Nine More Free Bonsai Trees - From City Hall to Pots in my Yard, S01 E20

In my recent video on 7 ways to get free bonsai trees, the last method was to strike when opportunity presents itself. This week, I had some business at City Hall and found that they were ripping out the parking lot landscaping, which consisted of some 50-foot tall cypress trees and hundreds of fairly old natal plum shrubs. Natal plum (carissa macrocarpa) is a great species for bonsai, so I hit the workers up for a few of the scraps they'd just yanked out of the ground with their excavator. It was a very hot midsummer afternoon and the excavator wasn't gentle on the roots, but they let me grab a few and I turned them into 9 new bonsai trees.
Natal plum is a woody African evergreen broadleaf shrub that thrives in tropical and semi-tropical climates. It produces small white fragrant five-petal flowers and small fruits that turn red and purple when ripe. It prefers night temperatures above 50º F and daytime temps above 68º F, but it can tolerate temps as low as 25º F (-3.9º C). In America, it does well in USDA zones 9-11. It can tolerate winds and salty soil, so it is often used as a hedge or ground cover in Southern California beach communities, but it is also thorny, and every part of it is toxic (except, curiously, its ripe fruits, which are edible and full of nutrients), so it's not uncommon in my area to find gardeners ripping it out. It's also frequently used in landscapes in Florida and Hawaii.
It propagates easily from seeds or from cuttings. It is best repotted in mid-summer. It does best if you remove no more than one-third of its root mass. Uh oh...
These plants will do fine in full sun, or in shade. They can even grown indoors with the right lighting - try to give it at least 6 hours of sunlight or a grow lamp.
#DrunkBonsai, #Bonsai, #BonsaiArt, #BonsaiLife, #BonsaiTree, #BonsaiTrees, #bonsailifestyle, #Urbandori, #FreeTrees, #Repotting, #Pruning, #PruningBonsai, #NatalPlum, #CoastalBonsai, #Landscape, #LandscapeDemo, #Yamadori, #Opportunism, #Tropical, #SemiTropical, #bonsaitreesforbeginners, #bonsaiforbeginners, #BonsaiCalifornia, #BonsaiUSA, #BonsaiSoCal, #BonsaiOC, #Zone10, #Colorvision, #Rum, #Beer, #MyFirstBonsai, #MyFavoriteBonsai,
#酔った盆栽, #酔っ払い, #盆栽
Intro music: Artois by Colorvision (used with permission)
Background music: Patchwork - Ever So Blue, with permission from © Epidemic Sound
Video footage taken July 2023
Thanks for watching. Stay Cool.
Soil mix used:
Agricultural Pumice 40% amzn.to/3lZXgGz
Diatomaceous Earth 40% amzn.to/3YUZjug
FoxFarm Ocean Forest 10% amzn.to/3m5HjyQ
Fine Orchid Bark 10% amzn.to/3Itmvsf
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[@XaviersBonsaiRetreat]

Great haul and if only one or two make it then you are still ahead. A stack of work though so I bet you had a good drink at the end of the evening. Cheers Mike.

[@DrunkBonsai]

That was a nice stroke of luck. And I did enjoy some Stella Artois in a chilled pint glass when I went into the house.

[@johng3669]

So you went with 100% pumice? Do you normally do that or was that just because you hadn’t planned on potting a bunch of trees that day?

[@DrunkBonsai]

I often will use 100% pumice or a mix of pumice and DE for collected trees, especially when handled roughly, but because of the lack of budgeted time for this, the decision was made for me. Pumice was the best thing I had handy and I didn't have the time or energy for sifting and mixing fresh batches of bonsai soil.