Box store San Jose Juniper

[RJG2]

My first juniper. Should be good practice.

Giving it it's own thread because I'm proud of it for living through a late summer full bare root last year.

At this point I had only done a bit of clean up and practiced a couple of my first jins.

 

[BonjourBonsai]

Looks great but I've personally had bad luck when I take a lot of soil off of juniper roots. I hope you have better luck

 

[RJG2]

Today I decided to ditch that secondary trunk and small scraggly bottom branch.

Hope to do some wiring later this year.







I'll have to do a shari in the middle there - broke off a branch by accident when moving stuff around trying to determine a path forward.

 

[RJG2]

Looks great but I've personally had bad luck when I take a lot of soil off of juniper roots. I hope you have better luck

It's been almost a year and is pushing some good growth, fingers crossed.

 

[just.wing.it]

Nice!
You bare rooted it in 2020?

 

[Pitoon]

Very nice! All my San Jose still have juvenile foliage.

 

[just.wing.it]

Very nice! All my San Jose still have juvenile foliage.

Do they turn to scale foliage? I've only seen the spikey stuff on them.

 

[RJG2]

Nice!
You bare rooted it in 2020?

Yeah, aggressive, but it was like $17 or $18.

 

[RJG2]

Do they turn to scale foliage? I've only seen the spikey stuff on them.

This one is about 95% scale. I've been trying to take the pruning slow.

 

[just.wing.it]

Yeah, aggressive, but it was like $17 or $18.

Do or die!
I did the same thing with one of mine.....it never skipped a beat.
But I do do the HBR method nowadays.

 

[just.wing.it]

This one is about 95% scale. I've been trying to take the pruning slow.

Oh, sure is....I'll try looking with my eyeballs next time....

 

[BonjourBonsai]

Yeah, aggressive, but it was like $17 or $18.

Looking good!

 

[Pitoon]

Do they turn to scale foliage? I've only seen the spikey stuff on them.

Yes, mature foliage is scale. It takes a while to transition to mature. Hopefully mine will start pushing out scale foliage next year.

 

[RJG2]

A few more firsts for me.

First attempt at raffia (came out alright).

First attempt with thick copper (6 gauge - didn't come out as good: angle, tightness...).

First attempt at moving a relatively thick branch (6 gauge wasn't quite enough and needed a guy wire too!). Only heard one small crack while bending...

Definitely a good practice tree, but I'm still trying to go a bit slow as it's grown on me.

 

[Crazy Diamond]

Pretty decent for San jose, lot of scales and not very leggy

 

[RJG2]

Pretty decent for San jose, lot of scales and not very leggy

Thanks, it was definitely the best at the big orange box at the time.

We'll see what it puts out next year - I'm guessing there will be more needle foliage after this year's pruning - and I'll probably do some more wiring late winter early spring.

 

[RJG2]

Finally think I have an end goal after staring at this for a couple years...

Been slowly reducing the foliage trying not to get too much juvenile growth, and just did some wiring. I'm still not good at cleaning junipers yet, so I'll figure that out next year...

Oh, and I put it in a @penumbra stone age pot!

Here are a few photos.

Current state:



Left erased:



Left erased; right shortened:

 

[orangeyeoman]

That's incredible for $17 or $18. Around here a procumbens with 3/4" trunk will still run you $25 (probably a lot more this year, with inflation) when they're trying to offload them in the fall.

 

[RJG2]

San Jose grows a lot faster than procumbens I think, but I did find my first decent procumbens this year for <$20. About 1.75" trunk.

I've only repotted it so far though.

 

[Crazy Diamond]

Im still amazed that is all scale