Timing Reason For Late Fall/Early Winter Japanese Black Pine Work
- Thread starter mrcasey
- Start date
hemmy
Omono
One theory is that final shoot selection in the Fall after summer decandling, prevents the shoots from overly elongating rather than reducing to 2 earlier in the summer. Needle plucking to balance vigor can be done at different times of the year. I like cut back into old growth pruning at the same time as decandling in the summer.
Patrick K
Sapling
If you decandle the first flush, the second flush doesn’t harden off until that time
Paradox
Marine Bonsologist
Buds dont typically form until late summer. By fall you can sometimes see which buds are going to be more vigorous than others and can select accordingly to what you are trying to accomplish. Fall is also at the end of the yearly growth cycle so you can set the tree up for next year's growth
MaciekA
Shohin
I think it's a couple reasons , not all of them always overlapping
- decandled shoots waiting to come out of the oven, so we wait
- dilution of stored energy into larger number of kept unselected shoots leads to the dimunition in those shoots. See also larger unplucked previous-year needles if tree is in the process of making big needle reduction strides year by year
- sometimes you wait because you want to use the excess needles and shoots to gather up more energy for future use. Say the response this year was more muted than expected
- for some growers/gardens there is a backlog of single flush pines to work through first, and you intervene (to, as @Paradox says, "set up" for next year) with those earlier as they usually tend to be slower than JBP (or JBP-like pines). In that case JBP would come last anyway for practical reasons. If I am working on a limber pine, I want some "runway" left in the season to bake new buds in response to my adjustments, whereas JBP can catch up and respond to late-season changes much more quickly than other pines
- In The Dude's parlance, "new shit has come to light" by the very late season in terms of needle elongation and growth response which was not yet evident back in mid to late summer, and so maybe now you want to adjust the response of the upcoming spring flush. If you are dialing in shohin shoot sizes, maybe you want an early winter edit because you need to pump the brakes. Follow Japanese shohin growers on IG and you see needle trimming sessions at that time in hopes of pre-slowing the spring response. Doing it in July wouldn't have made sense since it wasn't yet clear how things were going, but also doing it in spring may be too late (because the buds are well on their way by then)
<climate / technique YMMV disclaimer>
- decandled shoots waiting to come out of the oven, so we wait
- dilution of stored energy into larger number of kept unselected shoots leads to the dimunition in those shoots. See also larger unplucked previous-year needles if tree is in the process of making big needle reduction strides year by year
- sometimes you wait because you want to use the excess needles and shoots to gather up more energy for future use. Say the response this year was more muted than expected
- for some growers/gardens there is a backlog of single flush pines to work through first, and you intervene (to, as @Paradox says, "set up" for next year) with those earlier as they usually tend to be slower than JBP (or JBP-like pines). In that case JBP would come last anyway for practical reasons. If I am working on a limber pine, I want some "runway" left in the season to bake new buds in response to my adjustments, whereas JBP can catch up and respond to late-season changes much more quickly than other pines
- In The Dude's parlance, "new shit has come to light" by the very late season in terms of needle elongation and growth response which was not yet evident back in mid to late summer, and so maybe now you want to adjust the response of the upcoming spring flush. If you are dialing in shohin shoot sizes, maybe you want an early winter edit because you need to pump the brakes. Follow Japanese shohin growers on IG and you see needle trimming sessions at that time in hopes of pre-slowing the spring response. Doing it in July wouldn't have made sense since it wasn't yet clear how things were going, but also doing it in spring may be too late (because the buds are well on their way by then)
<climate / technique YMMV disclaimer>
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