JLDoggett

Very nice Centaura, as if anything else is possible. I suspect soon that will be as good looking as many of your other trees. Maybe a progression thread would be fun when you are so housebound.

I almost wish we would get snow-bound here.

__________________
"Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant with the weak and wrong....because sometime in your life you will have been all of these"

And I further resolve to click on an ad, each time I visit, to help support the site and to be welcoming to lurking guests when you join! After all, you're already here.

Mattbonsai

Hey Centaura, Thanks for replies, at the moment I've only got a couple a retusas, I've tried various benjamina in the past but they've always been a no go with me, usually kicking the bucket within a month or two. I've always put my Ficus outside for the summer, but with the last 3 summers being wet and cold, they've suffered a bit. I haven't got any grow lights set up (still living with a parent who likes to keep an eye on the electricity bills), could this be why they dont put much growth out? Not enough light in the summer or winter.

Wish I was snowed in aswell! We had nearly that much in Berlin this Christmas, but back home in England its all melted and gone


Cheers

-Matt-

__________________

centaura

Retusas, huh? They never get great ramification unless you work on them in a very large scale. I'll attach a pic of one of the retusas that I work on at the Garden, that's a size that works well with the large leaves and long internodes of retusas. Of course, this tree is a pampered baby - with a big greenhouse that it lives in every winter, with supplemental halide lighting. We trim and defoliate twice a year, and they grow like weeds.

Your benjaminas are probably suffering from being too wet. They can take cool - my basement in the winter stays between 60F and 65F, but will grow more when warm. But they do need light - I have mine under florescent lights for 16 hours a day in the winter. That's enough to get them by until they can get outside again, they'll grow a little bit but not much and very slowly.

You might be able to get by with a 4' florescent shop light. I had about 5 or 6 going in my condo - and it only added about $10 a year to the electric bill. Now, that was a while ago and energy prices are cheaper in the states, but I bet one 4' shouldn't add more than three to five pounds a year to your folks' bill. I get cloudy like you in the winter time, but the sun does come out for me in the summertime.

-Centaura

Attached Images

gardenretusa.jpg (80.7 KB, 9 views)

centaura

The other common thing to do with retusas is to grown them out to get fat trunks, and then graft smaller leaved and more densely packed foliage onto it. A commonly imported example of that is:

Goliath

They're mass produced in tropical areas of china, where they can get fat trunks fast, and then in this example's case, they grafted gold coin onto the retusa trunk where they wanted branches/foliage pads. This still needs one more foliage pad, which I will hopefully be grafting in this summer. I got some cuttings of the gold coin growing, and I'm hoping they'll be long enough by summer to do an approach graft with them.

-Centaura