How to Discipline Your Growing Bonsai Tree
A Necessary Part of Achieving Zen with an Unruly Young Tree is being just strict enough
Keeping a Bonsai tree can be extremely rewarding: the daily routine of watering and trimming it can immeasurably aid your mental health while leaving you with a very handsome addition to your home or office. But many first time Bonsai tree buyers overlook some of the less fun aspects at their own peril, such as the need to firmly punish a bonsai tree that acts up.
The first issue that tends to challenge a Bonsai tree “parent” is paper training. You may be tempted to yell at your tree for dripping on the carpet, but then you would be forgetting that it doesn’t know yet that’s bad, and it certainly isn’t able to connect your yelling to its specific bad behavior! It just knows you’re yelling! So rub the tree’s branches in the water puddle while saying firmly but calmly, “NO. NO.” And when it drips onto the paper, give it a treat, such as a nice raking!
Bonsai trees are curious creatures. So yours will probably try to explore the house, sometimes getting into places they don’t belong, such as the laundry room or the pantry, where it may chew up boxes of things in hopes of finding fertilizer tablets. So, you will probably want to set up gates around the house to keep your bonsai…
