I have watched the same video as you music4cash!
"Remove all downward facing branches. Because it saves you on wiring them later. They're just not worth it."
And I made the same mistake on some spruces. Luckily, those tend to back bud. But junipers don't. But these guys are working on already pretty refined trees. Far from raw stock material we pick as beginners.
Nowadays, I watch videos and try to understand what they're doing and why they are doing it. Sure, sometimes that leads to mistakes. Sometimes it leads to serious insights.
Like a few weeks ago, I commented something like this on someones thread: If you want a good and convincing piece of deadwood, you might want to grow it tall and big before you strip it of all the bark. That gives you something to work with. If the tree grows a foot tall and your deadwood is the size of a matchstick, you might as well remove it entirely. The person in question responded with something like: "I've always thought that to be logical, but nobody ever said it out loud."
Ryan Neil and Bjorn Bjorholm, in their videos say: Do deadwood work directly, because dried branches are harder to handle. But that's only when the wood is thick and strong enough already. They leave out the part about future vision and multiple year plans (at least in their free videos).
Me being enthusiastic, did some deadwood work straight away, as advised. But my trees have grown this year, and now I only have matchsticks and branches I want to keep. If it's true what they say about junipers, then it might just take 15 years to grow a replacement branch that could later be turned into deadwood.
In my juniperus procumbens self critique, you can read people saying that I should do the work now. To make it look good straight away. But my juniper isn't up to that. Branches are damaged from my own inexperience, and they'll need to heal first. If I would have listened to the experts, I wouldn't still have my tree. Their advice is sound, it's correct, it's well done and well needed, but it's poorly timed for my tree. That's part of the game, I think. I had to tell myself: these guys are right, but not right now. They'll still be right next year, or even the year after that. Whenever my hands go itchy, I take a look at the "future dead branch" of that nana. It's literally connected with a single strip of bark, 1/16th the width of the branch. A silk thread. The reminder.
Those are things I would like to have realized earlier. But there's progress in that thick skull of mine. That's what it's about.
As for damage control:
Nana will either dry up, or go brown all the way. If they dry up, it usually means there is still some connection with living material, but not enough to keep the foliage alive. Frequent misting could help to some extent, but usually it's a sign of a lost branch since the tissue is so slow growing that recovery/reconnection is nearly out of the question. If the foliage browns, there is no saving that branch and it has been dead for a while.
You can expect some dieback on the large leader, maybe a few branches/nodes down. At least, that's what happens with most junipers I've handled if thick branches are cut. Ever since I've noticed that, I try to keep 3 extra branches to counter for it.
