Genius Hour Blog

 Hey Guys,       This week has been a bit of a rollercoaster, balancing school projects, plant care/work, and the spider mite battle I've been fighting over the last couple of weeks.       For those that don't know, spider mites have been the number one killer of my plants. I'm careful, so overwatering isn't a problem but when the spider mites move in some plants are really at risk. They are very small so it can be hard to identify who is infected and who isn't. they can be hard to get rid of because they have to get under the leaves where they live and either wipe down each leaf and/or spray them down with insecticide. They feed on the sap of the trees which is essentially the blood of the tree. You can notice their effects when the leaves start to yellow and fall off, this can kill branches or the whole tree itself. they are prolific on indoor plants because there are generally no predators such as ladybugs or spiders and it doesn't rain in...

     Hello everyone, this week I was a little pressed for time so it will be more brief than usual.        So, to start, I just want to say that everything is alright with Nigel's channel. Youtube was able to get back to him and restore all of his videos. Everything is back to how it was before he was hacked, so that's good.        What I looked at this week were three videos that Nigel put out. these give some good insight into how pots are made for bonsai.       The first one here is Izabella making a pot on her own to give Nigel and opportunity to see it being done firsthand.      The second video is Nigel giving it a try with Izabella helping him along the way. He was working with a smaller amount of clay which must be easier to work with. One thing I noticed was that Nigel always had the potter's wheel at a low speed, likely because it could be pretty intimidating when you haven't done an...

Hey guys,       This week I took a look into Vietnam's bonsai presence. This topic was a bit harder to find information about online. Like a lot of other areas, it was carried over from China and Japan. They created their own version of the Japanese bonsai, these take a lot after the Chinese Penjing in the sense that they want to create a small landscape. This is called Hon Nam Bo.       Their trees look very similar because the branch selection and pruning techniques are the same as Japan’s and China’s. These trees are generally kept larger and are either in the ground or in very large pots. below is an example of one of those trees. you can see it's got the same pads that Japan's bonsai have but the scale of it is much larger and it located in a public place.      Bonsai is used as a symbol of good luck, that’s the reason that they have them placed all over. Inside, outside, on the streets, and on balconies. This art has such popu...