hi there,
Some of you may remember that last Thanksgiving I bought a BRT in Fl:
Life was nice, more than 70 F end of November, the turkey was good and the Bears kicked some Packers asses on top of it.
The Holidays unfortunately never last very long and on the following Saturday my wife, my tree and I had to take the plane, back home for my wife and I and to its new home for the tree.
It was not impressed, not impressed at all, by its first X-ray at the security of Miami international, its trip to Chicago as a hand luggage and the weather waiting for it at his new home.
The leaves immediately started to fall and keep doing so all winter until the tree actually looks like this:
I keep watering it regularly but I was resigned, one more tropical lost this year, until yesterday, first really hot day here, when I put it outside for the day.
I was looking at it thinking it might certainly end-up lightning a BBQ soon when I remarked this:
May be not easy to see on the picture because they are really small but each black line actually points to a bud, and there are tons of them, one per node more or less and there are a truckload of nodes!
So it seems that my BRT isn't dead after-all, in fact it seems quite alive on the contrary!
Now the question:
My wife, who is a very sweet and gentle person, thinks I should let it grow its new leafs before doing anything else.
I understand the principle but: I want to get ride of some branches. So I was wondering if that couldn't be a good idea to remove these branches now, while the tree is budding, as like that it would be able to concentrate its energy on the buds from the branches that will actually stay instead of loosing a lot of energy with buds on branches that will go anyway.
What do you think? The gentle option or the more drastic one?
Some of you may remember that last Thanksgiving I bought a BRT in Fl:
Life was nice, more than 70 F end of November, the turkey was good and the Bears kicked some Packers asses on top of it.
The Holidays unfortunately never last very long and on the following Saturday my wife, my tree and I had to take the plane, back home for my wife and I and to its new home for the tree.
It was not impressed, not impressed at all, by its first X-ray at the security of Miami international, its trip to Chicago as a hand luggage and the weather waiting for it at his new home.
The leaves immediately started to fall and keep doing so all winter until the tree actually looks like this:
I keep watering it regularly but I was resigned, one more tropical lost this year, until yesterday, first really hot day here, when I put it outside for the day.
I was looking at it thinking it might certainly end-up lightning a BBQ soon when I remarked this:
May be not easy to see on the picture because they are really small but each black line actually points to a bud, and there are tons of them, one per node more or less and there are a truckload of nodes!
So it seems that my BRT isn't dead after-all, in fact it seems quite alive on the contrary!
Now the question:
My wife, who is a very sweet and gentle person, thinks I should let it grow its new leafs before doing anything else.
I understand the principle but: I want to get ride of some branches. So I was wondering if that couldn't be a good idea to remove these branches now, while the tree is budding, as like that it would be able to concentrate its energy on the buds from the branches that will actually stay instead of loosing a lot of energy with buds on branches that will go anyway.
What do you think? The gentle option or the more drastic one?
)
):
