When you start growing indoor bonsai’s and how it goes with this hobby, at least for me, you end up quickly with more than just 1 or 2 to water. If the trees are established and humidity is drier the watering sequence starts feeling too often 🙂


The trees in my indoor shelf are not in very dry atmosphere, around 60-80% so the watering sequence is lets say every 2-3 days depending on the tree. The aquarium doesn’t need that often, perhaps once a week, again depending on the tree.


The indoor shelf contains 4-5 trees and still it gets annoying if watering is not somehow handy and easy. The structure of shelf is already such that I cannot just flush the trees inside but need to take them out and water somehow efficiently.


I tried different ways:

Water bottle

The first was having a bottle with by needle made holes in its cap so when bottle pressed water goes out in a nice shower:


Result

Shower fineness was very good, providing the holes are small enough, directed and separated enough so that the small water streams don’t get together and be too strong to wash away the soil particles. Making it was very easy and for the first try this was a good way. Unfortunately, I got bored with repeatedly pressing the bottle and water lasted too long.



Watering can

This way should be the best. I first bought the rose from www.bonsai.de but it was not made for shohin bonsai’s but rather larger trees whose soil is not so fine as my indoor trees and the water flow would wash away the akadama. After that I tried to make a rose with finer hole size and structure (something like the bottle cap) which ended in the watering can for shohins:

For some reason the photo ends up-side-down no matter how I rotate it 😀

 

Result

This was faster watering than the bottle, had a fine water flow but I had troubles when using powder fertiliser. Somehow regardless of waiting for it to be dissolved in the water small particles existed which filled the holes and the stream would be half of its flow. Same problem existed with the water bottle but water was going under higher pressure and I would manage somehow to push through all.



Sprayer/sprinkler

Now I use this one:


Result

Watering process is fast, it doesn’t require as much energy as the water bottle, the fineness of water spray can be adjusted ad it doesn’t suffer of fertiliser particles. Perfect solution….almost. It does spray the water quite much around so more care has to be taken. Using this it is also easier to sprinkle the tree itself, not only the pot and the amount of water in the spray is much greater than with other 2 ways listed above.



Watering location

Toilet sink 😀
I put the metal mesh with which I can clearly see if the water is dripping out of the pot:




Who would say I can make a post even about watering process as simple as this 😀