Japanese Black Pine

[alpineart]

This is for Scott

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.No Boon soil here ,No Japanese Masters blend , only Alpinearts red scoria and pine bark .A picture tells a thousand words and results speak for themselves .A little late this season as the bike accident in October prevented me from working on my pines for the first couple of months in recovery . A good result , bad result of bloody fantastic .Your choice .Cheers Alpine

[squizzy]

Hi Alpine,

What time of the year will you remove the cut needles?

Cheers

Squizz

[Jow]

Hi Alpine,

It sounds like you have got some good back-budding there. Black pines will do this when relitively young, healthy and cut back hard. I am sure with your huge amount of new buds you will have the start of a good tree there.

Where i started to have problems with black pines was when they were in bonsai pots for a few years. They definately slowly become less aggressive growers after a couple of years in small containers and as a result hard cut backs produce less and less impressive results. The next thing you may find is that the new buds grow out and produce long needles. You may have a method for countering this but my guess is that you will get long needles.

Long needles are good in that your tree will process photosynthesis better and therefore be healthy but as it gets close to show readyness (maybe 5 years?) you will need to start thinking about needle length.

If you have the trees to spare, i would suggest giving the calendar approach a go as a test. You might be surprised at the results or you may be able to discount it totally. Either way you wont know till you try. I will keep an eye on this thread as it progresses, as either way you should end up with some nice trees.

Joe.

[Scott Roxburgh]

250 new buds for next season, all the hard work done . This was finished around the 22 March this year and almost every set of needles has a bud .Some will be removed but only a handful.

Great results, in a short period of time.

Of the 250 new buds, are you selecting ones to keep or letting them all grow? Or is this bud selection included in the work that you did 22 March?

[alpineart]

Hi Alpine,

What time of the year will you remove the cut needles?

Cheers

Squizz

Hi Squizzy , i don't use a calender neither does Mother Nature in the last decade in most cases up here I cut the needles after they lengthen and as soon as the begin to congest the branch no timing just simply open up the foliage so to speak. Only the unwanted cut needles are removed for shoot placement .

CheersAlpineart

[alpineart]

Hi Alpine,

It sounds like you have got some good back-budding there. Black pines will do this when relitively young, healthy and cut back hard. I am sure with your huge amount of new buds you will have the start of a good tree there.

Where i started to have problems with black pines was when they were in bonsai pots for a few years. They definately slowly become less aggressive growers after a couple of years in small containers and as a result hard cut backs produce less and less impressive results. The next thing you may find is that the new buds grow out and produce long needles. You may have a method for countering this but my guess is that you will get long needles.

Long needles are good in that your tree will process photosynthesis better and therefore be healthy but as it gets close to show readyness (maybe 5 years?) you will need to start thinking about needle length.

If you have the trees to spare, i would suggest giving the calendar approach a go as a test. You might be surprised at the results or you may be able to discount it totally. Either way you wont know till you try. I will keep an eye on this thread as it progresses, as either way you should end up with some nice trees.

Joe.

Hi Jow , good to here from you .Mate i'm working the JBP tree from Shibui to the same method i have worked European Black pines for the last decade or more .Pinus Nigra or EBP reduce extremely well using this timing and method .This tree is 4 years in training , its a Yamadori Nigra

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if it makes a difference , the natural needle length is around 60-90mm depending on soil types in the wild but usually average is 75mm

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.

SANY0490.JPG

This is a good result however this tree along with most of my material hasn't been worked over due to the accident .To work this tree now i know for a fact i will dislodge the new buds which are few and far between as the congestion in very thick .I will do it but its against my personal experience working these Nigra's .

I wasted 5-8 years doing it by suggested times and methods and never produced quality small foliage .W.P told me many years ago , until you Aussies learn that our methods don't work in your country the sooner you'll grow better tree's .This was in reference to Pinus Nigra's and other species i have here . So basically i experimented and found it to be true .When your on a good thing stick to it .I think there is enough members employing guru methods to post up some results, but i haven't seen results . All talk and no action doesn't cut it with me , i test , re-test and test again until i get it right .No good sharing something if its not tested or tried here , and no good copying written literature and stating it works without showing the proof in the process .

