A few pine seeds, 6 years later.

[esons]

Very interesting and informative. Thank you.
Was wondering about that canker rot on the monterey cypress. I've got a bunch started and would like to avoid it.

 

[Eric Schrader]

I believe I was referring to pine pitch canker which is different from cypress canker. Cypress canker affects Monterey cypress when they are in hot inland areas. Although mine never suffered while I lived in Thousand Oaks, ca.

Pine pitch canker is particularly rampant in San Francisco at the moment because there were thousands of Monterey Pine trees. In the years since I lost my batch of seedlings more than half the full size Monterey pines here have died and been removed. They used to line the highways which are now feeling a bit more barren. However, the Monterey Cypress are thriving in most parts of SF. I have a batch of cypress myself - they grow remarkably fast.

 

[esons]

Oh, I misread. I guess I got excited when I read "monterey" and acorns since oaks and Monterey cypress are the seeds I've planted this year. I know the oaks might be susceptible to the sudden oak death, mainly if I try to plant them out (does this affect potted trees), but I've been hoping the cypress would do well.
I'm lousy at identifying pine trees, but a ton of the ones around me have started dying. Maybe there Monterey, and the cankers here too. I'm not to far from SF.

 

[KennedyMarx]

I just had to read through this thread again. I must have forgotten to thank you before, but thanks for documenting all the pine growing! It's definitely inspirational. Have you experimented at all with wiring JBP seedlings and allowing it to cut in and swelling the trunk?

 

[garywood]

KM, I think the important takeaway in this thread is realizing that there isn't a need to cut candles to get back-budding, regardless of style. The same principle is true of all pines if you are growing-out.

 

[Eric Schrader]

I just had to read through this thread again. I must have forgotten to thank you before, but thanks for documenting all the pine growing! It's definitely inspirational. Have you experimented at all with wiring JBP seedlings and allowing it to cut in and swelling the trunk?

No, I've never left wire on intentionally. I've never liked the result of how that looks. Boon had a batch where he allowed that to happen and I thought it was bad looking. [Edit - I should say that there was a batch in Boon's yard, but they belonged to a student, not to him.] As with the Japanese White pine that are grown in bulk in Japan, you get a somewhat regular spiral in the bark with indentations. It looks manufactured to me.

As to allowing the wire to scar the trunk and then removing it to increase the girth - I believe it's much easier to get this wrong than right. If you think about it, you need to get the scarring to be more severe at the bottom and less severe as you go up so you don't get reverse taper on the trunk. But I've not tried it so perhaps the actual results after 8-10 years is not what I expect.

 

[jeanluc83]

I wouldn't mind an update on the root over rock trees from earlier in this thread. It is one style that I have always found appealing.

 

[barrosinc]

Nice thread! thanks

 

[Eric Schrader]

Here's and update of this tree from post #34 in this thread, last seen looking like this:

June 2014 I candle cut the branching. In this case the tree will be shohin size but the branching is growing far too long.

After decandling the tree structure can be seen again. I've decandled behind the node on some of the branches to force needle buds and make the structure more compact. The down side of this is less-regular bud formation, but the upside is that it buds in more places. This technique is only well applied to young trees that are very vigorous and that don't already have a lot of branching.

After a three months of growth the buds are looking strong. In November I'll thin them and wire the tree out:

 

[wlambeth]

Why are the roots cut off of a seedling?

 

[Eric Schrader]

Why are the roots cut off of a seedling?

For a couple reasons, but the technique does not need to be universally applied. Cutting the tap root on the 1-month old seedling forces it to bud out roots in one place and it shortens the stem of the plant below the first node point. That's more important if you're trying to make small pines, like shohin or smaller size. It's less important if you're making larger pines.

There's some lore surrounding the technique that suggests that it causes a good flare at the base of the trunk. In my opinion the flare is caused by the roots, not by the cutting of the seedling. So, if you get roots radially anyway then you'll get a good root flare regardless of whether or not you did the seedling cutting technique.

Check out some of Jonas' posts on bonsaitonight.com there is a pretty extensive exploration of the technique both in his own work and from some of his travel entries from Japanese growers.

 

[Poink88]

Thanks Eric. What a great thread about JBP. I only have a few so I did not comment earlier but I can see some I can apply to mine now.

Awesome progress BTW...I did not expect JBP to mature as past as your results actually.

Thanks again!!!

 

[Eric Schrader]

Thanks Dario, I almost missed your reply in all the flurry of posts around here yesterday.

