My first Austrian pine

[plant_dr]

This came from Lowe's. I've had it the longest of all my trees. It seems a little worse for wear because it has been with me through all the rough times I've had the past several years. Now that everything has settled down for the most part and stabilized, the tree and I are ready to progress again.

 

[JudyB]

Interesting, I've always wondered how Austrian would do as bonsai. Do you think you will be able to get some backbudding on those empty branches? Do you treat this as a JBP? Just wondering how the culture is on these.

 

[plant_dr]

Walter Pall has some great Austrian Pine Bonsai here: http://walter-pall.de/c01conifers.jpg.dir/index.html I think they are great. I admit I'm a bit scared to do candle pruning on this, I tried it once and didn't have great results. It was on those branches at the top and after removing about half of each candle, the rest of the candle on each branch died off. Then the rest of one whole branch died off too. Two years later only one of those remaining branches is finally getting a couple tiny buds on it. The other branches up there aren't doing very good ethier;they seem a bit faded compared to the one good one.

 

[JudyB]

Maybe you could put it in the ground, and get it super healthy, then start working it. As it is, there is no bonsai... (if you know what I mean.)
I'm no pine expert for sure, so maybe someone can give you some ideas on how to stimulate this guy. I would feed the living c**p out of it- that's one thing I can say I would do...

 

[C.A. Young]

I have four large austrians, and provided it isn't a repot year, I do a total candle removal of the weakest candles about 2 weeks before they would normally be ready. A week later, I remove the "medium" strength candles, and a week after that, I remove all the strongest candles. I have good results with this method.