Bonsaify | Repotting a Root Bound Nursery Tree

Root Bound. Root-Bound. Rootbound. No matter how you spell it, repotting a root-bound nursery tree is labor-intensive, difficult, and time-consuming.

00:01:06 Eric demonstrates with a Juniper, though the same techniques generally apply regardless of species.

00:01:34 Eric tries a few techniques, including cutting down the side of the container. Finally, he goes with a POWER TOOL!

00:03:17 Using the power tool is ok because Eric has identified the junction of the trunk and roots.

00:04:07 Finally free of its container, the Juniper has a lot of circling roots around the outside that need to be removed to create a little space.

00:05:00 Metal root hook vs chopstick.

00:06:03 Ideal timing for this operation is during your local repotting window.

00:07:23 Another round with the POWER TOOL!

00:07:52 Eric can tell the soil is too dense because the underside of the rootball is completely dry.

00:09:07 Why Eric chooses the size container to repot.

00:10:26 Why Eric did not bare root the tree.

00:10:52 Eric repots with a mix of perlite, cocoa coir, and bark.

00:11:29 Winter color on an Itoigawa; aftercare.

What experiences have you had with root-bound nursery trees? Have you ever had to go the POWER TOOL route? Share your experiences with us in the comments below. This video comes from a viewer request. Thank you for watching! Please share this video with your bonsai friends, and give it a like.

What’s up everyone today I’m going to go through some of the steps that I usually try to take when I repot rootbound Nursery material I’ve been helping out a number of students recently with rootbound Nursery material and it kind of runs the gamut from things that have been potted

Up but have really large Roots uh because of field growing to things that are completely pot-bound and extremely difficult to get out of containers now if you’ve ever worked with this type of material you know that it can be very labor intensive difficult and timec consuming to repot just a tree such as

This one so this is in a 3 gallon can obviously the soil is very dense it has a nice big trunk I have no idea how long it’s been in here but I’m guessing it hasn’t been repotted in at least 10 years I’m using a juniper because that is

The best example that I have available right now but the same techniques generally apply to a lot of different species of tree I’ve seen old Japanese maples in these types of conditions I’ve seen Japanese Black Pines and so on so the the process of extracting essentially the tree from the container

And getting the roots cleaned up and then into some fresh soil is challenging let’s say so there’s a number of techniques that you can use if you don’t have a lot of tools to get your tree out of the container so pulling this out is not

Going to be possible and using a regular root SI along the sides is going to be difficult because the container is so deep so just cutting down the side of the container in order to extract the tree can be really a pain in the butt but it will be faster typically than

Trying to cut around so if your tree is not in a plastic container you could consider breaking the container uh that’s totally up to you but in this case after my attempts at cutting the container and actually damaging my scissors then trying to pull it out and

So on I’m actually just going to resort to a little bit of power tools Safety First with power tools I’m going to use this electric reciprocating saw to cut through the entirety of the root ball and pot all at once so that I can quickly extract this now I’ve

Strapped it down to my table here both to keep myself from having to otherwise uh stabilize it if you have a second person you can use that usually it’s not too much of an issue [Applause] and just make sure you don’t actually saw through your worktable now a few caveats to what I

Just did with this particular plant I could actually see where the nibari was and so if I turn this sideways here it is Poss with Nursery stock that the junction of the trunk and The Roots could be way down in the container and that I could have just sawed through the

Entire trunk removing all of the roots by doing this so before you do this make sure that you know where the junction of the roots in the trunk is because particularly with container stock that has not been specifically grown for bonai a lot of times the trunk is buried

Down in the pot now with the bottom of the root ball removed I should be able to get get this out of here a little bit easier there we go so because I know this material is pretty pot-bound the main goal of what I’m doing here today

Is just to create some more space for root growth I’m going to try to take some portion of this root ball and clear out all this old Nursery soil but if I can’t do that because of the amount of wood that’s under here then I’ll just go

As far as I can but I definitely want to remove all the Sur cing roots that are on the outside as well as clear out a little bit of space I should mention if you don’t have a Sawzall reciprocating saw of some sort you can try using a hand saw or you

Can just do it all by hand cutting the container open as well as then raking out more of bottom soil and cutting the roots by hand if if you prefer not to use metal objects to do root work you can certainly attempt to do this with a

