How to get short internodes during training (JBP)?

froufrou

Question is, if a japanese black pine is in the ground or training pot to thicken it up, are you suppose to work on the lower branches?

From the Bonsai Today pine book, looks like the first few years you don't touch it at all, no energy balancing, no pruning, pinching, trimming, or thinning. How will you get short internodes? Except for some cultivars, I imagine most will grow with long internodes.

Suppose you can use bonsai techniques on the lower branches to get short internodes, is that useful without working on the sacrifice leader? But if you work on the leader too, wouldn't growth be slowed significantly?

Some explanation would be great. Thanks.

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Brent

Froufrou

That, of course, is the $64k question. No offense to the authors, but I find books like this one to be pretty much worthless for pines in early training, and I don't think there is a decent book out there that discusses this.

It's really too much to go into in a single post, so I will point you to the Pines articles at my website and the various Pine posts on my blog. You sort of have to search for the posts since stupid Typepad won't let you just list the posts. Amazing, they come up with new bells and whistles all the time, but can they just let you list your posts? Noooo, way too complicated.

Warning, these articles are quite dense with information and you may not get it first time through, in fact, you may find that you learn something new each time you read them. Some things just won't make any sense until you go out and prune and observe, that is, get some experience. Pruning pines is not intuitive, and they are not forgiving. Reminds of my youth when I couldn't get a job because I didn't have any experience. How the hell was I supposed to get any experience?

I will leave you with just one thought to guide your study. You MUST be able to identify every part of the tree as either sacrifice or final (branches or trunk). You treat the sacrifices one way and the final growth another way. Sacrifices you let grow, final growth you prune and train continuously. And, yes, you have both at the same time and all the way through the training process.

Brent
EvergreenGardenworks.com
see our blog at http://BonsaiNurseryman.typepad.com

froufrou

Thanks Brent I read all your articles but not most of your blog. Hehe yeah the blog is disorganized and discourages me. I will read the blog entirely tonight.

Thanks,
Foo

bonsaikc

Another thing to remember is that quite often, if not most of the time, the end product of the trees in those articles was achieved by replacing all the branches with grafted ones. Of course, this won't produce the great proportional branch sizes for many years, but it's not uncommon.

__________________
Chris Johnston
Sashi-no-eda.blogspot.com

Kansas City Area Workshops 2008

froufrou

Interesting tidbit.

Asus101

Maybe chris may go into more depth his own methods for growing shohin black pine?
Its similar to one discussed in bonsai today issue 20.

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