Beginner Ginseng Ficus Bonsai Tree Care

 

How to Grow and Care for Ginseng Ficus Bonsai

Today, I’m going to talk about Beginner Ginseng Ficus Bonsai Tree Care, which is one of the most popular indoor subjects for people who live in time, temperate climates in the tropics. The ficus literally grows wild. There are thousands and thousands of species of ficus and they range from the rubber plant, which has huge leaves to some, which have very, very Tinus, tiny leaves like the ficus but de VI.

But this one here is the ficus reducer, which is the most common one which is sold in European and American countries, and they come from southern China and Taiwan. This is a slightly different variety with the bigger leaves.

Ginseng Ficus: The Perfect Bonsai Tree for the Beginner

I don’t know what variety this is. There are so many different focuses that I would be misleading you if I gave you the wrong name. If you are from India and Indonesia and China and Taiwan, they have many other varieties and species of ficus which are used for bonsai.

So let’s talk about the ficus, how to care for them and how to look after them. In the UK, where we live, we have temperatures in the summer we rarely get more than say 25 to 28 degrees temperature in the summer on the order cajon it may go to about 29, but that may be for one day in the year, but generally the Temperatures in the summer is probably around the mid-twenties, and if you put them in the Sun, they do very well when it comes to the winter.

We have a problem in the winter, in southern England, our average day, temperatures 5 degrees and in winter time in the night we may get the odd day when it goes to minus 10 degrees. Very often, the temperate goes to minus 3 degrees in the night.

So these ficuses will not survive, although I’m in the greenhouse. Here we don’t heat our greenhouse because it’s very expensive to heat, so we only rely on the Sun heating it through the greenhouse. So in winter time, this ficus NGO will not stand the cold temperatures, because during the winter this greenhouse at night sometimes goes to minus 2 degrees, minus 3 degrees and the daytime it may rise to 10 degrees, but generally, if the doors are open, it goes to About 5 degrees, so they don’t survive.

An Easy Guide To Ficus Ginseng

So in the winter time all the ficus go into my house where we have a conservatory and I keep them there and they do shed some leaves. So the ficus is a lovely plant to use for indoors. Of course, in the average living room in the West, they do extremely well as long as you keep the temperature around 10, maybe maximum 20 degrees.

They will do well and give a lot of Sun. So when it comes to indoor bonsai, we always tell our customers that the ficus is by far the easiest of all the so-called indoor bonsai, that we grow and sell and they are always green.

Ginseng ficus naturally grows in warm, moist climates

They look nice, but although they are always green during the summer, they do shed their leaves. This is the odd yellow leaf. You will see that most of these trees will have the odd yellow leaf and when it comes to the winter time, we are now towards the end of August.

But once we get into October November, lots of leaves will start to fall and right in the middle of winter December January, some of these ficuses will lose all their leaves. Those of you who live in the tropics, I have seen ficuses in the in India and China, where, in the winter they lose almost all their leaves and in fact I’ve seen exhibition trees of ficus in China, where they help to defoliate all the leaves to get The bare tree image – that means is that have no foliage at all, so don’t expect the ficus to keep the leaves all year round.

These three big focuses again. They are ficus reduce, I think, have been grown in a very special way. Look at that trunk that trunk is every bit 18 inches at the base and they’ve got this beautiful trunk shape.

All of them have got beautiful trunk shapes, as you can see. Look at the massive trunks and many of the roots are fused together to make the thick roots. I haven’t let many of the aerial roots grow, because I wanted this to have a clean trunk line.

The point of showing you these trees is really to show you that the foliage is not the same species as the trunk, because all these branches have been grafted on to the parent plant. So the trunk is one species, probably a benjamina type, and then the top is grafted with ficus reducer, so they grow it up to here and all these branches here have been grafted on for the smaller foliage, because I don’t let the suckers grow.

If you can look at this, these are the sucker the actual plant, and they are a different leaf to that. If they got bigger, you will see that they are completely different. It’S almost like a benjamina type, but they are quite different from the branches which have been grafted, so we don’t let these sucker shoots grow from here.

So these big trees are produced in this way. They grow the trees very rapidly for the trunk size and then they graft branches onto it, and I have seen some of these growing in the tropics and although I’ve had these quite a few years, I’ve had this.

