If it's been 3 days since you carved a trunk, is it too-late for paste/coverings to be useful?

SU2

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3d ago I did a really significant carving job, never sealed my cuts and in hindsight wish I had, at this point I'm still going to keep applying the stuff (I've got quite a lot of area to cover!) but want to know if it's pointless! Am very ignorant about the timeline of how these wounds heal, I know that new bark takes ages but have zero clue whether a wound stops transpiring/losing moisture in 6hrs or 6 days!

Thanks!!

[edit- It's a bougainvillea fwiw! And I know it wasn't the right time to carve it, long story but it was the lesser of two evils type of choice :/ ]
 

MichaelS

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If it's a big carving job, all you need to protect are the edges - the exposed cambium. Covering this stops bark tissue forming and slowing the growth of callus tissue. But only if you really want to. You don't need to seal wood on bougainvillea as far as I know, even though it's a soft wood. You will need to preserve it eventually though. As for timing, 3 days is no big deal. After 3 weeks you might have to re-open the wound before you seal if you want continued callus production.
Hope this helps..
 
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bonsai-ben

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If it's a pink pixie, a branch at a callous will heal the wounds. More branches faster healing.

If it's not, then you would not want to use cut paste. It would seal in moisture thus rotting more. Your goal is to stop rot. Keep the wood dry. It will not grow over, but will instead just age a bit over the next few months and be less noticeable and part of the tree. Chop or carve to style, then ignore. Thats all!

tl;dr do nothing if you are happy with how it looks it'll do its thing
 
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SU2

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If it's a big carving job, all you need to protect are the edges - the exposed cambium.
Thanks that's good to know, I'd figured the softwood was the least important but was being more liberal in applying the glue/paste to the edges(cambium, which I suspect has already mostly-healed and isn't transpiring much at 3 days) and the heartwood, which still looked quite 'moist' relatively speaking of course.


Covering this stops bark tissue forming and slowing the growth of callus tissue. But only if you really want to.
Whoa, I'd thought it was to prevent moisture loss *while* waiting for callousing to be sufficient, not preventing it! Why would I want to prevent it? Ideally I'd have thick bark in these spots (this was a large yamadori, cut-back / trunk-chopped significantly, so after couple season's growth I carved the trunk to flow-into the new primary branches I'd grown, I hated having to get rid of good, old bark but that taper is necessary! I'd figure I'd want it to callous, and then form bark, as quickly as possible though, no? My thought was that this was an interim period, where I cut what's necessary from the trunk (this was a 1' wide trunk!) to make it conform to the new primaries, and now I wouldn't be doing any further trunk stylings, just letting it grow-in to conform to what I'd carved.



You don't need to seal wood on bougainvillea as far as I know, even though it's a soft wood. You will need to preserve it eventually though. As for timing, 3 days is no big deal. After 3 weeks you might have to re-open the wound before you seal if you want continued callus production.
Hope this helps..
Never heard that re bougies, just that they're slow to heal...they seem to take any amount of abuse, I've done some pretty insane experiments with them and the ones I reallly didn't think would work still did! I've gotten most of the wounds sealed at this point, will be done tomorrow- I've gotta say I'm wayy confused by the last part of your quote there, you say that, at a future point, I may want to open it to seal for continued callous production- firstly, wouldn't the stuff on there now be the seal? It seems counterproductive to remove it, thus opening-up the wounds, just to put a different dressing on (you say 'seal', I'm presuming wood-hardener? Have heard mixed things about that on bougies, but whether I used that or not I thought I'd be waiting til the callouses healed and am surprised to hear a way of doing that would be to open it up at 3wks, if anything wouldn't it be shrewder to simply apply another layer of the sealant I'm using now (a diluted wood-glue product, it worked well on one of the only other times I used a protective layer, I was taking a 1' log of bougainvillea trunk (no shoots, no roots, just a 1' section of trunk from a mature specimen, I put ~4" under perlite with 8" exposed, put the diluted wood-glue on the top, and it made it!! Has 2 nodes now, each with 3 shoots at around 7"+, am hoping this isn't the type of specimen that's just not *nearly* stabilized enough to handle fall/winter :/
 

SU2

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If it's a pink pixie, a branch at a callous will heal the wounds. More branches faster healing.

If it's not, then you would not want to use cut paste. It would seal in moisture thus rotting more. Your goal is to stop rot. Keep the wood dry. It will not grow over, but will instead just age a bit over the next few months and be less noticeable and part of the tree. Chop or carve to style, then ignore. Thats all!

tl;dr do nothing if you are happy with how it looks it'll do its thing
Interesting, thanks for the reply :D

I'm going into my 1st winter with a real collection so am very new to this, and only recently have I begun carving....I guess that, when I'm carving to create taper between a half-decayed stump (from where a part was originally cut-back - almost all my bougies are mature, cut-back yamadoris) and new growth, I'm hoping to *eventually* have bark there, not deadwood...I'll freely admit I have no idea what to be expecting on any particular grinding though, I just do them because I know that, bark or deadwood, the taper needs to be there! As an example, what do you think of the following jpg of a carve I did recently? This was an attempt to taper the new growth to the trunk that had been chopped-back, this spot was originally a flat-cut branch (2 branch-tops actually, I cut it so I could keep the Y-bend at the top of the trunk there) when I collected it, I let the shoots grow a while and then used my die-grinder to get rid of the excess (dying) branch above where the new shoots emerged, and tried to contour to the shoots- should I be expecting that, in ~6-18mo, that will have bark? Or it'll be a deadwood spot?

a.jpg


[edited-to-add: actually, you can see there's 3 'trunk-cuts' in that area and only 2 of them were ground-back to smooth/taper, one is still a rough, decaying circle that used to be the bottom of the removed trunk!]
 

bonsai-ben

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SU2 -- You've done great. Now ignore it and enjoy the flower in about 2 weeks.
 
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SU2

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SU2 -- You've done great. Now ignore it and enjoy the flower in about 2 weeks.

Thanks! It'll be a bit longer than that though, right now the thing's got a pretty dense canopy for something just getting its 2nd flush of growth!! It's going to be crazy when it goes into flowering though, that detail is from the top of a tall, twin-trunked tree (my favorite tree), with 1 large mass of foliage/canopy at the top, think it's going to become a really nice tree :D
 
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