If it's of use, I have progression-albums for both:
cavernous crape: https://imgur.com/a/MZa2V4d
blocky crape: https://imgur.com/a/3854W
I didn't want to make 2 posts so figured I'll just split this into 2 halves, any & all advice/critique/comments on either/both of these would be greatly appreciated, feel 'in the dark' when it comes to crapes!
Firstly is my favorite, the newer one my 'cavernous crape', first off I'm not even sure which would be the better front, I was thinking the 'high character' side that shows the deadwood interior & hollow-ness of that half of the tree:
However, I recently did a routine plant-rotation and, with it flipped, I've started to grow fond of its 'back-side' (
), it doesn't show the cavernous interior well but it really show-cases the hole in the trunk that I think is really cool/unique:
Not only am I now unsure which side I want as my front, I'm not even sure I want to keep them connected as 1 specimen anymore, I can't tell if they were always 1 specimen or if they were 2 that merged (I suspect the former), I know it'd be a brutal operation but crapes are tough (in the progression-album linked earlier there are pics of it bare-rooted upon collection that show the 'bridge' between them) I should mention that, while not shown, this thing has a *very* fat radial/surface root, it's just buried right now because I planted it at a sub-par angle and had to add more substrate to fix it ;p The general plan for its canopy is to simply grow-out my primaries in a horizontal fashion, am using guy-wires & weights & wiring now to do that, figured it makes sense to get a wider base from the start since they're so apically-dominant!
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AAaaand my 2nd crape, this one is tougher because it's just such terrible stock, it was my first crape ever and I was still so new that all I thought was "yeah that's wide!" lol, anyways I've got angle-/die-grinders and will be grinding/shaping/contouring the cut trunk-line later this year when I do a hard-prune+re-box session on it, but so far as just what to do with developing it, well, I'm stuck
I mean, what can you really do with something like this?
I'm thinking that, since it's a blocky crape stump, that my only real option here is to aim for a natural growth habit (crapes are pretty 'broom-style' naturally), only far squatter/wider of course, but essentially I'm just tying-down the primaries to get a wider base ('reverse/inverse taper' in a way, though with a broom-swept like I'm going for I think that's OK?), so all the side branches are being trained to grow at lower, more horizontal angles so I can set the bottom of the branch-structure up to be a good base for a broom-swept (am thinking a 'rounded-top broom style', again very much like a crape's natural form) So am now in mid-spring and it's growing like a weed, am unsure whether I should let it go to flower or try to keep coercing growth out of it (when shoots stop growing I pinch their tips to force them to re-start ;D ), but it's just become a thicket and I'm worried about it looking less like a natural crape's form and more like a bush on a stump:
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Thanks a ton for any advice on either/both of these guys, I'm just barely 'getting it' when it comes to styling bougies (the majority of my collection) but developing crapes properly still confuses the heck out of me!
