In this video, Jason discusses how to repot an Oak bonsai including things to watch out for when repotting. He also goes over general care information for an Oak bonsai including watering, pruning, and fertilizer tips.
Hey how’s it going jason here and in this episode we’re going to be talking about this oak i have right here [Music] all right so this oak i actually repotted it about four weeks ago i have some footage that i’m going over in a little bit uh that sort of documented the process for repotting this oak now the one thing that you always have to keep in mind with oaks is that they don’t like to have their roots disturbed so i took a lot of care into repotting this to make sure i wasn’t disturbing the roots too much trying to keep as much of the root ball as possible while still trying to fit it into this pot right here so i noticed that this tree is actually in a shorter pot than i normally use but for the oaks since you want to uh not disturb the roots as much as possible you want to leave it alone i went with a bigger pot so that i didn’t have to remove as much as the rip-on didn’t have to cut as many roots about four weeks later this thing is doing fine um it’s pushing out a bunch of new leaves right here a bunch of lots of new foliage you can see right in there it’s pushing out a bunch of new new leaves so i know that the pot was the repel was successful so just keep that in mind when you’re repotting your oaks just take care to not overwork the roots uh try to leave them as you know try to leave them alone as much as possible and then your tree will do fine so now that this tree is in this pot it’s going i’m going to go into maintenance mode originally before it actually made it into this pot i was running out a couple branches here which i’ve grown out by now so i’ve cut them back already i’ve cut them back so i can start to ramify these lower branches a little bit maybe bring this down a little bit but i can already see that on this side i’m starting to get a lot of new buds a lot of small branches here that are going to basically fill in this tree really nicely with basically enough leaves to cover this area now what i’m going to do is also i’m going to grow the leaves and branches a little bit longer so that i can match this pot a little bit better maybe come out to about here on both sides if the pot is about 80 percent the width of the tree i’m going to go out to about here on the foliage so i’m just going to let these grow out as you can tell i’ve got one branch right here just to start the process now in terms of care you know things you want to keep in mind with the oaks is that they really like to be well watered um you can use a little bit of a more organic mix when you’re putting this into the into the pot for this one you can see i’ve still got my aggregate right here i’ve got my lava but i’ve got a lot of peat moss in there as well just so it always stays nice and moist now other than repotting the other thing you want to keep in mind when working on your oaks is wiring the branches on the oaks are very brittle they’re also very delicate so when you apply a wire it can damage the cambium really easily so if you’re not too careful you actually will lose that branch luckily um oaks especially in the early spring you can cut them back right when you see those buds start to appear you can cut them back i mean you can cut them back really hard and you’re going to get shoots coming out so as long as you haven’t killed the entire branch when you’re wiring and you accidentally break it you will be able to basically develop a new one but of course the ultimate goal is to not have to do that so just take some care when you’re wiring and then you should be okay now in terms of fertilizer uh what you want to use is just a general balanced mix um you don’t have to do something that’s too high in nitrogen um you don’t have to do something that’s too high in phosphorous just because there’s no flowers on the yolk so basically just use something balanced and then just feed it from the spring to the fall evenly every month and then scale back in the winter now there’s also you know people like to defoliate their oaks and i think that’s totally fine if the tree is healthy you can defoliate your eggs i mean you’re basically in the late summer you can cut off some of these these leaves and it’ll come back again and usually you will get some small leaves out of that so it’s kind of a nice way of controlling the growth so that these things don’t get gigantic and yet leggy defoliating is something that you can do to manage the growth on your oak i think oaks are great trees i love that there’s so many varieties of it this is aquarcus agrifolia or coast live oak but that’s just one of them there’s tons of them and they all have different leaf shapes they’re great we have a cork oak that’s going to be going up on our site soon and that’s really cool because the the you know sort of the bark on the tree in the trunk is corked uh which looks very cool uh this one’s not but there’s still the leaves on this still look really nice let me know in the comments below if you have any questions um otherwise you know give me a like if you thought the video was helpful and of course subscribe if you’d like to see some more thanks for watching [Music] you