Chopstick and I do do that sometimes and I alternate between root Hooks and Chopsticks but I find that unless you unless you have a lot of practice at it that Chopsticks tend to be uh quite a bit slower and I don’t see any real advantage AG to it especially with rough

Nursery stock of this type I’ve already Unearthed a fair amount of circling roots here and I’m not going to cut all the roots off but what I am doing is trying to remove roots that are going around in circles so I’m where I find roots that are

Snagging up my root hook or Chopstick I’ll go ahead and sever them and that means that I’m reducing the amount of usable fine roots that the tree has obviously uh the the timing for this operation should be during your local repotting window so now having gone around one

Time I can see that pretty much the entire root ball is full of fine Roots so I’m going to go a little bit more aggressive I’m going to clear off some more of the top soil here to make sure that there’s good air penetration into

The root balls so I just am noting that despite the fact that this has been outdoors in the rain for the last 12 hours that there’s actually dry spots here in the root ball and that’s part of what we’re trying to correct as we as we move this into a bonai pot and

Different types of soil we want to ensure that there’s good water and air penetration into every part of the root ball all right so I’ve sort of broken up the majority of that top crust and gotten down here to some slightly larger Roots I’m going to do a little bit more

Excavation here but I think that where I’m headed is that I’m going to actually get the saws all back out and cut off another 30% of what’s left here because there are so many roots up here that’s going to break this up a little bit more and save me a lot of [Applause]

Work so now you can really see that the unders side of this is almost completely dry in the center and that’s a function of how dense that soil is so I’m going to go ahead and use I’m going to break up that bottom now I’m going to tease a little bit of

This out from between the root tips so that I can trim the root tips with a sharp scissor and also then have them projecting slightly into the new soil that I’m going to put underneath here for the next year or two worth of growth I have previously done this whole

Process by hand without using any power tools or anything and I have to say that it takes about five times longer so don’t be shy about if you’re confident that the root ball has a good amount of fine fibrous Roots like this one then don’t be shy about cutting off

The bottom assuming that you’ve also excavated and found the junction between the trunk and the majority of the roots okay so with the majority of the root work done I’m actually going to go ahead and stick this right back into a 3 gallon Nursery can just like it came out

Of the reason is I’ve removed something like 2/3 of the root ball so there’s going to be plenty of space for the roots to run and reestablish themselves and with this tree in particular because it is an old tree and has been grown out I had to cut it back significantly in

Order to bring the growth in tighter to the trunk and I’m waiting for these branches to grow back out and so the larger the container it is in for the next couple of years the faster that growth is going to happen and the sooner I’m going to get this into show shape so

Putting it into a small container at this point it would be counterproductive it’s possible because I could fit it into a much smaller container that it was in but at the at this point I want that fast growth so the root work that I’ve done is not going to be undone by

Using a large container again this large container is going to give the tree lots of room to grow and then I can come back and do additional root work to free up space closer in here to the trunk during the next repotting junipers are pretty tough and I could probably go ahead and

Completely bare root this but that also might slow it down so i’ prefer to do the repotting in stages as well as to put it into that large Nursery container all right so I’ve gone ahead and washed off the loose soil particles from the outside of the root ball here and I’m

Going to go ahead and stick it into this container I’m using my standard kind of Nursery mix which is a mix of perlite cocoa quar and I’ve added some bark in in this case and then I’m actually not even going to tie the tree in the container because it’s got a relatively

Established root ball I might regret that later but um all right and with that I’m done basically I have given this some fresh soil and some room to grow and I’m going to put it back out in my Nursery grounds to get going again and hopefully see

Some nice shoots now if you’re wondering about the color on this that is winter color on an ET toy gawa there are they are not all the same some of them tend to do this a little bit more than others but I saw it do this last year and it

Went right back to A nice bright green in the spring the after care here can be a little bit important in the sense that if you’re doing your repot out of season or early in the repotting season you need to make sure that you are protecting from freezing temperatures

Afterwards it junipers are obviously very cold hearty but you are better safe than sorry particularly when you’re dealing with older trees like this one that wraps up this video thank you so much for watching we’ll see you next time