P.S i think i made reference in this earlier post that the tree was to be potted up into a bigger pot
Cheers Alpine

[alpineart]

250 new buds for next season, all the hard work done . This was finished around the 22 March this year and almost every set of needles has a bud .Some will be removed but only a handful.

Great results, in a short period of time.

Of the 250 new buds, are you selecting ones to keep or letting them all grow? Or is this bud selection included in the work that you did 22 March?

Hi Scott , there are some buds to be removed they will be selected by the growth on the above and below branches and the placement of those branches . Some buds are directly opposite purposefully left as to see which bud above and below will be kept, some needles may not produce a bud , these will go and that will determine the next set placement again above or below. A quick look over the tree and i can see 20-25 buds.needles to be removed but that would be it .

Cheers Alpine

[Jow]

Hey mate,

You are surely getting short needles on your Nigra's, i have no experience with that species so cant really comment. I guess the technique may cross over to Japanese black pine well or it may not. Time will tell.

There has been a few posts on the results of this technique. If you are coming to the AABC convention there will most probably be a few JBP's that have had this technique applied to them so see in the flesh to give you a comparison point. Photos can be hard to see sometimes.

There was a discussion started by Grant about red pine techniques that had a couple of pics of needle length. The pics are from a JBP as the technique is the same for Japnese Black and Red pines.

Thread is here

I found the bigest difference between techniques was once trees hit a refinement stage and were in shallow bonsai pots. That said, if you can get good, repeatable results though, keep doing what your doing, why fix something that isnt broken.

Joe.

[alpineart]

Hi Jow , like i said mate i have been working Nigra's for near 2 decades and wasted 5-8 years , well i learned what didn't work . Now i know what works and i'm very new to these JBP , i will test my method on them .There is a lot of people who swear by methods but all i need is some examples , not 1 or 2 but a few dozen .Unfortunately i have 60 plus JBP , but all are undergoing other methods of trimming training ferts wiring butchering and so on .

I need to corner Shibui and relieve him of some more possibly another 20 but i don't like going backwards or covering old ground .Not too many people can spot the difference between JBP and EBP , i have had a few tense moment here regarding to two .Like you said "if it ain't broke ,don't try to fix it . I certainly don't pull my bike engines apart to see how they work .

Ps How is that little Nigra going .

Cheers Alpine .

[Jow]

well with 60 Japanese black pines and 20 on the way i am sure you will know iron out a technique that works in no time. I'll be keen to see the results as they develop.

As for the Nigra, i put it in the ground in my mums garden hoping to turn it into a big nigra..... i will have to see how it goes in the coming years.

Joe.

[squizzy]

Only the unwanted cut needles are removed for shoot placement .

Hi Alpine,

Do you not consider the cut needles with brown ends and issue asthetically? By saying they can stay unless they impeed shoot placement. The reason for me asking the question in the first place was that a lot of my pines needles were made look shorter by trimming the needles by half which as I know now looks ok at first but looks rather unsightly in my opinion a few days later. I just figured your method may have been to cut the candles needles in half, allow the new shoots to emerge and then remove the cut needles leaving short healthy full needles?

[alpineart]

Only the unwanted cut needles are removed for shoot placement .

Hi Alpine,

Do you not consider the cut needles with brown ends and issue asthetically? By saying they can stay unless they impeed shoot placement. The reason for me asking the question in the first place was that a lot of my pines needles were made look shorter by trimming the needles by half which as I know now looks ok at first but looks rather unsightly in my opinion a few days later. I just figured your method may have been to cut the candles needles in half, allow the new shoots to emerge and then remove the cut needles leaving short healthy full needles?

