Once again I'm taking flak for not updating, mostly (again) from Helen who apparently sits at work and reads these... but it has been a while since I put a post on here so let's get to it.

I was at our company golf tournament a couple of weeks ago and won the first prize for having the best score among the staff, which included my dad and his boss and some guys that I work with in the warehouse... ah yes, bragging rights for the next year... and also I won a digital camera! I was picking between that or a fancy new golf club but I'm married now and have a wife to think about... it was a good move...

Anyways, I thought that I would "blog" about a hobby of mine. I used to walk through the mall and see this kiosk where they were selling bonsai trees and I would always make this friend of mine stop there with me and look at them - for some reason they fascinated me and finally one Christmas my sister asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I said "buy me a bonsai tree", so she bought me one! Anyways, after nearly killing it a few times ( I had no idea...) I decided to take up "bonsai" as a hobby and started researching etc. It turns out that there are a lot of places you can go (online and otherwise) to learn about this and there are some people who probably take it a little too seriously. But it's fun. I also discovered that to buy a bonsai that's already "done" is like $150-$1000, or you can buy a $10-$20 plant and make your own. So I've decided on the latter. I even took a course on it last year; if I remember correctly I got some strange looks for that, apparently not many 26yr old guys do such things... But it's pretty cool actually, and now I think I have 11 or 12 trees, and pretty much all of them have tried to die on me at least once or twice... anyways, I took some pics with our new camera last night so I could post them with this blog... so here they are...







The first one is a Sargent or Chinese Juniper and I've had it about a year and a half - it actually hasn't tried to die on me, which is odd for me... I'm going for a windswept look with it, and actually I think it looks kinda cool, but it will take a while to fill out the foliage pads etc...
The second is a Serissa - this at one point was Sharon's (Pat and I bought it for her) but I inherited it - Serissas are fussy plants and are tropical so don't like cold, so it spends winter indoors. I think this one is my favorite, it has changed a lot since Sharon got it a few years ago. It lets off a bad odor too when you trim the branches which is somewhat strange, and it has little white flowers that bloom usually in the spring. Actually this one hasn't really tried to die on me either...
The third is a trident maple group planting; there are actually 3 trees in there, and eventually it is supposed to look like a small grove of trees. I just started this one in the spring so it's just a mess of twigs so far and it is taking some time to recover - when I re-potted it from the nursery containers in the spring I cut off about 1/3 of the roots to make room for the shallower container and they don't like that very much, so for about a year or so afterwards you have to just give them some time to recover and get strong again. They say that to train a decent bonsai it can take sometimes 5-10 years of working with a plant . I don't know if my plants will live that long, or if I will have the patience for that... We'll see how this turns out, but trident maples are cool, and you can't actually find them in a regular garden center...
The fourth is a fig tree and I can't tell you how many times this thing has tried to die on me - figs are supposed to be "easy" trees but this thing doesn't take change well and has lost a lot of leaves a few times which means it is "stressed" - basically every time I move (I think I've moved 3 times in the past year) it ends up in a slightly different environment and it "stresses," which usually means it isn't warm enough, or humid enough, or bright enough, or something like that, and it takes a while to get it back to being healthy again. Apparently if it "stresses" too often it ends up dying. But I still like it. It's also a tropical tree so it spends the winter indoors with a few others.
Well, I think that's it for now - this has actually taken me somewhere around a week to do because Sharon and I were camping over the long weekend, and well, I'm generally incompetent with this stuff and it took somewhere near 3 days alone just to get pictures on here. Nicely done Brad...
Until next time...