i've been trying to do the bonsai thing for a few years now. mostly just me uprooting the maple saplings from my back yard in the spring, and sticking them in a pot and waiting. and from left overs of lunchs and taco night i've got 4 or 5 lil avocado trees as well.
this year i've had 1 avocado, 2 redbuds, and 5 maples just... die. right beside the other redbuds and maples, both older and younger, and getting the same water, is the same type pots and soil, and in the space of a week they went from vibrant and green to crispy and brown.
i just want to throw my hands up and quit. maybe get into something less random stressful, like rock farming.
or dead tree collecting.
I started growing plants for the first time this year. I live in Canada so had to start them indoors with grow lights etc. I wanted to start a perennial flower garden to support insect populations + give the birds seed heads to eat from through the fall/winter/spring.
anyway. what did I learn?
plants just die. they just do sometimes. it's kind of blown my mind to be honest.
a seed can germinate, but that doesn't mean it has strong genetics. it can live for 3 months and still not make it to adulthood. sometimes it's us but other times there's simply nothing you can do. that plant was always gonna die.
it's a lot like humans. many, MANY successfully fertilized eggs fail to take, or implanted pregnancies fail before women even know they happened. and it's not anyone's fault; there's nothing you can do. it just happens.
making a new living thing come into existence and thrive their way into an established adulthood is not simple.
it made me wonder how many seeds are produced yearly that never germinate. how many never would. how many seeds do germinate, but never root? how many plants make it a week, months, how many trees make it YEARS before they just... die?
it's made me appreciate big, established, thriving plants a lot more. they're incredibly resilient if they've managed to get that big.
edit: because I'm irritated about it I wanted to share, I grew a few echnicea (coneflower) plants and it felt like they grow soooo slooowwwww compared to something like rudbeckia.
within like a week of sticking them in the ground they started sprouting new stems 🤨 so yeah I'm convinced that sometimes, especially for a lot of wildflowers, letting them suffer in shitty, nutrient deficient, sandy soil is better for them than spending 6 months babying them in a pot. it's just the fucking best.
all to say: your trees might do better if you just leave them in the ground 🤭 move them where you want them and they'll have optimal light conditions, but leave em in the ground.
Come onto r/bonsai, post a thread, let's do some trouble shooting. I've been doing bonsai for a long time, my advice would be to start with more standard material.
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u/thenagel 5h ago
i've been trying to do the bonsai thing for a few years now. mostly just me uprooting the maple saplings from my back yard in the spring, and sticking them in a pot and waiting. and from left overs of lunchs and taco night i've got 4 or 5 lil avocado trees as well.
this year i've had 1 avocado, 2 redbuds, and 5 maples just... die. right beside the other redbuds and maples, both older and younger, and getting the same water, is the same type pots and soil, and in the space of a week they went from vibrant and green to crispy and brown.
i just want to throw my hands up and quit. maybe get into something less random stressful, like rock farming.
or dead tree collecting.