Stormwater, soil and bonsai, Part 2 of 2 (9/22/2022)

As I mentioned in the previous post, soil is one of the most important factors in plant establishment. I tell my students that crappy soil means a crappy vegetation or plant establishment. I even quote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who famously said: “A nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.”

Roosevelt said this during a meeting of the governors association in 1937 when he announced the establishment of the Soil Conservation Service. It was a reaction to the dustbowl and catastrophic flooding that had occurred in the past few years. Roosevelt and his scientists instinctively knew that if we lost all our topsoil, we would lose all our fertile land in the prairie states, our bread basket, and the great depression would return and continue forever. Moreover, it is something we encounter in some of the lesser developed countries when we try to explain the famine they experience. Their soils are screwed up by years of mismanagement. That mismanagement is often caused by the lack of knowledge.

Enough! This lack of knowledge is also the blame for what happens on construction sites and what beginners do with the first bonsais they buy from the big box stores. Yes, me saying this, makes me think I desperately need to re-pot that Fukien Tea that I saved from the sales rack at Lowes last year. I never re-potted it, but it has survived one year and it seems to like what I did to it. Note to self, Fukien Teas or Carmona are notoriously finicky.

Back to construction sites for one more paragraph. All that equipment and material on the site causes the compaction of the soil. And growing roots need to penetrate, push through that compacted soil. There is a point where they give up, they can simply not do it! Neither can water infiltrate that soil. This becomes a problem especially in areas that are designated as infiltration areas. We can bring in all the topsoil or specialized soil mixes, but if the subsoil is so compacted plant establishment is in trouble. Some soil preparation such as ripping or plowing may help. However, that costs money and if you are a builder and in it for profit, you could just cover it with a thin layer of top soil, hide the problem and walk away from the project. The new owners will find out a few years from now when the plants start failing.

Mass commercial bonsai growers in China do the same thing. They have pots with small drainage holes that don’t drain vary fast, they use crappy soil that don’t drain very well and they just plop a plant in those pots. They produce thousands at a time. The problem is folk buy them and do not know how to take care of them. Take my Fukien Tea for one. It was dying on the sales rack when I bought it. These plants do not like night time temps under 60 degrees. They do not like the soil wet. The soil in my pot was terrible.

The first thing many folk will do, is prune. They would want to make it look like a classical bonsai. Problem 1, the plant loses more leave, less evaporation, needs even less water. Some will want to transplant it. This puts more stress on the plant and it dies. Others don’t do anything to the plant but think they need to water it often (Problem 2). The soil stays wet all the time and in the heat of the summer wet soil with little air means rot, no oxygen in the root zone, mold growth and there goes the plant! But I watered it every day! Exactly! Problem 3 is that the weak tree weakens even more. You get the picture?

I water a lot of my trees every day too. But I have a very course free draining soil. When I do not have free draining soil I do something else. The first thing I did with my Fukien Tea was cover the soil with a layer of diatomaceous grit that I use in the soil mix that I make. It turns dark grey when the soil is wet and white when it is dry and it is therefore a great indicator when that lousy soil that the Chinese gave me needs water. I covered the soil of another little tree that I bought for $14 at Ikea with akadama which turns pale yellow when dry and is dark yellow when wet. Giving me the same principle. Akadama is a specialty clay from Japan that does not break down.

So what should you do when you are an aspiring bonsai grower? Here I am not talking to the experts, we all have our own favorite mix. My YouTube friend Nigel Saunders has a mix of 50% floor dry and 50% perlite with some fine pine bark mixed in it. He has been using it with success for the past 7+ years, I think (go look at his YouTube channel The Bonsai Zone). I mix 40% diatomaceous grit (that I get at NAPA auto parts), 40% perlite and 20% commercial Cactus mix. I use the cactus mix because I travel a lot for work and need to depend on others to water. The cactus mix adds enough organic matter to hold water for a longer time. When I grow conifers, I add some akadama to the mix (20% or so). Akadama makes the soil acid and the story is that it helps with the development of finer roots. Others use pumice in their mix or lava rock. As you can see these are mostly what are called soilless mixes. The objective is that they drain quickly. You can make them yourself, but you can also buy ready-made mixes from commercial bonsai stores online or maybe even in your community.

Hope this was fun and informative. Shoot me a message/email if you have any questions or comments. I love to write more about soil and bonsai, thus staying away from politics and all that other stuff. On another note, I bought a greenhouse kit, so stay tuned. Maybe soon a post on the construction and use.

The Fukien Tea to the right and my ginseng fichus to to the left, with an edelweiss stuck in the middle.  Both trees need to be worked.  I am still surprised that the edelweiss survived it so far.  It was a gift from a friend who grew it for her kids.  I need to pot it down and try to grow it as an accent plant.  In the big planter to the right I am growing some red maples seed from a tree that is at least 100 years old, some crabapples, bald cypresses and a few zelkova seedlings.  They all have to be transplanted next spring.

