Who is the greatest expert [ with grown proof ] on Japanese Black Pines ?

Poink88

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nathanbs

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Anthony,
It has probably been mentioned to you elsewhere that for your needle(leaf) reduction needs you are going to need to play with your fertilizing schedule, decandling schedule, needle thinning/plucking(reduction of total needles) and your new bud removal timing. Getting the timing right with all of these things will ultimately lead to a reduction in needle length as the tree will not be able to produce anything larger than what you have hindered it to do. As Adair mentioned in the US we do not fertilize year round as this gives the tree too much energy, we do complete candle removal at the end of spring/summer, we wait until the new buds have emerged and opened with needles before selecting only 2 and we control the trees overall energy by removing needles throughout the tree. Unfortunately what timing works for us will likely not work for you and vice versa.

Dario,
When "growing" black pine for trunk girth you focus on trunk shape and on having a horizontal root spread. Otherwise let all branches grow for approx. 2-3 years from seed. At which point you cut the apical leader down to lowest node. This promotes back budding and will give you your future sacrifice branches and permanant branches. Selecting which is a sacrifice and which is part of the future tree is the harder part. Sacrifces are let grow and future branches are treated with ramification techniques. EDIT*
i just read Brents article linked above which is excellent. It pretty much picks up at the 2-3 year point as I discussed.

Hope this helps
 
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Vance Wood

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If you look at it logically and cynically it boils down to the laws of politics: If you cannot dazzle them with brilliance, convince them with facts, if that fails confound them will BullShit. The Japanese Black Pine is grown over so many different climate conditions I think it impossible for any one person to know every thing there is to know about the tree grown in all of these differing conditions. Me?-----I take the Sargent Schultz gambit: "I know nothing". (Hogan Heroes )
 

cmeg1

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Anyone knows a good tutorial for developing JBP? All the tutorials I am reading seems to be geared towards refinement and not for young seedlings or younger stock. I am slowly getting the concept and some refinement steps seems to be counter productive for development..or am I mistaken?

Thank you.
I learned the colander method from the 'Pines' book from stone lantern.You could make a small shohin pine in as little as 6-7 years from seed.The book also helped me grasp the concept of letting leaders rocket away while training final branches down low.There are other methods I have seen though to develop pines from graft or seed.I prefer the escape leader technique I was taught though.I have JBP I hastily started training from small grafts and when I realized it was the wrong thing to do it seemed it was never too late to just let the leader rocket away to several feet long while preserving a new (possibly final) leader and branches down low.I was able to save all my learning pines.This is just one method,I have seen others.
 
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You should search the stuff here posted by Brian Van Fleet. He takes a lot of effort to clearly teach pine techniques. An expert is not necessarily a good teacher.
Gary Wood is also very knowledgable.
I realize I'm not offering anything broad, geographically, but it seems prudent to start with what is accessible.
 
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