Bonsaify | How to 10x Your Juniper Growth: When You Feel the Need to Speed!

Eric demonstrates that there's more to making healthy, fast-growing juniper bonsai than water, fertilizer, and sun: container size! The difference is clear when you see a side-by-side comparison of junipers from the same cutting batch (thus the same age), same growing grounds, and same watering schedule. The trees in the 1-gallon grow bags are 10 TIMES larger than their siblings in 2" growing containers!

00:01:09 The driving force for the growth of wood in the trunk of Junipers is strong tips and elongations.

00:02:03 Close-up of trunk of larger tree.

00:02:33 Eric works on a smaller Juniper.

00:03:17 Eric adds movement to the branches through wiring, focused on ensuring interior growth doesn't get shaded out by stronger outside growth.

00:03:56 Larger tree - Eric redirects the dense mass of growth to keep it from shading out branches he may want to keep.

00:05:00 Wiring 6 whips to bend down and out. Detailed explanation.

00:06:28 Rearranging the growing configuration of 9 large Junipers involves placing the trees in their 1 gallon grow bags together into 3 gallon grow bags - how and why.

00:07:30 Takeaway - how to let your Juniper trunk get bigger. A larger container creates a greater volume of growth, faster.

00:07:58 And a Caution: carefully consider before removing whips. This will have a big impact on the tree's speed of growth.

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[cactsai]

Excellent tips, Eric. I have to add that I believe you missed one crucial detail in how to get trees (or any plant for that matter) to grow quickly, and that is AIR. It looks like all your large junipers are in fabric pots allowing air to prune the roots and encourage rapid root development. It's the same concept as your potting mix of 80-90% perlite and 10-20% coir. It's an ultra airy mix that stimulates root growth, and staves off problems that can occur in the root ball like disease and rot. It's not just container size, it's equally important for root health and plant development to also have plenty of access to air in the root zone. Anyway, I just thought that should be mentioned, not that anyone will read this comment lol Take care, man!

[DazedPhasesofLazerbeams]

info and trippy visuals all appreciated

[ebenoid]

Whoa! 2 mins in I thought I had a flash back! Thanks! Good video had to watch it again Everytime I get a new juniper lol

[lesijo]

Great video Eric! If you were to make a t-shirt with that psychedelic juniper on it, I’d buy it! Beautiful effect. ❣️

[CharlieForeign]

Eric, glad to hear you got courses on pines in the works!

[DavidJinPa]

Great Vid~! This has worked wonders with twisty itoigawa whips too. Love your vids. They're always an inspiration. Thank you

[gusvietnam]

Great video! Thank you for sharing. Very interesting and helpful. 👍

[heidizwaenepoel]

Looking forward to the JBP course too ! I have 3 2-year old I’ve grown from seed. So they can start their journey.
Thank you for your interesting videos ! Keep up the good work 🙏

[RunNGunPhoto]

That's amazing! Thanks for sharing your growing tips. The results really speak for themselves. 😲

[pdean_photography]

I was watching this at 6:45 am while drinking coffee and that kaleidoscope had me thinking I was having a flashback lol I’m kidding of course, very informative thank you for sharing. Coincidentally I’m getting ready to put my California Coastal redwoods and African and Madagascar.Baobabs in 30 gallon pots. The purpose here is to get thicker trunks as fast as I can without planting them in the ground.

[beardownchicagobears]

Excellent instruction! Exactly what I needed for my junipers

[carolficorilli]

Good video, great info. I have a 1-2 year old juniper bonsai kit.coming from a nursery next week and I am wondering what is the best pot to use for development? And soil.

[w.l.]

After a day of going through the usual bonsai channels, your video has been the most useful in terms of how to maintain, plan and dissect trunk growth. Would love to see if you can have different camera angles on your tree as it is hard to discern through the foilage when you talk about promoting the growth from the branches you left unwired in the middle. Still, great video!

[steveanacorteswa]

I use #3 commercial air pots, put them on a raised garden bed so the roots can grow into the ground, my JBP and JRP love it too. I am using Azalea pots for some also, like they do in Japan (well Tokoname) and running an angled sacrifice like they do in Japan, the #3 is kicking butt on trunk size/growing wood, still too early to see, will find out next repot season on what the roots look like. I put a heavy layer of lava rock in the bottom to flatten the grow profile more bonsai pot like.

[SuperKrats]

Really looking forward to that JBP course, as I have started some JBP seeds this year, and have been searching for info about that kinda pine 👍

[Cory_J]

Great video, Eric! Looking forward to the JBP class. I'm loving the neagari JBP I bought from you in February. I'm stoked to do candle cutting on it next month and compact the image a bit. It's gonna be a great tree!

[ShalomYal]

At 1:45 I stopped to put on some Grateful Dead. Then continued this great video

[khizarhayat]

Sir i have an adult almost 5 feet tall juniper chinensis ‘Aurea’ planted in ground and i want to transplant it to a new sunny area what are the prerequisites for transplanting it safely thank you.

[sagebonsai]

I added sagebrush to my rocky mountain junipers, what I find is they grow much more all over compact growth compared to ones without sagebrush which growing a few long whips.
Eric I think this information could be very useful in some of your work.

[peterlubbers]

Hi there Eric, love your videos! I've a question to ask you: I've watched a lot of your Juniper videos and i am currently busy propagating Juniperus communis cuttings. Do the same rules apply to in propagating these as the other species in your opinion? Many thanks Peter!🙏