Start Your Own Bonsai At Home Without Spending Thousands | For Beginners

You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on an expensive nursery tree to start learning bonsai. In this beginner bonsai video, I show you how to start your own bonsai at home using small trees, seedlings, Japanese maples, bigleaf maple, ginkgo, coral bark maple and trees you may already have growing around your property. This video is about creating bonsai from scratch as a beginner, without needing a perfect bonsai tree, expensive bonsai tools, or years of tree experience. I go through real beginner bonsai training, including hard pruning, cutting back new growth, encouraging lower branches, thickening trunks, teasing out roots, repotting trees, working with seedlings, starting a small Japanese maple bonsai forest and collecting a young bigleaf maple to start its bonsai journey. I also show how I keep roots wet while working on trees, why I soak dry root balls before repotting, how I remove bad waterlogged soil, how I compact soil around the edges of the pot and why watering bonsai trees in gently after repotting is so important. This is a real-world beginner bonsai project, not a polished expert demonstration. If you are new to bonsai and want to learn how to make a bonsai tree from a regular tree, how to start bonsai from seedlings, how to train small trees, or how to create bonsai at home on a budget. This video will give you some simple ideas to get started. In this video I work with: Japanese maple seedlings A small Japanese maple forest planting Bigleaf maple Coral bark maple Ginkgo A larger softwood tree I’m still trying to identify Beginner bonsai soil mix Root teasing and repotting Trunk thickening cuts Hard pruning for bonsai training Watering after repotting 0:00 - Intro — Starting Bonsai Without Spending Hundreds 0:34 - You Don’t Need An Expensive Tree To Start Bonsai 1:18 - Using Seedlings And Small Trees For Beginner Bonsai 1:50 - Japanese Maple Bonsai Forest Example 3:10 - Cutting Back Growth To Build Thicker Trunks 4:20 - Creating Movement And Lower Growth In Bonsai 5:28 - Hard Pruning For Bonsai Training 6:15 - Working On A Larger Unknown Softwood Tree 8:54 - Teasing Soft Wood Tree Roots 10:05 - Separating Or Leaving Two Trees Together 11:05 - Bad Pot And Dry Soil 12:10 - Teasing Out Roots Safely 13:22 -Keeping Roots Moist Before Repotting 14:24 - Bonsai Roots Can Be Trained Too 15:22 - Acer palmatum 'Ukigumo' Bonsai Training Example 16:13 - Why I Don’t Like Pruning Before Leaf-Out 16:50 - Collecting A Bigleaf Maple From The Ground 17:15 - Digging Carefully To Save Workable Roots 19:25 - Beginner Bonsai Soil Mix 20:50 - Potting Low For Future Root Training 21:18 - Compacting Soil Around The Pot Edges 21:47 - First Hard Cut On The Bigleaf Maple 23:00 - Repotting The Japanese Maple Forest 23:40 - Repotting Coral Bark Maple And Ginkgo 25:01 - Watering After Repotting