putting tree in nursery pot

Hi Everyone,

I'm pretty green when it comes to bonsai. I ordered a japanese maple off the internet which cost me $15. I want to put it into a nursery pot for a few years to grow out and am wondering what kinda soil I should use? Can I use just regular potting soil?

Thanks in advance!

You and it will do better if you plant it in something a bit coarser than "potting soil" which tends to get packed and mushy when we have wet weather.

Thanks for the tip. Should i just put some store bought bonsai soil in there? i'm not planning on moving it till next year and only if healthy enough. its having a bit of a rough go of it at the moment.

If you are planning to repot next year, I would suggest that you can use garden soil to fill the space between the root ball and the larger nursery pot. You want soil that is on the sandy rather than the clayey side. You will also want to loosen the outside of the root ball a bit so that the roots can grow into the new soil. I have used this method to overwinter quite a few late season acquisitions in Spokane - a similar climate to yours.

Jim is right that you want a better draining soil for long term growth. You can use a commercial bonsai mix or make your own. Lots of folks use Turface MVP which is used for baseball fields and similar sports surfaces. The key to using a coarse soil when repotting a nursery plant is to get rid of part of the old nursery soil and loosen up the rest so that there are no well defined boundaries between the coarse and the nursery mix since they will dry and wet at different rates. For most maples, I go ahead and bare root the tree when I first pot it up. However, this is not for the faint hearted or novice.

Why not put it in the ground? It will grow much faster. If not add perlite to a regular potting soil mix, maybe 1 to 1. Fertilize weekly with an high nitrogen fertilizer and watch it grow.