That's in contrast with the shorter candles at the interior and lower branches of the tree. To bring this all into balance, the Japanese Black Pine is decandled.
Now there are a lot of ways of decandling. some people break immature candles in half, others remove the candles progressively over a period of 2-3 weeks, cutting the weakest first, middle strength over the next 10 days and the strongest last.
The method I describe here and on the
TreeBay Bonsai Tools & Supplies site in the articles section has the advantage that you can work the entire tree at one sitting. The article on that site covers the theory in more depth, but briefly put, we are going to cut the candles off just after they have matured and opened out into needles in the summer, but we do it in a particular way.
The candles are cut leaving a stub whose length is proportional to the strength of the candle. So if you have a strong candle that's thick, say 1/4 inch, you'd leave a stub 1/4 inch long. If you have a weaker one that is only 1/8 inch thick, you'd leave a stub about 1/8" long.
That length is measured just above the crown of needles from last year's growth. There are more detailed pictures on the TreeBay site. We'll talk more about decandling as we get closer to summer.
The remaining photo sequence shows
A. Replacing some of the top soil lost to settling and erosion. I added about 1" of fresh soil and worked it into the top 1" of existing soil with the chopsticks (B)
C. Decandling with the shear. These candles on the end of the lower branches are about mid-strength and will be cut to about 5/32"
D. Also discussed was THINNING, which is the process of plucking needles, primarily from areas of strength. In this example I show the five needle pairs I would leave surrounding the stub in areas of greatest strength. I would leave more needles on middle-strength candles and nearly all on the weakest. We also discussed removing needles from the branch crotches.
E. A potential change in planting angle was reviewed after the work was completed.