Back to the Potting Intensive:
See that picture in the last post? That's how we work the bottoms of the trees. I'd posted this picture on another thread a long time ago, and Smoke questioned me about it, implying I had somehow faked it. He noticed I had a root rake in my hand, and there was white stuff on the table that had been raked off, and he implied that I had scraped that off the dark section of roots.
No, that's not how we do it. When we turn the rootball on it's side like this, we scrape straight across the bottom, starting at the bottom. Why the bottom first? Well, you see that stuff falls off, right? If I started at the top, it would pile up on the table next to the root ball. Thus making it hard to get to the bottom, lower part of the rootball. No, start at the bottom, and work your way up! Far easier! "There's a technique to everything!"
That white half is white through and through, and the dark half is dark through and through.
When I pointed this out to Boon, he took a picture, and posted it on his Facebook page.
Other stuff we do at the Winter Intensive:
Pull needles on JBP to balance the growth.
Back in the fall, we pulled the old needles. This cleans up the tree, and exposes the interior wood to the sun. Often by late winter, early spring we see where some dormant adventitious buds may have been stimulated to form. Be careful with those, they're very delicate!
At the repotting Intensive, it is also time to check the JBP for balance. The idea is to get the tree to have the same apparent density of growth (foliage) over the entire tree. The top of the tree is the strongest, and the lower branches are weaker. Sometimes the lower branch terminal tips are strong, but the interior buds will be weaker.
So, since the idea is to have the tree "in balance" all over, the general approach is to weaken the strongest parts of the tree to match the weaker sections. If it were possible to strengthen the weak parts to match the strong parts, we'd do that, but no one has figured out how to do that, so our only approach is to weaken the strong parts to match the weak.
We do this by needle pulling. This can get very tedious. Let's say we see that our lower branches have 12 pairs of needles. This would mean that the middle section of the tree might need to have 7 to 9 pairs to look as thick as the bottom. Which means the top needs to have 3 to 5 pairs. Counting needles on every twig is a tedious job. Earlier, you saw the picture of Godzilla. At one Intensive, another student was assigned the job to pull needles on Godzilla. After a couple hours, I felt sorry for them, I went over and helped!
Now those numbers I just posted, are guidelines, and the actual number can vary, based up the size of the tree, it's overall vigor, etc. The numbers aren't as important as the appearance when the job is completed.
Also, let's take two terminal buds. One has twice as many needles as the other. Another balancing technique is to leave the needles on the weak bud alone, and just pull needles from the strong bud to match the weaker bud.
We're very busy at the Winter Intensive.
Oh... One person noticed that I have posted a lot about "Technique" and little about "Styling".
Boon covers styling in the "Handouts" section of the class in the mornings. Branch placement, trunk movement, selection of fronts, and all that occur all the time, but we also study the Kokufu-ten books, and we have exercises to do: Boon gives us a sheet with trunks. We draw on where the branches should be. Or how the silhouette should look, or where the apex should be. And we discuss the options. This instruction occurs at all the Intensives.
