Bonsai Tools
Bonsai Tools You’ll Need
You don’t need many tools for bonsai. But some tasks are just quicker and easier with the right tools. You can expect to pay a few or a few hundred dollars for your tools. In most cases, the more you pay, the better the tool you’re buying is. You should probably start out with a sturdy yet inexpensive set of basic tools; you don’t need to go all out when you’re just starting. If you take good care of your tools you can expect them to be useful for a very long time.
You absolutely need three tools to start shaping your tree for bonsai.
First you’ll need scissors, since you’ll have to trim your tree with minimal space to work with. Keep your scissors sharp and don’t use them for anything but bonsai. Rather than spending a lot, go for small pruning shears at first. You can upgrade to specialized bonsai shears after you get the hang of everything.
Concave cutters are just about the most necessary tool for good bonsai tending and growing. When you cut a branch off your bonsai tree with a concave cutter, the branch will have a concave wound. Concave wounds heal much more quickly than straight-cut wounds and the way they callous makes it tough for any layperson to tell that you cut the tree at all. Suffice to say that you’ve got to have a good pair. You also need to get some wire cutters, though you don’t need them to start your bonsai work. Remember that you can’t keep a wire on forever; it has to be removed. With wire cutters, you can cut your wire all the way up to the tree itself and leave the tree unscathed. Make sure you’ve got a pair of these, too.
A variety of wire thicknesses is best for bonsai work. Try to get anodized copper wire. It bends very easily, but after you bend it, it holds very rigidly. Anodized copper wire is great for positioning and training your branches. The wiring section will go more in-depth about what wires to use and how. When you get experienced with bonsai, you’ll probably want to add a few more instruments to help you along. With these new tools, you’ll have an easier time doing some tasks and you can even expand how you work on your bonsai trees.
You use knob cutters much like concave cutters, but knob cutters have spherical heads; when they cut a branch it leaves a hollowed-out scar. Folding saws help you cut branches that knob or concave cutters aren’t big enough to get through. If you’ve got a big tree, you’ll really need a folding saw. When you’ve got a space that you can’t get big shears into – twiggy spots in your trees, for example – you’ll want to have small scissors. Plus, you’ll need these if you need to touch up smaller trees.
If you need to re-pot your bonsai tree, invest in a root rake. You’ll use it to get dirt out of the root ball by combing it out.
An incredibly useful tool for bonsai is one of the simplest things around: tweezers. Tweezers can remove obstacles and other troublesome objects from your bonsai growth, hold back new growths, prune your trees, and anything in between. Specialty bonsai tweezers tend to come with a little trowel that you can use for sowing seeds, patting down moss, and whatever else you need.
Of course, the most important part of bonsai is the tree itself. Is it better to grow your tree from a seed or start with a sapling? Either way is fine, as long as you’re doing it!