This is the time of year for working on the tropical house plants. Many of my orchids are growing, even though the house is cooler. Too cool in the house to keep my ficus active, so no work on it. My lone Bursera has new buds popping out all over, so I watered it for the first time since October. (Nice thing about using desert species, long dry rest periods) I have the Bursera potted in a relatively coarse mix, in a very porous clay pot, that dries out rapidly. In active growth it gets watered several times a week, in summer daily with the other bonsai, in autumn it goes dormant, I leave it out until it has had a light frost, then it goes on a sunny windowsill, and left completely dry until I see new growth. Then regular watering resumes. The peeling bark is interesting, probably will never make a traditionally acceptable bonsai, but it is a woody tree. The uneven swelling of the spongy layer below the bark causes regions of reverse taper, same problem as with Opercularia, Difficult to get smooth transitions after trunk chops. We will see how it looks in a few more years.
Reading, seed catalog shopping, cleaning empty pots, cleaning and sorting out. Also time to go through the photos I took over the year, crop, edit and perhaps post on forums what I did over the summer.
Seeds that need a warm stratification, followed by cold stratification, will go into the cold storage about January first. For me this year, these are Hornbeam seed, and Pawpaw seed. Both need 3 months warm & moist, followed by 3 months cold and moist. Otherwise it will take 2 years to get germination. The pawpaw is not for bonsai, the leaves are just too big, branching is too coarse, but I love eating the fruit. Got the seed from a wild tree with particularly good fruit. Unv. of Kentucky has a breeding program trying to improve the pawpaw, maybe in 20 years there will be enough select cultivars that one might see it become a commercial fruit tree, but at the moment, if you want a pawpaw, you have to grow your own.
It is not too late to pick up seed and put it into cold stratification for spring germination. I enjoy propagating stock, with the intent that others, in the future will be able to use them for bonsai. You can create shohin from seed, in less than 25 years, but generally I view raising seed as a nurseryman's project, I don't expect to see them become finished bonsai under my care.
