Giga I have never heard of the "Judge" variety before. That's already a small pot and it looks healthy so in the spring it should be fine to do your root work.
ed
it's in a 5 gallon nursery pot and the roots go all the way to the bottom and there shooting out the holes. You think I should still be fine will cutting the bottom part of and then finding the nabari and keeping most the fine roots?
It's a "judge Solomon"-meant to say that it's a full sun, heat tolerate variant and seem to do well with cold as well as last year we had temps down in the teens for a couple weeks and it didn't skip a beat.
Giga,
You've done fine work so far. The challenge with azalea is to make a plant that is really a "bush" look like a tree.
To do this, the general approach is to reduce the elements that look "bushy", and enhance the elements that look like a tree.
Generally, this means a single trunk line. And, generally azalea are trained to look like a Pine Tree.
Assuming that's the way you want to go, what's the next step?
Azalea bud out well. I think you should pretty much remove all the existing branches, and prune down to a single trunk line. You'd create great taper. Cut the brsnches off flat. Do not use concave cutters. If anything, leave a slight bulge out. Clean up any roughness with a grafting knife. And seal each cut immediately with TopJin cut paste. The orange stuff. It takes a day to dry. Let it dry. Then, the next day, cover the TopJin with the putty cut paste.
When new buds break and grow out, you can wire them with aluminum wire out into horizonsal shapes.
Your leaf size is going to be an issue. Not much you can do about it. They'll reduce some, but probably not as much as you would like. The flowers will not reduce.
Giga,
Put some damp sphagnum moss on the top. It will keep it from drying out too much, encourage roots to grow close to the surface, and help hold the soil in place while watering. Good job on getting it in a pot, I know it is tough.
it's in a 5 gallon nursery pot and the roots go all the way to the bottom and there shooting out the holes. You think I should still be fine will cutting the bottom part of and then finding the nabari and keeping most the fine roots?
It's a "judge Solomon"-meant to say that it's a full sun, heat tolerate variant and seem to do well with cold as well as last year we had temps down in the teens for a couple weeks and it didn't skip a beat.
Only to realize the trunk went a lot deeper than he thought and he wound up with the tree trunk in one hand and ALL the roots on the floor! Oops!
On your root work, you have it backwards- Kathy Shaner advised us on an azalea Of mine she was working on the other day that you want to dig down and find your nebari FIRST. This is important for any repot, especially of a nursery tree like this one. They tend to just up- pot the trees from a 1 gallon to a 3.5 gallon to a 5 gallon... Each time heaping more soil around and ON TOP of the existing root mass... This can lead to a very deeply buried nebari, so if you go sawing the root mass in half THEN you look for the nebari, you could wind up with a cut above where all the roots are connected to the tree- IOW, a dead tree and a bunch of disconnected roots!... Or at the very least, you could wind up cutting off a LOT more of the viable root mass than you intended! This was demonstrated on the tree I had and the nebari was buried pretty deep... She also told a story about a beautiful old juniper she saw a guy repot once- he had recently purchased the tree I think and it was the first time he repotted... But he just grabbed a saw and dug into the root mass, sawing off the bottom portion... Only to realize the trunk went a lot deeper than he thought and he wound up with the tree trunk in one hand and ALL the roots on the floor! Oops!
Just be careful, and take your time, you should be fine...
Ha! Just saw the updated post- you have already repotted it! Well, hopefully that bit of info will be helpful for others, I found it to be a valuable lesson as she told the story.