#Bonsaiupdate: Common Fig tree bonsai progression

I have posted a few photos of this tree on Instagram but I never wrote the full story of this tree. I moved to the property where I have been living for the past few years in 2014. This tree was right next to my kitchen window. Under this tree was a wet black muddy area. So during the first winter my wife and I decided that this tree must go. That Sunday afternoon while my wife and daughter were sleeping I removed the tree. It did not take long at the ground the tree was in was very easy to dig into. The tree was chopped to size and removed from the ground.

As I looked at this nice short stump I knew that I could make something out of this. I got the cats litter box made a few holes in the bottom filled it up with soil and planted the tree in the “pot”. After about a year buds started to appear on the stump as I planted this tree in the pot in winter.

Here is the tree after its first styling.

Must say it was not easy bending these branches. I even had to use rubber bicycle tubes to prevent the branches from breaking. I was very happy with this as a start as I now knew that the tree will survive.

This was the tree in November of 2016. It had a lot of new branches and was planted in a bonsai pot. As you can see I tried to improve the taper be chopping of thr top part of the tree at an angle towards the front. It help by the scaring did not look good. As you will see in the photo below I carved the trunk to make the scaring look more natural.

This is a photo of the tree earlier this year. I changed the angle that the first two branches and bend them slightly forward. I will be repotting this tree at the beginning of the growing season as it was been in this pot with the same soil mixture for more than two years now. The soil has become very dense and when watering it takes a while for the water to drain from the holes at the bottom of the pot. I will be planting the tree in a free flowing soil mixture in the same pot. Hopefully this will also help with the growth of the tree and cause more foliage to grow on the tree as it has been growing slower the past few year in relation to the first few year in the pot.