Also - for the benefit of future readers of this thread, I wanted to cross-reference this with the discussion that is in this other recent thread:

http://bonsainut.com/forums/showthr...a-reasonable-step-by-step-black-pine-tutorial

Cheers,

Eric

 

[Eric Schrader]

Last we left this slant style tree:

The front with all the branches wired. In the future the left branch will likely be much shorter but for now I'll leave the strong buds on the ends until the ones closer in are stronger. Balancing the vigor between the sacrifice branch and the finished branches is important and this is done with that in mind. I candle-cut the finish branches last year but not this year.

And a look at it from roughly the same angle today:

Removing the primary sacrifice branch, to leave the new one that is coming from the next trunk section that I wired last fall:

Carving the stump back:

Finished jin with dished area surrounding. This allows the wound to heal mostly flat, rather than bulging out (I sealed it with cut paste after taking the photo):

The transition from the larger to the smaller trunk sections taken the front of the tree. It still needs some time to look like a smooth transition. If you look carefully at the photo below you can see tiny buds coming out from in between the needle pairs at the bend of the smaller trunk section; these will be some of the most important branches on the tree. I bent the new sacrifice branches over to encourage them to grow a bit more. At the bottom of the photo, in the large trunk section you can see a small circular depression, this is the very tip of a small jin that was sticking out quite a bit when I first made it a few years ago.

Here is a photo from May 2012 showing the jin sticking out from the trunk:

 

[jeanluc83]

That tree is really coming along nicely!

It seems to be the prevailing attitude that you need to put a tree in the ground in order for it to bulk up. It is good to see proof that 100% container growing can still give you an impressive trunk in a relatively short amount of time.

 

[sorce]

Eric.

The Black Pine Creation post on phutu is EXCELLENT.

Thanks a ton (of Akadama!) For that.!

Might have to get me a unicorn! And some seeds!

Great work. Love em!

Sorce

 

[MidMichBonsai]

Last we left this slant style tree:



And a look at it from roughly the same angle today:

Removing the primary sacrifice branch, to leave the new one that is coming from the next trunk section that I wired last fall:

Carving the stump back:

Finished jin with dished area surrounding. This allows the wound to heal mostly flat, rather than bulging out (I sealed it with cut paste after taking the photo):

The transition from the larger to the smaller trunk sections taken the front of the tree. It still needs some time to look like a smooth transition. If you look carefully at the photo below you can see tiny buds coming out from in between the needle pairs at the bend of the smaller trunk section; these will be some of the most important branches on the tree. I bent the new sacrifice branches over to encourage them to grow a bit more. At the bottom of the photo, in the large trunk section you can see a small circular depression, this is the very tip of a small jin that was sticking out quite a bit when I first made it a few years ago.

Here is a photo from May 2012 showing the jin sticking out from the trunk:

How large is your 2nd pond-basket in these photos?

Thanks.

 

[Adair M]

Eric,

Are you finding any benefit to the double collendar?

I know the original article showed it, but we discussed this at the last Intensive, and couldn't determine that a double collendar would provide any benefit over just slip potting into a bigger one.

 

[MidMichBonsai]

Eric,

Are you finding any benefit to the double collendar?

I know the original article showed it, but we discussed this at the last Intensive, and couldn't determine that a double collendar would provide any benefit over just slip potting into a bigger one.

I think this was addressed in post #47. To summarize, it seems that this is not particularly helpful as it creates and overly-dense mass of roots in the smaller basket and ends up being a pain when trying to remove the rootball from the smaller grow basket as the larger roots have grown through the holes, swelled and essentially grown into the basket similar to a tree growing along a fence.

 

[Eric Schrader]

Eric,

Are you finding any benefit to the double collendar?

I know the original article showed it, but we discussed this at the last Intensive, and couldn't determine that a double collendar would provide any benefit over just slip potting into a bigger one.

I've discussed with Boon and I've pondered it myself. I actually have more experience with the technique that he does I think (maybe). Jonas has also done it a bunch of times I think.

The bottom line is I can't say for sure whether or not it actually affects the quality and shape of the roots. I got some pretty good roots from trees that used the technique. The best nebari's that I have were all in double colanders. But, it's hard for me to believe that if I had slip-potted them instead that it would have been any different.

The inner colander is very difficult to remove after three years or more. It forces you to cut off a lot of roots. I've found that all the trees that I took out of doubles were much slower growing the following year, which makes sense given the amount of root that has to be removed. Eventually the roots have to go back down in size, but I think that at year 8 or 9 it's not the right time for trees that will be larger than shohin. For shohin, at the 8 or 9 year mark you're likely cutting back everything anyway.

I've actually got the problem of too much root spread on some of the trees. The near-pancake effect will make it hard to get the roots into a shohin container without making a bad cut. That means that I'll have to allow the trees to get larger and control the root spread to get them into a pot that it proportionally appropriate.