It’s been 7 weeks since I first planted my maple tree cuttings. Every few days I’ve had to remove a cutting that was failing to root, but I still have 10 trees that are looking good. A 42% success rate is pretty good considering in the past all of my cuttings have failed.

I don’t know why certain ones rooted and others didn’t, but I do I think the reason that at least some of them rooted was due to the new medium I was recently told to use: 1/2 coarse sand and 1/2 perlite.

My current count is 4 Trident maples and 6 Japanese maples.

Here’s a photo of one of the Trident maples that has already put out some new leaves:

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: