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I've never been good at that. Knowing exactly how much to trim, and when, is some sort of psychic power. My plant telepathy's just weak. That said, olives woul

I've never been good at that. Knowing exactly how much to trim, and when, is some sort of psychic power. My plant telepathy's just weak. That said, olives would probably work well for it, considering their growth habit. Only as art, mind you, my wife and I'd fight over the one olive per year for the celebratory dinner salad.

Maciek416 2y ago
I've studied bonsai with a professional who trained in Japan for a number of years. Bonsai is a well-developed professional craft that should be learned from people who already know it rather than guessed at from absolute first principles (or from completely illiterate/nonsensical web slop, whether AI or not), as most beginners unfortunately try to do. The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow. If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-restyling/ https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-... Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
If all you want is the fruit you don't have to be artistically inclined. You can keep it simple and space-saving by training them into miniature espalier.

Maciek416 2y ago

I've studied bonsai with a professional who trained in Japan for a number of years. Bonsai is a well-developed professional craft that should be learned from people who already know it rather than guessed at from absolute first principles (or from completely illiterate/nonsensical web slop, whether AI or not), as most beginners unfortunately try to do. The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow. If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-restyling/ https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-... Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

If all you want is the fruit you don't have to be artistically inclined. You can keep it simple and space-saving by training them into miniature espalier.