great thread, Nice Chojubai. Really vigorous. It won't take long to be 'show' worthy.
I don't think letting the flower buds develop and open drains all that much energy from a quince, you should let a few flowers open, just so you can be inspired to keep working with them each year. (I know I would need to see a few flowers, that's the way the plant pays rent around here
) Letting fruit develop is a big drain, but a few flowers are unlikely to slow a healthy plant at all.
I picked up 8 or so different quinces from Brent Walston at Evergreen. Just the 2.5 inch pot cuttings, cheap but fun, with the thought of using them as accents or shohin. I like my Chojubai White flower, its really nice, small leaves & good ramification, and it is nearly equal in vigor to yours.
Brent was out of Chojubai - Red. So I picked up 'Hime'. Nice Red-Orange flower. More red than orange. Hime is truely a small leaf, fine twigged wonder. Very dark bark too. I think time will tell, but Hime looks to me every bit as good as Chojubai, maybe even finer for small shohin, though I have not had it long enough to say what a mature one would look like.
And for the velvet red fully double flowers, you can't beat Iwai Nishiki. Growth habit is much larger than Chojubai, more like Toyo Nishiki, so it can be grown out to sizes larger than Shohin.
There are others, I picked up Brent's Contorted White, and really like the random zigs and zags this makes.
What is nice about all of these, they just go into trays, get set under the bench, mulched with leaves, a little snow shoveled over them if we get snow. And that is it. Fully hardy for a zone 5 winter. No need to baby them. For flowering quince; no endless
"climate zone envy parade" into and or out of the unheated well house or the indoor light garden.
Iwai Nishiki
