Bonsai in the Frozen Tundra
The feature tree in this episode of in the workshop is yet another spectacular itoigawa shimpaku imported from japan this tree is owned by a private client in the southeast and he brought it up to me i guess probably two or three weeks ago to start detailing it up and getting it back into proper shape it had been a little bit overly fertilized for the last couple of growing seasons and had kind of gotten out of shape some of the branches had gotten a little too thick on it as well so i’m removing quite a bit of foliage and then again just applying detail wire to make it look pretty again so when this tree arrived at acn i actually thought that i had seen it in japan at some point in the past perhaps at fujikawasan’s nursery or maybe at another nursery on my travels around the country so i sent a photo of it to fujikawasan and asked him if he had sold this tree in the past but he told me he did not recognize the plant so i must have seen it somewhere along the way in visiting other places around japan in the past i don’t know if you can see in the video but my breath is very visible in the workshop today it is absolutely freezing in nashville right now as a matter of fact we’re having historically low temperatures at this point last night it got down i think to minus 11 or minus 12 celsius which is somewhere in the neighborhood i think of you know 10 12 14 degrees fahrenheit and we’ve got snow outside on the ground we’ve been trickling our water in the house all night long just to make sure that the pipes don’t freeze and burst again so i’m hoping that by this weekend all of this will have passed but for right now i can’t feel my fingers or my toes despite the fact that we have the propane tank heater going so you know owning a bonsai nursery we always check the weather almost every single day as a matter of fact particularly in the coldest part of winter just in case you know some inclement weather is kind of blowing into town so we knew you know prior to this weather actually blowing through nashville that it was going to get very cold and very snowy as well so in preparation for that we moved a lot of trees into the workshop here and put a lot of stuff into our cold frame as well so some of the plants that we moved actually into the workshop which stays quite a bit warmer than the cold frame would be a lot of our expensive trees and client trees as well so you know even plants like this the toygawa shimpaku that was imported again from japan it’s a high elevation tree it can take cold temperatures but it’s very very expensive and i want to be extra careful in protecting it in the workshop here anything that was worked on recently as well in terms of even just detail wiring but also of course heavy bending we brought in here plants that were a little bit sickly from last year that had been brought here for us to get back into better health if they just aren’t looking great or they’re not in perfect health we brought them in here as well and then of course a lot of our deciduous trees as well we brought into the workshop so i’d rather be safe than sorry come spring if these things don’t wake up we’re in big [Music] trouble [Music] come on sit sit hey all right [Music] go get it so last year when the pandemic hit we of course had to cancel all of our intensive classes here at acn and i had to cancel all of my domestic and international travel as well up until that point i’d been on the road essentially 150 to 250 days a year and we were hosting classes here at the garden basically every weekend so i really not had an opportunity to set myself up with a routine or a schedule but when the pandemic hit of course all of that changed so starting last may i started drinking a little bit less alcohol which has been fantastic i feel much more clear-minded and cognizant and aware of what i’m doing throughout the day and i also started lifting weights last year as well i’d actually lifted a lot during my apprenticeship in japan about four or five times out of the week but once i started going on the road and teaching i didn’t have that opportunity anymore but again when the pandemic started we built a little kind of makeshift workout room in our garage here and i started lifting basically six days a week doing push-pull legs throughout the week so i’m up to about 225 pounds now eating about 3 500 calories a day which sounds like a lot but i’m six foot six inches tall so it’s stretched out over a pretty long body but in any case my goal is to get up to about 235 pounds over the next year and it’s really come in handy picking up these heavy trees moving them in and out of the workshop when we’ve got crazy cold weather like this so that’s been one of the knock-on benefits of lifting over the last year you
