Kalyos material

I got this broken computer chair from the school's janitor
for sixty pesos and nailed a circular plyboard
 on it  and it worked well as a turntable for working on
 bonsai materials.

It's frustrating how some of the bonsai materials I have been working on do not seem to grow or develop fast enough. It's been almost three years now since I have started the hobby and yet there's not a tree in my collection that I could say even resemble a tree because most of them are still stumps. 

I know, patience...

My niece Brielle who together with my mother and sister were
vacationing here in Cainta.

I have not been doing much with my hobby except pull the weeds off the trainer pots but since I have collected almost a hundred bonsai materials, this is keeping me busy most weekends. It's good because it keeps my hands off from twiddling with the developing materials that may  end up killing them. 

I went to Katipunan this morning to look at the materials that "Barok", the bonsai hunter, had collected from the wild but I met him on his way home, which obviously meant his materials were already sold. I asked and he smiled and told me that this was so. 

Anyway, I continued on towards the street where he and his hunter friends ply their trade to check some materials hoping that I could find that "perfect" trunk form, which does not exist, of course, because they are all stumps and perfection is really nothing but a subjective blah, blah, blah wishful thinking. 

I got these three kalyos (strabler asper) for a hundred each. This was a bargain considering the hunters dig these up and travel them to Quezon City all the way from the mountains or wherever they hunt for these material which definitely is not in the metro manila area. Of course whether the materials live or die is another thing. That's the risk of buying raw materials instead of buying established materials, but there's the excitement and fun with looking out for the little leaf buds that could mean that the material survived or it  could turn out to be nothing but the trunk releasing its reserved energy and it was really already dead. Yes there are time where materials sprout leaves but not roots. Ficuses especially Ficus benjamina is notorious for this. Anyway, established materials are about five to ten times more expensive.

Kalyos is a good material but looking at these yamadoris, there's not that much to expect from them but I guess with or without the "artistic potentialities", it's really  up to me, the hobbyist ( I dare not call myself an artist) to train and shape this tree to its ideal form.

Well, lets see after a year or two.