Club News - January 2023
Michael Greenstein – Repotting Oaks
January 20 @ 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm
Many club members have oak bonsai – or are interested in them. January is a great time for repotting oak bonsai so this month Michael Greenstein will talk about and demonstrate how to do that. The photo below shows a Valley Oak that Michael has been nurturing in a grow-box for the past 3 years.
Michael began his Bonsai journey in 1969 at the age of 16 when he was introduced to Bonsai by a family friend who had learned about Bonsai while stationed in Japan following WWII. While in college at UC Berkeley, Michael spent time in Mr. Kato’s Bonsai nursery on University Avenue. After returning from graduate school, Michael collected his trees from his parents’ backyard.
After joining Kusamura in 1985, Michael took classes from Sandy Planting, Tosh Saburomaru, and Kathy Shaner. In the late 1980s, he was fortunate to go on California Juniper collecting trips with Lonnie McCormick led by Harry Hirao. In the early 1990s, Michael took workshops with John Naka, Harry Hirao, and Ben Oki. He worked on program planning for twoGSBF conventions and edited the initial versions of the GSBF Beginning Instructors guideline. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Michael worked with John and Sandy Planting on many trees and became the caretaker of several Kusamura club trees.
Monthly Tasks
Each month there are a number of tasks you need to do to your bonsai – from repotting, to fertilizing to spraying for pests. We have put together a checklist, customized for the San Francisco Bay Area to help you. This checklist is adapted from earlier work by Mitsuo Umehara.
This month: January Tasks
Potting Party - Sunday, Jan 15
Our second potting party will be January 15. Hours for the party are from 10AM until 4PM or earlier depending on the number of trees we all bring to work on. In the event of anticipated heavy rains, we will notify you via an email the day beforeSee your newsletter for location information or use Contact Us to ask for information.
Club potting parties are held to work on trees that can be sold at our Annual Show (this year that’s April 29-30, 2023). We can work on material that can be repotted in the winter which includes deciduous trees, junipers, pines, cedars, etc. Soil, pots, and wire are provided as well as some club owned trees in need of some attention. You will have an opportunity to purchase a tree during the potting party. For members who can come early to help with setup or stay late to put things away, your assistance is greatly appreciated. You don’t have to stay the whole day.
Donuts will be provided, but also consider bringing a bag lunch.
Festive December Holiday Party Recap
Despite the frosty temperature, an uptick in the “viral trifecta,” and a last-minute venue change, over 25 members gathered at Cubberley Community Center in Palo Alto for Holiday festivities. A shout-out to our members who scrambled to secure the venue replacement. Thank you also to members who contributed to our smorgasbord of appetizers and desserts. Maryann’s hot spiced cider kept us warm and Lynne’s table decorations looked festive and brightened up the room.
The “Select or Steal” gift exchange game kept us on the edge of our seats wondering whether an item would go home with the first person who picked it out or get stolen twice and go home with the intrepid “thief.” Members had the opportunity to bid on numerous bonsai tools, books, and stands. See below for pics of our delightfully decorated parade of bonsai trees.
Recommended Videos
Go Big in 2023! Here are three videos by bonsai professionals who do not hesitate to go big, whether on a small tree that undergoes a big bend or large trees that need taming. Do you hesitate to acquire and work on such materials because you don’t know what in the heck to do with them? These videos are for you. Technical focus is on big bends but there is so much more here to learn from the pros.
Demonstration for the Bonsai Association Belgium Trophy
This may be my favorite bonsai video. What will, what can David Benavente do with this impossible, tall, gangly pine? Difficult material transformed before your eyes. In this demonstration, he creates deadwood with hand tools and torch, then hollows out a section of the long trunk with a Makita die grinder, wraps, and, with rebar, bends to the back then down to the left. He splits crotches of big branches to bend them into a more compact shape. Lots of bending, guy wires, strength of human muscle—all required to place the branches. And lots of finger work to refine the image. Stay with this video, it gets better and better.
How to Trunk Bend a Field-Grown Pine Bonsai
This relatively small Japanese white pine with a thick trunk looks quite good even before Ryan begins to work on it. He uses the wedge technique, rebar, and a jack to make a bend in the short stout trunk. Always a perfectionist, Ryan runs into an overbite problem that he needs to correct, which he does with persistence and patience and his refined technical skills. He then proceeds to style the tree with his usual attention to details. He goes big on a small tree!
Bonsai Demonstration European Bonsai San, Saulieu, France
Taming the Dragon. A team of South Korean bonsai professionals styles this wild pine using all kinds of contraptions, including a ratchet hoist-like mechanism to execute drastic and dramatic bends.
Newsletter Editor: Jenn Tan