"Geeks Turning to Bonsai to Combat Stress". That's the title of an article I just came across. The author claims that "the art of bonsai, which takes extreme detail to attention and tremendous patience, is the ideal stress reliever for the “geek”." This may be true, but it got me thinking about another geek trait with which I am afflicted: extreme procrastination.

It's been a long while since I've done anything other than water my trees. I let my wine grape dry out a little too long in the basement, and all its leaves dried up. I plucked them off--I was pretty sure that the leaves were also harboring a fungal infection (they had a dusty coating and some of the leaves had started to shrivel anyway), so I figured I'd see if I could get it to grow new (fungus-free, hopefully) leaves, and if not, well, I've still got a nice pot. The wine grape was in a sorry state to begin with: soil completely taken over by liverwort, small white worms in the bark, which was perpetually soggy, by the way.

Anyway, to get to the point, there's been a ton I've wanted to do with my trees (prune my ficus & repot it over a rock, prune my pomegranate, and possibly repot it with new soil, stratify japanese maple seeds...), but I haven't done any of it, because I am an excellent procrastinator. See, it's because I don't want to mess it up--the easiest way not to mess something up is to not to it. So I haven't.

But I'm reinspired since a friend gave me a brand new awesome bonsai book...and since I just read that it's OK to prune a ficus pretty much any time of year, I'm gonna go ahead and give it a go. Pics to come...