A small red pine came into my possession last year. It is a relatively small tree, only 14 cm high. In the longer term it may even get slightly smaller. At least if…

Because this tree has known some problems, you may well see that the foliage is weak, and also the color is not really fresh green. I think the reason is the complete beaten down soil mix of pure akadama, which was almost completely crumbled. It was very difficult to give this tree water, the root ball didn’t take much water, and was terribly slow draining the water. For this reason, I made several holes in the root ball with a skewer, and from then on it went slightly better to give this tree some water. But the tree had suffered …

Because of the persistent cold and the frost at night, I waited until now to repot this tree. Repotting in itself is a major operation, and the tree was not in top condition. But I think without repotting this tree will only deteriorate. So I took a risk with this repotting, but I give the tree more chance to survive now, because it had a lot of roots. I have only pruned a quarter of the total amount of roots, and the tree is now in a soil mixture that I will have much more control over. So it will be ‘fingers crossed’ with this one …
Some shots of the repotting…

You can see this tree has been quite a while in this training pot. The mycorhizza you can see is of course good, but all the rest was a brown gunk of crumbled wet akadama. Not really optimal for a pine in this climate, according to me. After fifteen minutes working on the rootball with a chopstick, the gunk looked like this …


After this, I carefully sprayed the root ball with water, and then pruned the roots lightly, where I have tried to prune out dead roots. Here’s a shot of the tree after cleaning out the rootball…

Then trying some pots …

The smaller Bigei pot that you can see in the picture on the right was too small, and therefore excluded. But the round Emei pot seemed interesting to me. Maybe just a little too big …

Finally I went for this Tanzan pot. Maybe not the best choice for now, but changing pots can always be done later on. Anyway, I prepared the Tanzan pot, anchored the tree, and then filled the pot with a soil mixture of 40% Akadama, 30% Kiryu, and 30% pumice. Then I watered it well, and covered the soil with a bed of sphagnum moss …






For now, I placed this tree back in the greenhouse, out of the wind. Let’s hope he will get better soon…
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