AusBonsai

Species: Melaleuca Styphelioides “Prickly Paperbark”
Trunk: 8mm
Source: Plants Plus
Cost : $3.75
My Skill Level: Low
Once again any advice or suggestions welcomed and thanks to Rory for this

April update

Early January I planted this into a grow box with my other entry. I live in an apartment with a small balcony with very little room left and was hoping this would help bulk it up. This grow box took about 40ltrs of native soil I got from a hardware store. At first it dropped its leaves then started pushing out new ones.

February 2nd I thought I’d chop it down to encourage lower growth and it did. I added some wire to get some movement into the trunk but took it off again shortly after because I didn’t have much growth and thought it’d be better to wait till it had some branches to determine how to shape.
I had a big problem with getting the watering right as this box only has 2 drainage holes. It was pretty much constantly wet. The trees seemed to be okay with that but the fungus gnats were in the thousands. I used potato slices to get rid of the larvae and yellow sticky pads to lower the numbers. It helped a lot but it was still a pain in the butt with all these guys flying around. I didn’t water for about 4 weeks to get it dry out and purchased a moisture reader so now I can water when needed. It’s about once a week to once a fortnight that I’m watering now.

So the next issue I had was that I hadn’t turned the tree in 3 months so All the growth was heading in the one direction. I turned the box around late March and it’s since starting to get better.
I was thinking of moving it into a colander then planting the whole thing so I can turn that without having to lift the heavy box which only gets me 2 directions instead of 4 or more. I’m just not sure if I should just wait until next spring to do that or if I try to dig it out with the soil around it and sort of slip pot it into the colander. Thoughts on this are encouraged thanks.