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Stay back my sycamore tree, the European type. So it's part of the Acer family and it's been
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doing pretty well for the last few years. You can see here the buds are swelling and about
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to open which is one about to repot it. Start with the usual raking of the topsoil to try
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and get things loosened up. It's an aggressive grower so it might be in here pretty tight
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but it's also a decent shaped pot so hopefully it will slide right out. Lucky little Corrali chop is all I need to get it out
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I wish all my other trees were this easy to remove from the pot. Some of them take me forever to get them out
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Looking at the root ball, it doesn't seem as full as it could be. And you'll see when I start running my hands through it, the soil is still pretty loose
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There is plenty of roots, but I think I could have left this for another year. It has filled this pot within a year before
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but I did also remove quite a lot of roots last time so maybe that slowed it down a bit
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The fact it's not a solid block here makes me think to leave it for two years now
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but maybe I'll regret that But for now I just need to get all this soil off
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and see what's going on You can see after a bit of raking, there's still plenty of roots, and they all look very thin and healthy
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I'd rather see this in a solid block of thick roots. I end to shorten anything back that was too long The ginger root ball is quite good It doesn need much work but of course that doesn mean anything to me you see it take it back quite hard
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It was looking okay here but after a bit more pruning I was left with this, So yeah, that was pretty intense
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Although if you can see this high root, I spared that for an hour. I might remove that in the future, but we'll see what happens
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The bottom was also nice and flat, and that was because I removed a huge chunk last time
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So that's paid off. So quite a small root ball, but should be fine
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I then just potted up and backfilled it. So a drastic prune, but a simple repot
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in April it's looking like it's about to burst on the leaf at any moment
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and the rocks just to weigh it down just in case a bit of wind tries to blow it over
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In May it's looking pretty good. The leaves are out and they're looking small which is not the usual for sycamore Here in June is looking great it a bit one but still early in its development so that alright
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there's still plenty of time to grow more branches but anyway let's look at its leaves as people
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usually say they're too big so let's compare it to one from the tree in my garden although I
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couldn't reach a full leaf so this half-eaten one is going to have to do but you can clearly see
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there is a difference. It's still not perfect, but it's not a complete disaster. I think you can get
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away with using these trees for bonsai, so long as the general tree is slightly bigger
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Anyway, as you can see, I'm pruning it back. I'm basically just removing a lot of the growing tips
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which just caused it to push out some smaller leaves. I've been doing this for a couple of
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years now. I think it has helped keep the size down compared to a full-size tree
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Doesn't look much different. And there's only the small tips that have been removed, but that will help it for sure
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There's not much going on in July but it seems happy enough
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There not really any changes in August but this was the great summer of no growth for all my trees i just need to pull that weed out
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some of you may notice leaves have some black spots on it i'm not actually sure what that is
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no change in September but you can see those black spots a lot more clearly now
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if I bring you in closer you can see it's like inside the leaf
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so it's some sort of bacteria I guess I don't know I probably should have researched it
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whatever it is it's ugly in October it still has leaves but it's not grown at this point
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so we're dropping the sleeves any time soon. If we bring you in close again
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you can see the leaves are starting to grow a bit brown in places. They just rapidly dry out and drop off
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There isn't much of a show of these. Which is why it's bare in November
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So at least now we can see the structure all winter. And here it is in February
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where normally I would prune it back but I'm actually pretty happy with how it's going. Nothing seems overgrown and there's no extra shoots anywhere
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Everything seems where I want it to be, so I just left it alone. And here we are now, where you can see it's still dormant
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So hopefully it starts waking up pretty soon. Thanks for watching, see you next time