For more than 10 years, because we use them for exhibitions, but if you were to grow these trees in the tropics, I remember doing some ficus benjamina in India and after sitting about two years later, trees that I had cut down and made into bonsai were almost A complete tree, so you can make a big ficus in a very short space of time.

So if we were to start from scratch, I would say that in a tropical country you can get a trunk like this and create a bonsai in this size in no more than five years, so they’re very fast-growing, but once they come to the temperate climate, the Countries such as Britain, Germany and North America, these trees grow much slower and you won’t get that rate of growth.

I will just show you some of the ficus we sell on our nursery and the special way I grow them these trees, this all ficus reducer, I prune them only yesterday and I prune them hard. So that’s why they have very little foliage here, because they were badly overgrown, not only that they were getting a bit weak, so I decided to feed them and fertilize them, and you must be wondering why I stand them on these water trees.

These water trees are only filled with about quarter inch of water and the reason I use the traces, but that when I use fertilizer I don’t all want the fertilizer to leach away into the ground. That would be very wasteful, so I put them in trays while they’re being fertilized so that the fertilizer goes in then we can recycle it and use it again, but once the feeding is done, I won’t stand them in these trays anymore.

So that’s why they are in the trays in case you are wondering why they’re in these trays, some of these trees have got beautiful aerial roots, I’m going to do some pruning on some of these trees. You see all these thick roots, these aerial roots.

If you let them grow and go into the soil, they become thick, and this is typical of the ficus. They have this habit, so ficus grow in this way, and some more ficus is one of our most popular indoor trees.

So we always have thousands of focus that we stock, because is one of the most popular indoor bonsai that we sell. So these, I believe, come from southern China because we can’t mass-produce these and these trees.

An Easy Guide To Ficus Ginseng

I would say: we’ve had them about two years. I would say that they’re no more than ten years old because they would have been grown very rapidly. You can produce a bonsai like this. I would say in three years from a cutting if they’re grown in tropical country.

Now, I’m going to show you how to prune two very interesting ficuses, but before I go, I just spotted a ficus here and here. This is a good example of how they have grafted a plant see this brought. This rich stock here is the root stock of the plant, and that is the thing that they’ve grafted on you see the difference in the leaves, so these we should get rid of, because this is only in the root stock.

So they graft onto this because the trunk grows very rapidly, but the top has better shaped better looking leaves. So that’s why they do that. So this funny style is called a ginseng and I don’t know why some people like it, I personally don’t like it, but you’ve got to cater for other people’s tastes so but we’ve gone into in a different style in a different part.

I’M now going to show you how to prune two interesting focuses now. This is another ficus. It’S not quite like the reducer slightly different, but it’s hard to tell, as I say, there’s so many varieties that there must be botanical name.

But it’s similar to the reducer with small leaves and all this growth has occurred in the last month. And whenever you get lots of new shoots, the old leaves die so you’ll get the old leaves turning yellow inside the tree and dropping off.

We trim to the outline first don’t bother about going inside the tree at this stage, anything breaking the outline we take off and then we will go into the tree and do that. Many people just do this all the time, but in time it will get very congested.

It’S ok, but not ideal. There are branches industry. This is a separate branch. There’S a branch at the back, so you’ve got to be a bit ruthless. Although we are at the end of August, I think there’s still time for it to make new leaves it’s best done in the middle of summer, any hard pruning, because you’d still get the opportunity for this plant to make more new growth.

But if you do it in the winter, you won’t kill the plant, but you won’t get new leaves in a hurry. So what I’m doing now? I can still expect lots of leaves by the middle of September and it will take me through the winter.

So what you see me doing is creating a pad from this project, and you see I’ve made a pad out of that. So I need to separate the pads there’s a lot of these commercial trees. People don’t usually bother to make them look good as long as they have a bushy plant they’re satisfied, but there’s usually more to it than that.

Now this pad you can see because the pruning has been neglected. All these tip suits have grown into the next level, and this has spoiled the trunk line, so I’m going to do a drastic prune. I’M pruning shoots as thick as this.

I can make cuttings from this. If you just stick it in speech soil, you get a plant in about three weeks, so I won’t throw those away so where they’ve started going into the next level, I’m doing something as drastic as this don’t be afraid to prune.

A lot of people are afraid to prune, so the trees get lanky out of shape. Even this pad, you see it’s gone long, lots of thick shoots or prune these thick shoots off, so I’ve created a level there and I’m now going to create this level here, because these are such vigorous plants, they need to be fed quite regularly because the nutrients That are in the soil, won’t be sufficient to sustain such a vigorous tree.

