An unusual Trident

markyscott

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Pruning and partial outer canopy defoliation. I left one shoot on the apex alone. I’ll let this grow wild all season to help heal the wounds on the trunk. I left the leaves alone on the grafts and wired them into place. I left all of the weak interior shoots alone and I left more leaves on the cascading branch than on the upper branches. That’s all for now.

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Lars Grimm

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Looks great Scott. Have you ever experimented with bridge grafting or thread grafting at the top of a big scar to help with healing large wounds?
 

markyscott

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Looks great Scott. Have you ever experimented with bridge grafting or thread grafting at the top of a big scar to help with healing large wounds?

I have in one occasion, Lars. I wasn’t very happy with the outcome. In this case I simply thread grafted shoots around the wound. It may have helped, but I think that strong growth above the wound site has been the main thing driving the wound closure.

S
 

markyscott

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Sacrifice branch doing it’s job. Easily 2’ of additional apical growth in the last month. Growth on the rest of the tree has slowed significantly. But a tree with a 7’ tall sacrifice with 4 solid months of growing season remaining is pretty dramatically cool to me, so I thought I’d post an update.

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markyscott

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In terms of the job it’s doing, the callous tissue is definitely moving strong under the cut paste. One or two more growing seasons like this should close it completely. Plan this year is to continue to let it grow uninterrupted for the rest of the year. In my experience, healthy tridents can throw a 10-15’ tall apical shoot in a single growing season in the Houston area.

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S
 

Paulpash

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Are you going to keep the existing sacrifice (cutting it away after several years will cause a mini version of the wounds it will heal) or are you going to cut it off and restart another next season? There are pros & cons with each I guess.
 

markyscott

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Are you going to keep the existing sacrifice (cutting it away after several years will cause a mini version of the wounds it will heal) or are you going to cut it off and restart another next season? There are pros & cons with each I guess.

Thanks for the question. I’ll cut it off and grow a new one. Not looking to thicken the apex, grow another trunk section, or create another large wound I have to heal over. Letting a new one grow seems to do the job well enough.

- S
 

markyscott

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Do you ever re-wound the callus? Or just let it run?

The wound was present for a long time. Well before I purchased the tree. It’s interesting how callous growth can just stop. It took a bit of work to reactivate it, but then there was a problem with rotted wood in the wound that I was concerned might inhibit the continued closing of the callous tissue. I applies CPE and putty as described in the section beginning with this post. I talked about reactivating the callous growth in the section starting with this post. Since then, I’ve rewounded the callous edge every year. I use one of my grafting knives to remove a small amount of callous tissue on the leading edge.

S
 

markyscott

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Time to repot. Rootball is quite dense and there are roots escaping from the drain holes.

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With this pot, I can just cut the wires and pull out the tree. No sickling necessary.

S
 
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