sooo.. am I the only one, or have others converted christmas trees into bonsai?

Creating bonsai is an art. Teaching is also an art. Jelle, you have a knack for both. Thank you for making these videos!

Now . The tree becomes a bonsai my brother. With your touch .

Sehr gutes Video, lieber Jelle. Jedes Jahr etwa Mitte Januar gehe ich auf unseren Friedhof. Dort stehen neben den Bioabfallbehälter immer entsorgte mini Weihnachtsbäume zum Teil noch mit Lichterketten. Ich sammel die Tannen alle ein und entwickle sie für ein Bonsai-Tannen-Wald. Liebe Grüße und frohes Weihnachtsfest!

Quite nice.

Ok - you win. I am going to try and find a bargain basement Picea this week. Great video Jelle. Cheers Xav

Great job Jelle! My outdoor trees are frozen to the ground and covered under 2 feet of snow. I will have to stick to tropical work until the spring! 🐦💙

Thanks for the shout out Jelle. Great vid! I liked the small one best, looking very interesting. Looking forward to see where you can take it given time. I will not get myself another christmas tree project. But I will need to do something with the one I made 5 years ago. Hope that qualifies. The vid is planned and I promise to include telling just why I will not get any more. 🙂👍

Watching here thanks for sharing my dear friend nice vedio very informative

Merry Christmas jelle

Great video as always Jelle. I hope you had a lovely Christmas and all the best for 2023. Fingers crossed for lots of bonsai videos too by the way!

Bonsai phill very good video yes I have oneits About 15 years old now Thanks jelle

I swear, if bonsai wasn't such a niche hobby, your channel would have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Great content.

Merry Christmas!

This shall be a blast

Merry Christmas Jelle. Also i've done a couple, the first two years ago and the second last year. Uno formal upright and the second short and slanting. I always love watch your works!

Hi Jelle, nice trees. 👍 I couldn’t have wait until Christmas to give my tree a little make-over… 😅🙋‍♀️

Happy New Year Jelle! I purchased couples of conifers particularly for this purpose from the Christmas sale and right after that you published this video. How nice. :D However, Picea glauca is a very common potted winter plantation tree here in Finland and some Cypresses and Junipers as well. Just recently, it has become more and more popular to buy some traditional Christmas tree species alive (not like cut ones) as a potted state too. Picea abies and P. omorica are the cold hardiest of all and would like to try bonsai with them. Therefore I now managed to get couples of Picea omoricas (we also have P. abies on sale but I just don't have enough space for them right now) relatively cheap on after christmas sale and planning to make some out of them. The challenge is still to get them alive through the winter though. Here in Finland you have to wait until the spring in order to do anything with the plants since it is so cold outdoors and plants there will be dormant and frozen completely until April. Moreover, the temperatures at indoors are too high for overwintering anything temperate species there either. Unless you have a storage, chellar or winterhouse with some back up heating keeping temperatures just above the freezing, you just have to pause pretty much everything for the winter regarding the horticultural activities. For many months! Nevertheless, I'll get back to this topic if and when I going to get these trees to the spring alive and have any chance to work with them. Wish me luck - there are still so many hard months to go until a safe zone...

Hi looks good might have to do one 👍

Merry Christmas Jelle! I started my first Bonsai 3 days ago and it´s also a 'Christmas tree'. Uploaded the video on my KZfaq for your Playlist :)

👍👌🙂

Nice work on the video and nice instructions and insights into the how and why of the design. I think this is great, definitely a good way for newbies to try things with pruning and shaping and not have to worry much about the cost of the material if things go wrong.

Noice! I need more practice with selecting and wiring branches. I have trouble with these types of trees. Looks really good! Thats why you’re a master! Merry Christmas!

Don't we all have at least one of these? I got several and actually got one for free at my grocery store this year. It makes beautiful bonsai. Love what you did to that little one.

Sorry I couldn't bump up your premiere numbers this morning, but terrific video as usual! I hope you had a good Christmas; I remember you saying you didn't like eggnog, so I drank your portion yesterday after mine. And then some.

Merry Christmas! Those trees look fantastic! I am going to the city today. Although nurseries and greenhouses are not all open today. I will look to see if any of the box stores have trees this year. I have not seen any yet. Hopefully there aren't too many humans. I should bring a stick maybe. I don't feel like dealing with humans today.

Now to leave the wire in place for the next three years while it sets in place 😂😂😂 I really like that smaller tree - at least it doesn’t look like a tv aerial. 😂 These definitely benefit from wiring dramatic movement into the trunk. 👍

I bought a small spruce like yours recently so that I can turn it into a bonsai this coming summer but it was inside a room temperature store for probably a few weeks (not outside in the elements). Do you think it would die if I put it outside (it's winter here, growing zone 5) as long as I don't do any work on it now? Thanks for all the really helpful videos!

Merry Christmas Jelle I have never bonsai before and thought the price is right for a small 1 gallon blue spruce, When is the best time to trim, and wire a christmas tree? I thought I had to wait until early spring to do any of that. I'm sure climate matters and Southern California does not get to cold but it does freeze here (30F/0C) so I thought i should wait. After doing any work to the tree do you shelter it? Great work very inspiring, I want to get started but don't want to kill the tree by stressing it out.

will these bud from the trunk? in case you need branches in bare locations?

Top vid again 🙂 Question... If you look at the natural growing habit of picea, when you wire down the branches, the bottom of the needles are now facing up and the top of the needles are facing down. Did you ever had an issue with this?

showing off about drawing in addition to bonsai? 😆

do you not have to wait till spring to prune the tree

What does it look like after months?

I had a few for a few years, but it’s too hot at my location. They died once we hit 107F.

What are the chances of killing a spruce after removing so many branches, pruning some length and still repot it in a few weeks ? Honestly I would like to do something similar, but I’m kinda afraid that I’m going to kill the tree, as I would probably need to remove a lot of photosynthetic material + reducing the length of the roots.