inspiration wohnzimmer gestaltung
hello and welcome back. in this episode, i want to show you my method of cleaning enameled bonsai bowls. and what i want to mention explicitly at the beginning of the video is that i used this method for those enameled bowls that you get as a free extra with the bonsai trees that you can buy in stores. in many cases, i don't go on to use those bowls for the actual bonsai trees. i put those in another bowl and the first one is left over. i rather use those for making some nice compositions with succulents or cacti.
so this method might not be the most gentle way to treat expensive bowls, whether they're enameled or not, but for those cheap bowls, the method is good enough and it costs extremely little. so have fun watching. in front of me, i stacked all the materials i need for this method. on the one hand, there are of course the bowls that are to be cleaned, and we'll use vinegar for that - take a cheap vinegar from the supermarket, should be available for less than 1 €,
you also need a microfiber cloth and some oil, which shouldn't be common household oil you use for cooking, but a special one than cannot go rancid, i chose clinker oil in this case, but camelia oil or other things that you can buy in every bonsai store would do just as well. you'll also need a bowl for mixing water and vinegar to put the bowls into for a while in order to dissolve the lime edges
and afterwards, we'll also do the cleaning in that bowl. my mixture is simply roughly the same amount of water and vinegar. so i'm filling this up with vinegar now. since it is so inexpensive, there's no need to use it sparingly either. the bowl or the pot that you use should be covered up well. and then fill in the same amount of water. the next step is simply to put the bowls in here, and of course, we want the lime edges to be under water. so it looks like this.
now we need to wait a little - i'm letting these soak for about an hour and then i'll se you again. well, that's that, i even let the bowls soak for 2 hours now in the vinegar water, and i switched them over a few times, which i'm doing again now, and now it's time to brush the bowls thorougly. this is the brush i use - it doesn't matter what kind of brush you use, the point of this is just to go strongly clean these bowls again and remove anything that might be left on it.
so i'm demonstrating that with this bowl and will then do the others off-camera. so this method is suitable for removing slight traces of lime and of water that contains lime since i don't use rain water because we don't have our own garden here, so i use tap water, and that contains a lot of lime in our area, which is why we have quite some issues with lime traces on our bowls. and of course, the method is also suitable for removing soil or dirt from any other sources as well.
so now the bowl is cleaned and i'll put it aside so it can dry, because as long as it is still wet, you can't see the residual lime traces that are still there, and as soon as it's dry, they'll be visible again. so i'm putting it aside now, will turn the camera off again, and in a while, when it's dried and i've cleaned the other ones as well, we'll take another look to see where some lime is still let, and then we'll get the oil.
see you then. all right, the bowl is now dry enough for us to take another look at it. the major lime traces are gone, but there are some spots left - i hope you can see that here - where a little bit of lime is still visible. here on the top as well, you can still see some lime traces here. so now the oil will do its job. so let's start with that now. since i don't know whether the oil might be harmful to health,
i took the precaution of putting gloves on, so that's something you should always keep in mind as well. you only need a very thin layer of oil and in fact, you're not actually removing the lime, you're only making it invisible. this is a microfiber cloth, a very cheap one from the supermarket, put some oil onto it and then spread it widely on the bowl. that's it basically. so here are these oil traces - i mean lime traces, so we're now putting oil onto them
and voila: the lime isn't visible any more. do you see that? so i'll do that for the rest of the bowl now, too. that leaves it nice and shiny. the oil doesn't smell adversly either - actually, it doesn't come with any smell at al. and you can see that i'm not adding any oil now either, i'm just using what i had already put onto it, to get the whole bowl glossy and remove the remaining lime traces. and now the same at the top. some little lime traces are still visible here
and will go invisible now. and i'll do the same with the other bowls now as well, you don't have to watch all of that now either, and i'll get back once i've finished all of that. that's what the result looks like: a shiny bowl without any traces of lime and completely clean, no dirt left. and the method is really simple and cheap. some mother time later i'm finally done with the bowls. i'm really satisfied - they have much more of a gloss than before,
the colors are much more visible, and most of all, no lime traces can be seen anymore and the dirt from the soil has vanished, too. when using the oil, you should definitely take care not to touch the inner side of the bowl because don't really know whether the oil that you use might possibly be harmful to the plants. so better keep the oil outside of the bowl. and as you can see on the oil bottle - that's a 100 ml pack that i bought,
and hardly anything is gone now, so 100 ml are enough for an eternity. something that this method didn't focus on was preserving a patina or trying to start a patina. i don't care for that with these bowls, really, because i don't intend to use it for bonsais for decades to come, instead, my goal is to use them for compositions with succulents and cacti, so i wasn't keen on developing a patina here in the next years. so if that is your goal, do some research on the internet
and maybe look at some other methods to clean bowls up while retaining or supporting a patina. so much for this video on the cleaning of bonsai bowls - that is, cheap enameled bonsai bowls. i'm very satisfied with the result, i hope you liked it as well - if so, i'd be happy about a thumbs up, so see you next time, bye bye, your galati.