I got home about two hours ago from the Akron Canton Bonsai Society meeting.

A bunch of people had trees that they were doing some major work on and many of them were giving away cuttings.

As I mentioned in my last post, I haven’t had much luck with cuttings, but I decided to take what two of the people were giving out. (There was another guy working on a beautiful fig and I thought about taking some of his cuttings too, until I realized that his tree is horribly infected with scale. I DON’T want to deal with that.)

I also got a bunch of new tips from a couple of the seasoned members regarding how many leaves to remove (can’t really describe it in words; not too many, not too few, is the best I can say) and where to cut the bottom off (just below a pair of leaves that were also cut off).

I just spent the last hour potting all of them. I now have approximately two dozen cuttings. About a third of them are Trident Maples and the other two-thirds are ‘Deshojo’ Japanese Maples. A few are hardwood cuttings, but most are softwood.

Hopefully at least some of them take. But if they don’t, it’s no big deal. I won’t have wasted my time because I will at least know that whatever I was doing will not work the next time I try it (if I do try again).

Here are two photos by Walter Pall that show what a Trident Maple bonsai and a ‘Deshojo’ Japanese Maple bonsai can look like:

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