One of the batch of 2015. Did them in small pond baskets and larger ones like this. Growth is obviously etter in the larger and roots are ok. This is the result of seedling cutting and no interference for the rest. Hope to get better results than this with an extra repot. On some pines the lower needles give buds like this one and make the final design obvious.
Hi Dirk
You are right the extra root work at this time will pay dividends. The pond baskets have worked well and your observation that the larger size produced better results is consistent with my experience. It is encouraging to see the lower branching and buds on some of the trees.
On a personal note this was the time when i cut back the apex sacrifice on about half of my trees to deliberately encourage even more lower branching. My reasoning was that JBP backbuds with greater frequency on younger growth. ( i have been taught that the best results are on four year growth or less). So i felt the timing between third and fourth year was ideal to sacrifice some growth for extra lower branches on the trunk. After that i resumed the process of sacrifice apex to focus on girth and growth.
I was pleased with the response, which in turn gave me more design options for small and medium size trees. All of the extra lower branches can in turn become part of the design or future sacrifice branches for taper and movement. I have put this extra step into my JBP development plan for each successive crop.
Previously i had observed that a lot of the grown in the ground trees often had few branches lower down on the trunk. Understandably due to the difficulty of working with trees in the ground and the focus on getting rapid growth.
