I'm Baaaaacccckkkk!!!!!

Wow, its been 5 years since I last posted here....I wonder if anyone still follows this blog? So, here's what happened....5 years ago it wasn't so easy to have your password recovered through Google and it became more trouble than it was worth. So I kinda gave up on it.

Then a few days ago I thought I would try again and wouldn't ya know, I remembered the old password and I was in!!!!

About 5 years ago I sold 98% of my trees just keeping 3 or 4 trees. I got back into riding dirt bikes which has always been in my blood. I had my first dirt bike before I had my first bicycle and grew up racing throughout Southern California growing up as a child. I had many years without riding and decided that I am not getting any younger and would like to get back to riding.  Trading in bonsai for motox was a hard thing to do but it has been fun and exciting I am also thinking I need to get back to collecting killer ponderosa from the mountains again!!

In the past 5 years I have really enjoyed watching my daughter grow up, she's 7 now and so awesome!!! I have had a great time riding tracks on the west coast and meeting tons of new friends and one thing that I really stepped up is with the koi. Man, noting better than walking up to a big pond with 20+ beautiful large koi swimming up to greet you. This has been my motivation as of late and has really allowed me to start a whole new pond, way bigger than my first and also the quality of my koi has really improved. They are very complex and I tell you what, they are awesome!!

So, the plan for the next few years?

1) finish my new koi pond build and back yard re-design
2) collect locally in the Cascades for great trees
3) 2017 get back to the Rockies for Ponderosa and Fir
4) narrow my focus on bonsai and only work on species that I love. Keep the numbers small but high quality
5) Offer some good quality trees for sale and/or trade for koi :)

Here are some pictures of randomness :)

Some recent work......

Just a few things that have been given a little love over the past few weeks....

Large Japanese Maple.

In 5 years it will be a stunner! The front will change from the picture below.

Cutting it back this hard was the right thing to do, infact it should have been

done 3 years ago....instead of wasting the past 3 years on this one. Live and learn.

Ponderoas pine now in a Mike Hagedorn pot. I love this tree and it can only get better

from here. Pot is nice, but not the final pot.

Fatty elm after letting it grow unchecked last year.

Changed the front and did lots of branch work. Give this one a few years then watch out! :)

I know, bad picture quality! This tree was posted on BonsaNut last year....in which some
did virtuals of it in a naturalistic style. I liked what they did but this trunk lends itself to a more
traditional styling. This is what the tree needs and wants, it wants to be short, super fat and powerful. Better pictures to come this spring.

Crabapple with a 4" trunk...bigger than you would think.

Roots......tons of them! Anderson flats and pumice do amazing things, no matter the species of tree

In a large oval pot. Need to work on branch ramification now.

Shohin Ponderosa

Same tree in a clamshell style pot by Sir Knight. One he was going to throw away.

This will look good in summer and next spring when the accents get established and fill in a bit.

But its a start!

Amny more to post later.... But for now here is one that is now in line for some work,

 a rather large pine...... My good buddy Tony there as "bonsai model extrordinare", lol!

Shohin Chinese Elm

This little elm is one of my favorites in the garden. Something about it just really appeals to me. I never liked the oval it was in just because it seemed to be to bulky and masculine of a pot. It really seemed to dominate the tree.  While I was cleaning the moss off the roots and thinning the foliage I thought now is as good a time as any to look at re potting the tree too. So I grabbed this little Erin pot that I thought would work well with the tree. The blues and browns in the pot will really work with the green leaf, the bark and the blues will really accentuate the fall colors. The only issue I had is I wish it had been a tiny bit wider. Oh well, it works just fine I think.

Before any work.

OH NO, NAKED!!! haha Roots just as I pulled it out of the little oval by Erin pottery.

Branches are thinned at this point.

Pots that I think will work. A blue-ish oval, a blue/brown rectangle and the oval it was in.

Root work underway, you can see the can for scale and the huge pile of Akadama, lava and pumice. There were a ton of roots on this little guy.

Soil I used was imported from Japan. It has akadama, lava, pumice and another Japanese clay in there. I use it on a lot of my shohins and accent plants and really like it so far. I got it from John Kirby at Vonsgardens. I don't know the name of it as the package is all in Japanese.

