Firstly, that's a neat/good-looking simple little bench there, hope it's looking better now that you've filled it! Happy to have stumbled-onto your thread while searching the site for this topic as I'm mid-way through building a new table myself, anyways though I have to ask about that crape myrtle!! I'm in FL and just getting into crape myrtles (have been doing bougie yammas for around a year), it's funny but my first crape was some weeks ago and I had to jam it into a similar container as yours:
View attachment 156682
[EDIT- forgot to ask this, but in your post you say you got that crape yesterday, while the shoots pictured are easily a week's worth of growth after it having been hard-chopped. Was that a 2-step extraction/transplant, cut one week then excavated the next?]
Anyways though I wanted to ask you, if you've got experience with doing these larger crape yamadori (this guy is my first, though I've got several equal or larger bougie yamadori), when do you begin removing shoots? When you remove them, how do you choose which branch to keep if >1 are growing from the same spot, do you remove the more or less mature one?
Thanks for any advice on this, I know from my experience with bougies that areas where there's too-many shoots get
thin shoots, compared to areas with less shoots that end up much thicker - here's an illustration of those, respectively, from the same bougie (one side had more shoots than the other):
View attachment 156685View attachment 156686
In the left photo, on the side that had many more shoots, I've removed a good amount but should've removed more, sooner, I think - I've noticed that, at least with bougies, they can have a tendency towards growing more foliage than their roots can support (leading to incredibly quick-to-wilt foliage on hot days), am really starting to think that it's not
only worth removing redundant shoots for aesthetic reasons but also to reduce the load on that section of roots!