Stormwater, soil, and bonsai, part 1 of 2 (9/19/2022)

The past week I was traveling again to train the folks in the state of Virginia. This time my travels were to Wytheville (look in the labels section), a town I have done some extensive writing about in my blog, and I might do some more in the future. However, that is not the subject I would like to tackle today as you can probably surmise from the title of this article. Now at the beginning of writing this article, I expect that I will break it into at least two parts, so this will be part 1.

What do you do after class?  You stop at your favorite microbrewery in town.  As I mentioned in a previous post Wytheville has two, and during my previous visit this was my favorite, and it remains in the top spot!

Most of you know that I teach subjects related to stormwater management and erosion and sediment control. One important item that factors in this, of course, is soil. For one, during construction soil is laid bare and becomes very erodible. Streams and creeks downstream from a construction site receive a lot of sediment from that site. On top of this, once construction is complete, we need to grow plants, a lawn or whatever. Here again, soil plays the star role. As I tell my students, a crappy soil gives you shitty results, while a good soil will give you great plant establishment. In other words, “you are what you eat” also applies to the vegetation we are trying to establish.

The current paradigm in stormwater is that we want to infiltrate as much of the stormwater that is being generated on a site as possible. We call this runoff reduction, or also low impact development or LID. The philosophy behind this is that all the roads, roofs, parking lots, sidewalks and alike, create more runoff than a virgin site, because they do not allow water to infiltrate. This has lowered the already declining groundwater table and is drying up of springs and the hydrology of streams and rivers. Of course, this was also partially caused by all the pumping of groundwater that our increased population pressure is doing. As a result, streams are becoming flashier and more polluted. Over the years, I have written about this; just look under the “Labels” column and click on stormwater. Now, runoff reduction and LID would help recharge the groundwater. In addition, it would allow some of the pollutants or contaminants to enter the soil and be broken down and cleaned up.

Well, this past week in Wytheville, I taught two soils courses, it got me thinking, and inspired to write this post. I work daily with soil as a bonsai enthusiast, I have realized that bad soil choices are probably why probably so many of the trees of the beginners die. I plan to reserve that for part two for my discussion.

I taught three continuing education courses in Wytheville. My Soils Concepts class is a full day course that goes from 8:30 to around 3:30/3:45 with an hour lunch. The next day I taught a Soil Amendment class from 8:30 to 12 and a Photography for Inspectors class from 1 to 3:45. Now, if you are going to ask me if I am a photographer, the answer would be no. However, I do have some formal training in photography and worked as a photographer for a bit. Some 45/46 years ago I did some work as a wedding photographer and a semi-professional photographer in the Army. But that is water under the bridge.

How about my soils background? How can I sell that? Well, I have an Agricultural Engineering degree, with some emphasis on soil science. I did an internship on soil fertility, and then in Yemen we did a soil survey and a soil hydrology study. During my MS study I studied a lot about soil/plant water relationships, while during my Ph.D. studies, I renewed my studies in Soil Morphology and Soil Identification. So, while my degree does not tell me that I am a soil scientist, I can fake it with the best. It is nice to be multifarious, especially when you are teaching. Although my mother always accused me to be a master of nothing (see also <here>)!

In my soils class I give my students some of the basics of soil, from an agronomic perspective, after which I go into how to handle soil on a construction site and how that soil handling impacts the soil. The afternoon is spent on talking about soil hydrology and on how engineers look at soils. Engineers have a very different way of looking at them versus the folks that grow plants and food on them. I tell my students engineers see soil as something to:

• Build on
• Build with
• Build in
• Support our buildings

While agronomists have words such as Alfasols, Histosols, Inceptisols, and Vertisols, just to name a few the engineers use the Unified Soil Classification System. Engineers may describe a soil as an organic silts and organic silty clays of low plasticity.

While this post is not an area to rehash what I tell my folks in class, I really try to push the idea that soil is one of our most important resources when it comes to plant establishment and infiltration of stormwater after construction (or what we call land disturbance). Often what happens is the compaction of soil, which does not allow for the penetration of roots and the infiltration of water. The topsoil is often removed and not replaced, making it even more difficult for plant to become established, and bare soil means erosion and less infiltration. Taking care of the soil is one of the most important things you can do as someone who is into construction, or as a homeowner. This is even becoming more and more important in these times of climate change.

Well folks, this is usually the length of my posts. In the next post I will try to elaborate and bring this around to growing bonsai. See you soon!

Another thing that my regular readers should know is, that a trip the Wytheville is always accompanied by a walk on the New River Trail.  The fall flowers were already in full display.