Some folks in this thread are taking the phrase "kill it or make it bonsai" (henceforth KIOMIB) at face value and no longer engaging with the original idea. People are free to do that, but the original poster asked a very specific and very coherent question about KIOMIB: Assuming we accept that KIOMIB makes sense (not the literal phrase -- the actual idea that is taught), then why not go farther than "repot 1" (exterior) and "repot 2" (shin), why not just bare root and skip over potentially 1 or 2 years of time?
The answer was already given, exhaustively:
Sometimes we do in fact do that. I do that with young pines. My field growing mentor does this to (literally) hundreds of pines every year.
@trigo , you can absolutely do this -- think of it more like a gradient or spectrum of possibilities than a binary one. In Mirai reckoning, "high-water-mobility tree species" can indeed be bare rooted when making the transition from "material" to "bonsai development". In my own experience and working with field growers and bonsai professionals in Oregon, you can also do this to a variety of species, even sometimes quite large trees. You can get away with some bare rooting of pines at this stage too, especially things like JBP or p. contorta, but likely many others too.
For everyone else: Ryan is not advocating cowboy bonsai. He's advocating making measurable progress on important root system goals in spite of beginners deep-seeded and often unreasonable fear of working with the root system. In Ryan's school of thought, it makes no sense for a student to be fearless in hacking back a canopy through severe pruning while being terrified of working the root system. This is why the catch phrase exists, to push people with an imbalanced approach to overcome that fear and do the necessary root work that's needed in the early stages.
Here is what Ryan is actually saying:
1) To be able to follow any of the rest of the Mirai curriculum ... To ensure that all Mirai students are on the same page horticulturally ... To ensure that Ryan isn't constantly halting an otherwise-productive refinement-stage lectures to answer subscriber confusions that their slip potted pines are dying after trying to do refinement work ... Ryan would appreciate if students would take the following steps,
specifically when considering material that has not yet entered the primary development loop:
2) Get their root ball into aggregate soil before ever getting to secondary stages of development
3) Get their
whole root ball into aggregate soil before ever getting to secondary stages of development
4) Make measurable progress on working back the roots to domesticate (Mirai speak for "get into aggregate soil") as much of the root system as possible in the "first repot"
5) Later complete that progress by then finally replacing the remaining native/nursery soil in the "second repot" so that the whole root system is now "domesticated" (in aggregate soil).
6) Address this issue early on, in Mirai's "primary" stage of development, not later
7) Study repotting carefully, take a deep breath, mutter the courage-inducing words "kill it or make it bonsai", and do the necessary first repot by working the roots back significantly instead of being a chickenshit who skips this and starts pretending like the tree is ready for refinement, to the tree's detriment.
OP
@trigo specifically asked whether steps 4 and 5 can be merged while still arriving at later development stages with all the same preconditions in tact. If y'all wanna engage with the phrase, then go yell at Ryan about how to better rephrase what he's trying to say, but
@trigo asked whether we can fuse steps 4 and 5. We can , in some cases. It's a gradient, a spectrum, not a binary decision.
