today we've decided to go back to the basics and do some bone side work on an azalea and this is alia is exactly as I purchased it from the nursery cavity remove the tag from it or anything because I wanted to show you folks what we do from the very beginning here so let's get started with our little azalea here the first thing we need to do is take the tag off it it's better cut the the line holding tag so is not to injure the tree and then we have to remove some dead flowers here and we can just pull those off with our hands be careful not to disturb the buds for any future growth now we've got a few yellow leaves which to me indicates that the soil may be a little bit waterlogged now let's see if we can get it out of a pot now I had to prepare to mount and everything but this may just slide right out let's take this really easy and there goes now it's out of the pot and we can clean the soil off and it's got real nice a lot of prime roots and a moose ball here well let's take this over to the garden cart and break up the soil a little bit and see what we have okay what I'm going to do here is just go into the root ball with the cultivator and kind of loosen the soil up a bit and as I suspected the root ball is a bit waterlogged and the soil is draining really poorly but we are going to fix that when we put this in a bonsai pot now generally if you start with one a five-gallon ursery stock you're going to have to remove roughly the bottom half of the root mass in order to get it to fit in the bonsai pot simply because nursery pots are much deeper now I'm trying here to kind of work between the roots so as not to injure them and I think at some point I'm going to go into this with a high-pressure hose in order to get a better idea what I have to work with here we've washed all the soil off the roots of our Azalea and fortunately the roots are in good shape but the old soil was much too lonely and too much organic matter and definitely had some drainage issues the next step is to remove any girdling roots that circle the base of the trunk like this one here and we're just going to cut that right out of there like that with a shears and now we want to look at our possible planted angles we've got two possible trunk angles and we can put it upright like this which wouldn't be very interesting we can tilt it a little bit like this and use this as the main trunk line or if we want to do something dramatic we can tilt it over like this and use this line here as the main trunk line and I actually like that choice best of all so I'm going to do a little bit of pruning here take a look at it from my side now if you want to thicken the base of the trunk the Japanese will typically leave branches like this on the tree and what they call sacrifice branches just to fatten up the base can develop good taper but we want to create something here that's going into a bone side pot now we want it to look like a bone side fairly quickly so we're going to take these off and now we're going to take another look at this s curving trunk line and take a few more little branches here now this one with the flower that I'm going to leave for now because it's not really hurting anything but a strong green ones here suckers as they I just tend to throw a lot of growth off the base and it's hard to get them to send growth to the top of the tree so during the time that you have it you're going to be pruning off a lot of these so they don't take energy from the top of the tray and then this one will take off and now we've got our upper trunk line fairly well established so let's prune back now when you prune an azalea you want to go just past the leaf internode because the new growth is going to come out of the gap between the leaf of the stem so we'll cut it right there and then we'll cut that right there and then this one will cut right there like that we'll take another look at this this looks like it's going to be the front of this tree so it doesn't really use this branch either you're not going to get something that looks like a finished wall side here when you do this you're going to get a nice little pre bond side that's going to give you some nice looking flowers and look quite showy in the pot that we've selected and we're talking about the product just a minute I'm going to clean up these stairs just a little bit more you have to be careful with the bark on azaleas - it's a sense of given for that reason we don't like to wire them the Japanese when they wire in is a Lea they wrap the wire and tissue quick protect the trees bark now we're going to look at the roots again and just do a little bit of pruning here to get it to fit into the pot if it's new clinton angle now I'm looking at these roots and seeing how much is at the end of them before I cut them off because if you take one that's too large you can seriously impair the trees ability to absorb moisture now we have a nice large pot here so this is going to fit into it nicely and easily and it functions well as a growing pot so that the tree can build structure and at the same time we'll give you something very pretty to sit on your patio and hopefully have your guests admire it shows this cream-colored pot because it harmonizes well with the color of the azalea's flowers and this particular Azalea is called a red bird that's the variety and the flowers aren't a true red but a very attractive pinkish red now some folks might want to wire the tree into the pot but we're using a fairly heavy soil mixture here and I think the aggregate and the soil is going to hold the in position just fine so why are here as a matter to me your personal preference and I just think it's kind of unnecessary here because you're using a deep pot and a fairly heavy soil so I'm just going to backfill around the tree here now for those who are going to ask about how to make the soil on what mixture I use this is my standard mixture it's equal parts decomposed granite builders sand humus and organic matter and I think right now the organic matter is a potting soil that we're using you can get it in your typical big box home store and any good grand a brand of potting soil will do stay away from the ones that have the water holding polymers because those will expand and move the tree around in the pot and they're also not necessary if you use this mixture this mixture paths both good drainage and good water retention ability alright that completes the filling in a soil now let's take it over to the hose and water a little bit so just from right over here is a nozzle Sun shower water from above until the water starts draining out of the bottom of the pot that way we know the Pradas full now you'll remember the old soil in the nursery floor there it goes you can see the fine ground the fine particles washing out with the water which is exactly what we want it to do the old nursery pot the soil was waterlogged and this soil is draining just beautifully so finish the tree by adding a rock which will help distract the eye from the fact that the trow God is still thin and then we'll add some moss and this will help the tree look as though it's been in the pot for a very long time now we'll just fill in a little soil around the moss and the rock just a little here you don't need a lot remove the water a little more with the nozzle set to mist and that will help the moss stay establish now I have a separate video on the moss and this moss is from my private supply which I keep in another part of the yard so I just missed it and get the moss nice and establish clear and this is our finished planting now we've got flower buds ready to go here on all these branches so if we've done things right if we had a little fertilizer for flowering plants and I happen to have some right here so I'm just going to reach over get it and sprinkle just a little bit I'm going to wash my hands right after I do this but if you don't want to touch the stuff you can wear gloves we use an old table spin so we've got our fertilizer there and this tree should give us a profusion of blooms over the next several months and put quite a color show on on the patio thank you for watching folks you