Don Walker wrote:
Good morning,

I have hard water so I try to keep my watering can full so the calcium
can settle out and the chlorine can evaporate. The problem is that I
never seem to have enough water ready for my trees and it's just going
to get worse as the Summer heats up. I'm thinking of buying a barrel or
a large pot or maybe a filter.

How do you folks treat your bonsai water?

If you use a settling vessel how do you keep the mosquitoes out?


Since the calcium is in solution, it's unlikely to "settle out."
The only material that will actually settle is something
carried in suspension -- unless your water is super saturated to
the point that the calcium would precipitate when the water cooled.

But as others have said, it's nothing to fret about as far as the
health of your bonsai goes. Neither is chlorine. Basic rule of
watering plants; if its safe for you to drink it's OK for your
trees, and actually water with higher-than-drinking-
water-standards levels of some materials still may be OK -- or
even good -- for your trees.

Any garden center sells "mosquito dunks" -- donut shaped cookies
containing a bacteria (BT) that attacks mosquito larva. It also
comes as granules, which is the way I prefer it since its easier
to dole out small amounts for individual trays of water I may
keep under some trees such as bald cypress and wisteria. I keep
my small fish pond and all the bird baths stocked with BT, which
probably helps curb the skeeter population, but with several
thousand acres of woods on all sides of my little farm and with
all the magnolia leaves on the ground in those woods to serve as
skeeter reservoirs, any mosquitoes I could produce domestically
probably would go unnoticed. ;-)

Anyway, I'd just use your water straight from the tap. Use a
spray head on your hose and it will further aerate away the
residual chlorine.

Jim Lewis - - Tallahassee, FL - Nature
encourages no looseness, pardons no errors. Ralph Waldo Emerson

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