New :-)

[kawaiihoshi]

Hello, I'm new to the community, and to bonsai-ing. About a week, ago, I got a bonsai for my birthday. It's a Ficus Benjamina KiKi. It's been doing good, I water it everyday and it's got a lot of new leaves coming in that are a nice green color

Comments

[nulldevice]

If it's young, it'll probably look twiggy.

Great thing about ficuses is unless you really do a number on them, they're next to impossible to kill. Ficus sawdust will practically root.

First off, make sure it's in some decent soil. A lot of purchased bonsai come just rooted in moss with a layer of gravel glued to the top. If that's the case, strip that stuff off and repot it in a non-bonsai pot for a while, in a loose, well-draining soil (like commercial bonsai soil). If it has a huge taproot, prune that back a bit...eventually you'll want to get rid of that entirely but right off the bat it might not be the best.

If you want the trunk to thicken, prune back a lot of the upper branches and leaves. If they try to sprout back up there, keep pruning. Eventually, the tree will get the idea and start branching lower. Ficuses grow fast, so they make excellent first bonsai - you can learn quickly how trees behave. Once it has a robust feeder root system, you can pretty much chop everything off and it'll sprout back. I've pruned a benjamina down to a little stump of trunk and had leaves on it again in a week. They're resilliant little buggers.

You can buy special bonsai fertilizers, but for a ficus, any regular plant food should do. Ficus like to be watered, but don't like to sit in water, so water it, let it drain, and you should be fine. They're also nice in that if you forget to water it for a day or two it'll survive - unlike some varieties which will drop leaves if you look at them the wrong way.

Good luck!

[kawaiihoshi]

Thank you very much! :-) My uncle (the one who bought it for me) actually bought it at a bonsai house, so it's already nicely set it a good sized pot and the rock aren't glued to it at all, so luckily, I don't have to worry about repotting it, for awhile at least.

It's very good to know that my ficus is a resilliant type. Once I know more about bonsais and how to take care of more types, I'm looking to expand into different types. Thank you for all your advice, it really helps a lot! :-)

[indigodye]

Im new to the community and wasgoing through old posts. I just got a mini jade plant today, and I was wanting to try my hands at bonsai. So I should trim the top branches to try to get the trunk to thicken? Would it work on Jade?