Oh, the crazy sh– we do for our trees

Tags

Bonsai, collect, protection, rain, repot, yew

That, my friends, is a big-ass rain fly from a family-size tent, oddly arranged and anchored under my deck. 

Under the fly is a yew. (Why does it feel like there should be a good pun in there somewhere?)

The yew was removed from a neighbors yard about a year ago, and put in this large box to contain a healthy-sized, clay-covered root ball. Since then, a bonsai friend of mine suggested I should have bare rooted it, but the decision had already been made out of an abundance of caution for the survival of the plant.

It has done quite well, really. It put on a good amount of new growth and has been backbudding all over the place. It was doing well, that is, until we got into a very wet August. The clay in that box is waterlogged and the tree is showing signs that it is not happy. What’s worse, we have a bunch of rain coming over the next week. 

It just can’t take any more water! It needs to dry out and this was the only way I could figure out how to protect it. That box weighs about 300 pounds so I’m not really interested in trying to move it to a sheltered location. Tipping the box so the watermore easily drains off is another suggestion I have seen often, but I think I would have to build a support structure to hold the thing up and prevent the box from crumbling under its own weight. 

We will see if this does the trick. Meanwhile, I will work on deciding when it will be safe to get it repotted. 

Oh, the crazy sh– we do for our trees!