So feeding is quite important for these potted bonsai. If they were growing in their ground, you would get nutrient from the soil in the ground, but once they in pots and many of these plants have potted in a pit type soil, there is hardly any nutrient in that soil.

So what I was trying to show you is really to be bold and to create these pads by cutting hard back. This trees got a lovely, leaning style. So although it’s potted like this, I think the front would be better like this, so I would repot this tree with this as the front so that it has this leaning type look.

So that is all I need to do. If I wanted to, I could wire these branches out a little bit, so that is what I would do so, as you can see, I’ve pruned quite hard on this tree, so this tree is going to be repotted that this angle, perhaps in a slightly different pot, I’M now going to show you the other one which is as interesting.

This tree again is very, very congested. It’S got a love, the arrowroot, which has gone into the ground, those of you who have been to the Calcutta Botanical Gardens, there’s a famous banyan tree that has more than 2,000 trunks, which were roots that have rooted into the ground and that spreads over.

I think almost an acre, or is it more there’s another one in Colombo, which is very similar, so in the tropics these focuses they have this habit of dropping the arrow roots into the soil and making separate tree trunks.

So I’m trying to create that image, but again it’s too dense for bonsai. So it’s due for a very radical prune. The trouble with most people who have ficuses, which are as healthy as this is that they’re always afraid to prune.

So when they see all that lovely foliage, they say, oh, I don’t have the heart to prune it. You know, so they just keep it as a round ball. But this really is not what a good one site should look like.

You need to introduce some pads. So again I would say once a year: you need to do something radical like this. Get it back to the trunk, create the pads and let it grow again. You will appreciate the tree much more if you were to do this if you go or fight as well in your conservatory, perhaps that’s a very good environment.

You will get this lovely effect now, because this tree has this as the front. This branch really is coming in the way it’s just been allowed to grow. Even if I were to change the front, this is not so good, so I probably or I will cut all that off.

Look at that, I’m taking all that off, not a lovely cutting to use, because I want to show the trunk so sometimes you’ve got to take these very drastic. If not bold, decisions to make the tree look better.

A ginseng ficus is a popular plant to grow as a bonsai

So I can now see the trunk battered from this angle. Also, if I have branches which are growing up too much, this branch is doing nothing take that out. Some of these are very roots. No, that’s not the arrowroot flatten it to create pads a lot of congested growth here, of course, if it doesn’t get light, the lot of the traits inside are dead.

So it’s just question of removing the debris. So now you can see that Trump death, nice triangle or dome shape, so these shapes are almost universal now these are too long. Looking at it from this angle, this is all one year’s growth I just mentioned something about diseases and pests that these three suffer from focuses tend to suffer from that scale, insect which exude that cystic is sap and if you grow it indoors, it’s the nuisance because It ruins the furniture and it drops that sticky substance everywhere, but if you simply spray it with any insecticide, you shouldn’t still off the scale and the plant should be healthy.

The Ficus ginseng is a slow grower and really relies on having a good amount of light

If you don’t deal with the insects such a scare, sometimes you also get fluffy scare. It can weaken the plants, so you need to keep an eye on the pests at all times. So that’s given a haircut and you can see, I remove the pad.

That is a branch which is sticking up there. I think I should remove it because that’s doing nothing, it’s just spoiling the front line that way now the tick one for a cutting, so this tree has been brought back, anything tick.

We take off and let it grow again. So at least we just can see some structure to the branches. I haven’t gone completely mad because the trunk line is quite pretty as it is, and I can extend this more if you put it in a bigger pot, you can extend this more and encourage more Airy roots to dangle down you can why these flat – and that Is how I would prune the tree? I will just look at the roots.

You see it’s been in this pot for at least the last three years, but it’s not that pop bar, so there’s no need to repot this just yet so this tree can stay here. For at least another year – and we will just feed it, so you can see the amount we have cut from here, there’s a lot of pruning that we have done lots of pruning and lots of cuttings that we can use for making new plants.

So this is how we deal with the ficus, like all other bonsai. You’Ve got to be bold and not shirk the responsibility of bringing it back to the trunk line and the form, because the trunk again is the most beautiful part of the bonsai, and you can keep the tree healthy and well.