See, I want to grow moss to put over the soil around the skull, and one of the best ways of doing that is with what the bonsai community calls "keto-tsuchi", or what we down here in the American south call "muck". As you may have figured out from the name, its basically just smooth mud and, well, muck. Lots of fine grain organic matter, clay, you know, the stuff that if you stepped in a big deep patch of it while out hiking it would suck the boot right off your foot. Now luckily, I have several streams on my property which means I've got ample amounts of stream bottom silty muck for the taking.
To turn that into some proper bonsai keto, what I'd want to do is add some dried sphagnum moss to it, maybe a little perlite, basically turn it into something akin to concrete.
The reason I would want to do this is that a good bonsai soil mixture tends to be gritty and aerated, which is good for the tree. A good moss likes a growing surface that is smooth and dense that retains water well without moving too much. Pretty much the exact opposite of what the bonsai wants. Now, given enough time a good moss can grow over a gritty surface, but its difficult and slow.
Thats where the muck comes in. Mix up some muck and you can make a type of thin clay layer on top of the grittier soil that is water permeable that moss loves, without screwing up your soil underneath for the tree (or in this case pepper).
So, I went a hiking to see if I had some good stream bed silt I could harvest, and yup, found plenty of it as I knew I would. But in addition to that, I found this...
Now normally the only mosses I see around here are... well I don't know the names of the various mosses out here. Before I got into bonsai I never had a reason to differentiate between them. Its mostly this:
and...
...this stuff.
That second one (which took me forever to find a picture of on the internet now that its too dark outside to just take a picture of whats growing in the driveway) is what I harvest some of last week to start growing, but its not really ideal for this project.
Then I found the patches of the fern like leafy stuff in the first picture. This is the same stuff (or at least extremely similar) I bought dried in a bag to decorate the sides of the pot with, and here's some good living colonies right in my own (extended and heavily wooded) back yard.
Needless to say, that is the perfect stuff, and I cut my hike short and ran home to grab a shovel and the nearest suitable lightweight transport container I could get my hands on. Which turns out to be...
...the turkey roasting pan from Thanksgiving.
Dug up some of the muck dirt from the mostly dried up stream bed a dozen or two feet away, filled the roasting pan, and then harvested some chunks* of the moss to seed it with.
*Note: Be kind to mother nature, never harvest an entire outcropping of moss, just take some pieces from any given spot so that it can regenerate easily.
Got home, transferred to a better container (never use metal containers), poured some rain water in there to get it nice and moist, and set it under the carport where it would get partial shade but still have decent light. With any luck, I'll not only have the muck to cover the top of the better bonsai soil with, but it'll already be covered in a layer of matching moss to the container. Perfection!
(Side Note: I could probably take the dried moss I have, soak it in water, and have spread it out in the soil as well. While that moss is dead, odds are its full of spores that would germinate fairly easily.)
This is the key to making really awesome stuff. Just get the basic idea of what you want in your head, and then just walk around with your eyes open. More often than not, the perfect things you would never have expected will just fall into your lap.
No comments:
Post a Comment