Potted up

In its new pot and lots of guy wires to reposition many of the branches. I think the new pot puts more emphasis on the tree and is less dominating that the previous pot. I think the colors in the pot will work very well and the size is good. The nebari touches all sides of the pot like it grew in it forever. Very, very good nebari. This is one of my favorites. Picture quality is not that great, I will update with better once in leaf. I hope you enjoy as I do.....

Dwarf Quince, Shohin

Here is a nice little dwarf quince that has amazing bark and is a cool little tree. Over this past summer it dried out and I lost the big lower limb on the left. My stomach sank when I noticed it dead....but then I thought that it would be a new chance to change the tree a bit.

 So today I decided that it would be the day to give it a look over and make some changes. The leaves are just starting to break.

As I started, lower left limb is dead.

Back

With Pepsi for scale.

I used mostly guy wires because I didn't want to damage any of the bark. Even though the bark is pretty tough I still felt it best. I did have to wire a few branches though. The guy wires are unsightly but effective for now. I am please with the way this came out since it was a complete restyle. This type of work is fun. I just hate the way picturs don't do bonsai justice..... oh well.
Finished for now.

Twisty Ponderosa

Here is a Ponderosa I collected back in the Rockies the summer of 2008. The pictures below were taken then.

I decided that it was time to work on it.I always knew what I wanted to do with the tree and the chance to work with good friends on trees presented itself I took this tree along. I learned quite a bit from a good friend of mine on some bending....

Now the after shots. The tree turned out pretty nice and looks much better in person. I look forward to getting it into a pot soon. This was just an initial styling and as it back buds and fills in it will be a special tree for me.

OregonBonsai's Website.

Here is a copy of the email I sent out today.
"As of today, Sunday Jan. 24th 2010 Oregon Bonsai's website has been shut down. A new direction and chapter is about to open up for OB and it will be an exciting time. A strategic partnership is being formed and said party will be working as a reseller/ distributor for some of the trees collected by Oregon Bonsai. More details will be released in the near future as they become available.


This has nothing to to with the economic climate as that market for high end collected material is stronger today than it ever has been. This has to do with a new direction and a new era in American bonsai.

Randy Knight, the owner or Oregon Bonsai is very thankful and happy for the new friendships that the website has supplied us over the past 2 years and he looks forward to meeting many more new friends around the world in the coming years.
If anyone has any questions or comments please feel free to email me.

jgamby713@yahoo.com
As details become available in the future I will put them on my blog so that everyone can have an idea about where to puchase the best collected material.

Regards,

Jason"

Shohin Ponderosa Pine

Here is a little ponderosa that I have had laying around in the front yard for over a year. A year ago I barerooted the little guy and potted it in lava and pumice. There has been an explosion of bew buds since then. This coming spring I will again repot it into a suitable bonsai pot which will change the image quite a bit. This will allow one to see the movement of the trunk coming out of the soil line.

Before I started it was about 8" tall and over 22" wide. Now is the time to give this dog a future and hope to one day be a bonsai

Lookin at the inside you can see a few rather large branches that are almost the same diameter as the trunk. While I can easily bend these it would just look funny and not be a good idea. After a minute a most of them were cut off and the tree changed drastically!

Branch selection has been made and now time to do some cuttting!

Jins have been worked, burned and will now age naturally in the great outdoors. By next fall they will be weathered and a nice grey in color. Tube of cut paste there for size comparison. Now the tree is very small and looks nothing like what it did 2 minutes ago. Maybe a future afterall?

After exposing the roots and seeing what the trunk did below the current soil line I chose to use this as the front. Ponderosa shohin are rare because they tend to have long needles. But there are short needle ponderosa out there, we see them from time to time. Or one could graft Black Pine on them as well. But for now native will work. While this tree will never be a show tree it will fit in nicely with my growing collection of shohin trees.  Next years posts here will show a much improved and filled out tree that will also be in a pot. Isn't bonsai fun? :)

Keep in mind this is an initial styling and the tree will continue to improve over the coming years. It has to start somewhere :)