Photo image How to make a lemon tree bonsai: Tiendabonsai
Bonsai is one of the most attractive plants in the plant kingdom. There are many fans who sometimes try to deal with one. However, What if we offered to make one yourself? For example, you could learn how to make a lemon tree bonsai.
If you want to know how it is done and some tricks to make it grow little by little until it becomes a beautiful specimen, follow this guide that we have prepared for you.
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Why make a lemon tree bonsai
When you go to supermarkets, florists and other stores that sell plants, bonsai trees are one of the things you can find. However, most of these stores have specimens with green leaves, that is, they do not bear fruit. Buy a bonsai of lemon, orange, apple… It is not cheap compared to cheaper bonsai prices. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have your own lemon tree bonsai.
The The biggest attraction of a bonsai lemon tree, as well as an orange tree or an apple tree, is in the fruit. After flowering, with beautiful flowers, you will have very small lemons, in some cases even useful, which makes it much more attractive. But also something more delicate in terms of its maintenance.
Decoratively, this is one of the finest specimens you can buy. And in reality you don’t need to buy it in a store but you can create it yourself from a lemon pit. Do you want to know how?
How to Make a Lemon Tree Bonsai
Source: centrobonsai
Then we will give you the keys to easily make a lemon tree bonsai. Of course, you will need to arm yourself with a lot of patience depending on the type of citrus fruit you use.
Materials to use to create a lemon bonsai
If you’ve ever considered creating a lemon tree bonsai in your home, there are several things you need to have on hand to make it happen. These are:
- A citrus fruit. In this case, we are talking about a lemon tree, but in reality it could be a seed, a cutting or a small tree.
- Substrate. If you want the lemon tree to grow healthy and develop as quickly as possible, then you will need to use suitable soil for citrus and at the same time adequate drainage to turn it into bonsai, such as akadama.
- A flower pot. We know how much we want to have a bonsai, but when it is created from an early age, we cannot use a bonsai pot directly, but first the roots must develop and that involves having depth in your pot. This is why the best pot to start with is a normal pot, often referred to as a pre-bonsai pot in the bonsai world.
With all this you will have everything you need to start in the world of bonsai from scratch.
Bonsai lemon tree from seeds
As we mentioned earlier, there is several ways to make a lemon bonsai. One of them, and perhaps the first of all, uses a lemon bone. It’s also the longest way to get there, but if you don’t mind that and have the patience, you can build your own tree and shape it into any shape you want over time.
To start, you need to get a Lemon Bone. Many times when we split a lemon, some of the bones are already sproutedthat is, with some roots or even a small stem from which a tree could grow.
Once you have this bone, you will need to keep it for a few weeks in a damp towel and in a container covered with plastic wrap to generate some sort of stable temperature and warm environment for it to continue to develop its roots. and even its stem.
When it is big enough it should be moved to a small pot about six centimeters in diameter so that it continues to grow. As it is, you will need to transplant it from a pot over the next few years until the trunk is thick enough to consider it a bonsai.
Meanwhile, what you can do is go shape the branches to go in the desired direction. This is achieved by means of wire, bending the branches very gently to prevent them from breaking.
Once the trunk of your lemon tree is large enough to consider it a miniature tree, the next step will be to turn this pre-bonsai into a real bonsai. is maybe the most complicated stage and in which the tree suffers the most because most techniques consist of pruning its roots to fit them into bonsai pots. Our recommendation is to do it very little by little, cutting only 10% of the roots at each transplant in order to have a better chance of success.
Lemon tree bonsai from a seedling
Source: bonsaiempire
Another way to get a lemon tree bonsai a little faster is to use a seedling. As you know it would be a small growing tree, although you can also find fairly inexpensive pre-bonsai lemon trees in stores.
For both options what we are about to tell you is of interest to you. A lemon tree seedling as well as a pre-bonsai are characterized by having, in most cases, a still thin trunk. This implies that, if you want to have a tree that resembles the normal specimen as closely as possible, you will have to let it grow. One of the techniques used by some experts to achieve this is plant this seedling or pre-bonsai directly in the ground for a few years. This way the tree will behave like a normal citrus fruit and grow properly. After this time, it should be dug up very carefully to transfer it to a pot.
As you might think, we are talking about quite a stressful process for the tree, but it is possible to turn it into a bonsai. For this, care is very important.
In reality, what you need most to get a lemon tree bonsai is patience and time. It will not happen overnight, it will take years. But for that very reason, it will be one of the ones you enjoy the most, because you will have brought it to life from the start and created it the way you like it. Have you ever tried to make a bonsai? What results did you get?