Crab Apple Bonsai Tree Care

Locations for your Crab Apple Bonsai Tree

Outdoor

Sit in full sun, perhaps with a little shade in midsummer. Fully grown Crab Apples are very hardy in the wild. Crab Apple bonsai trees will benefit from having their roots protected from prolonged periods of freezing weather.

Indoor

Cannot survive indoors.

Watering your Crab Apple Bonsai Tree

Aim to keep the soil evenly moist, like a damp cloth feels. Water daily in summer.

Pruning your Crab Apple Bonsai Tree

The tree will burst into leaves in spring, and the flowers also come early. Flowers into mid-spring. The flowers start to fade in late spring. Where each flower was, an apple is likely to form. This can mean that the tree will be full of apples. The apples will start off small in late spring and will grow throughout the summer. The tree will put much of its energy into growing apples, which can overly tax it. It is therefore recommended to thin out the number of apples over the course of the year by cutting them off at the stalk so that by the end of the year just a few apples are left, which should then be removed entirely by autumn.

The tree will grow new shoots throughout the growing season. When they have grown a little, cut these back to the first couple of new leaves.

Crab apples are a good candidate for partial defoliation. This basically involves the removal of a proportion of the leaves throughout the growing season on an ongoing basis. Cut off leaves which are larger than average. Leave the stalk. A new leaf will grow which is likely to be smaller than the previous one. By doing this, you will also be allowing light into the middle of the tree, which encourages buds to grow there.

Can be shaped by wiring if you wish.

Feeding your Crab Apple Bonsai Tree

Feed weekly / fortnightly from spring to autumn, using a mild fertiliser at around NPK 555. We tend to use a slow-release fertiliser called Naruko, which we apply three times per year, in April, June and August.

Repotting your Crab Apple Bonsai Tree

Repot younger bonsai trees every one or two years using a general bonsai soil mix. Mature bonsai can be repotted less often than this.

Pests and diseases

The most common issues are powdery mildew and leaf spots of various kinds. All Apple trees are prone to this. Easily controlled by the use of fungicide sprays available from garden centres. It may be a good precaution to purchase some of this and spray the tree periodically. We use Fungus Fight from Bayer which can be purchased as a premixed spray or as a concentrate which you mix with water and use in a hand sprayer.

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