Now that the leaves are dropping it’s time to get some trimming done. Maples tend to ‘bleed’ clear liquid when pruned closer to spring. Losing some juice from pruning cuts does not usually seem to hurt them but when I trim earlier in autumn there’s little, if any, bleeding so I prefer to trim as soon as the leaves drop.

There’s lots of small trident maples on the sales benches in 11 cm pots and these trees often drop leaves earlier than the larger trees so I’ve started with them. Here are some examples of how I trim the smaller trees.

The older bonsai are also trimmed now but it takes much longer due to the extra branch raminfication.

For bonsai growers in the southern hemisphere, now is a great time to give your deciduous bonsai a good tidy up. For the northern cousins you’ll need to way a few months.

I don’t usually start digging the grow beds until July but a Shibui Bonsai customer has been keen to learn more by volunteering to help. Jim had a couple of days off work due to wet weather so we picked a dry day and got started a week early.

Jim is younger and enthusiastic. He started on the shovel and kept me so busy pruning that I did not get any photos of the actual dig.

In a few hours we managed to dig and do a rough top and root prune on most of the larger trident maples, some Japanese maples, a few crab apples and some of the first year tridents.

They have all been ‘heeled in’ to a spare patch where they can wait until I’m ready to do a final inspection to decide if they get potted for sale, put back in the grow beds for more growth or go on the scrap heap.