Today I started my bonsai field growing project.

Since my garden is mostly occupied by soccer playing kids I had to find another solution. Luckely for me my mother only lives 20 minutes away and has a huge piece of land. I asked her nicely if I could use a tiny bit of it and since I always was a good boy when I was young *cough* she couldn’t refuse…

So I started by getting rid of all the grass and weeds that piled up over the past year.

An hour later I had cleared about 8m² or 90ft² so I could line up the tiles I would be using to get a flat root mass.

The tiles were buried 10cm/4″ deep and the plants where put on top of it. I planted most under an angle to avoid straight trunks in the future.

Almost 2,5 hours after I started from scratch I had something that looked a bit like a little grow field. The back row are Hedge Maples (Acer Campestre) and on the left and the right I got some Hawthorns (Crataegus monogyna). They will function as a hedge around the other trees that will be put in the center and at the same time they can grow out to be starter material in the future. As you can see I already put a Thuja Occ. in the ground too.

Next year I’ll put in some other young trees like Japanese Maples, Tridents, Ginkgo Bilobas. When I run out of space there’s still some ground in front of the grow bed I can confiscate 🙂

The toughest challenge will be to keep the “field” clean the next 10 years or so. We’ll see how that goes.