ingredients and add a bit of extra fish emulsion kick to them.
Bags on the bonsai.
Once on the soil I like to place a small dimple in the top of the bag/mix so that every time I water, a small amount of water pools on the surface of the fertiliser and helps to re-wet it.
Now it’s not the most attractive solution but it does have a few extra benefits out side of easy re-wetting. Firstly because all the ingredients are contained in the tea bag this stops a lot of the loose material clogging up the soil surface and hindering drainage. Then they are also very easy to remove and replace at de-candling time which is also a plus in my book. Possibly the biggest side benifit is there is no smell while making the cakes using this method, and no smell means no complaining neighbors and stinky backyard. Also not having to dry cakes means you can make them early in the season before the weather heats up to drying temps.
I look forward to seeing if i get the white mould and the working fertiliser smell……. fingers crossed!
Nichigo Bonsai 