Hi Sqizzy , this JBP is only 2 years in development , mate a don't give a rats ass what a trainer looks like, hence i don't care what type of wire i use as long as it does the job , it can be pink with purple spots , i'm not here to follow the "Lemming Syndrome"or to pee anybody off . I only had 1 Bonsai and i bought that off Mathew and hacked it back , re-potted it against his advice but it survive my harsh treatment now its back to a Shimpaku Shrub , it too never got any work done on it . I will get to it before Mathew comes over , he would be horrified at the condition its in

.For example on My Nigras if i cut a 75mm needle back to 40mm the next season they produce a needle around 50mm , the following season i cut the 50mm needles back to 30mm and they produce a 35-40mm needle, the next season i cut these 35-40mm needles back to 20mm they then produce a needle25-30mm the following season i cut again shorter . I have had a Pinus Nigra Produce 15-18mm needles consistently for 3 season without needle cutting then they begin to alongate so before long you end up with a nigra that will grow back to around 30-40 mm , so i cut them back to 15-20mm and the reduction starts again .They will hold there needle size once reduction has been sort usually 3-5 years .

Some of the Pinnus Nigra's for example "Maratima" have a 140-160mm needle in a pot longer on a tree , i have reduced them by cutting every year in as a trainer to a mere 40mm however they wont hold that size for more than a season but i haven't finished with the trials , i basically have to start from neglected trainers again ..This year most of my tree's were lucky to survive , on crutches just out of hospital i had to organize a working bee to plant out 400 trainers or they too would have died .

To quote W.P , The Pinus Nigra/European Black Pine is the ultimate black pine .If the Japanese Masters had access to these tree's 500 years ago we would be looking at Bonsai beyond yours and my comprehension" .

Now i will treat a JBP like a Nigra and see if it comes up to the standard i want .They grow well in scoria , and the grow well in wet beds , they grow under shade sails 95%uv block out , so thats a start . I will continue to test every thing and anything that i consider worthwhile to grow good material to hack and chop and play with in the future . All my material is works in progress, im a hacker and chopper and an amateur bonsai butcher .Certainly not looking for the "Guru Status"

Cheers Alpineart

[squizzy]

Hi Alpine,

You get my philosophy if you read the A.E quote at the bottom of my posts so I totally appreciate your approach to this. I am really just trying to understand if my pines should have the half cut needles that I have on them removed now or maybe next spring when the next lot of growth starts. Sorry. Pines still make me nervous. You can undo a lot of time spent with an incorrect cut or de needling.

I certainly take on board your needle reduction technique though. I havent had the pines long enough to see if that works on mine. I might conduct some of my own tests now.

Cheers

Squizz

[alpineart]

Hi squizzy , mate if your lucky enough to have 2 pines the same age , pot them in the same mix , doesn't matter who's blend it is , water and fertilize the same again it doesn't matter what brand or type just be consistent , and apply the method Scott and Jow have spoken about to 1 tree/plant and my theory to the other .If during any period P.M any of us for assistance to keep you on the right track during your trials, give yourself 4-5 years to sort these plants out and to thoroughly test things . .Keep a personal record or a topic here and we can all see the results .This may only be a small scale test , i prefer to use 20-50-100 plants but not everyone has the room nor the time to look after large amounts of tree's .The seasons are a little confused so you may not get a consistant result but you will get a result .

I don't plan on repeating my failures as i have already learnt what works for me up here , I would be going backwards . As has been said "if it ain't broke , don't try to fix it", i'm not about to pull 15 years of positives apart to try to understand why it didn't work here in the first cases , don't have that much time up my sleeve . If i was to move to Melbourne/ Canberra or Sydney i would have all the reasons to retry everything ,but hell will freeze over before i go back to the big smoke . These JBP are a different tree but i think the method will work on them , only one way to find out and that's to do what i'm doing .Its a pity i haven't got another 20 to play with , i'm working on it .

Cheers Alpine

[Bretts]

I have read through the thread in bits and pieces several times trying to understand what you are doing differently Alpine and I am still not sure I understand so please correct me where I am wrong.
Firstly it seems you are not following any seasonal programme but just doing things when it seems right. But at this time of year, instead of plucking the needles you are cutting them.
Thirdly at this time of year you are shortening the candles (what Boon would normally do in mid Summer) as well as selectively removing buds/candles/branches.

If this is so I see needle cutting as similar to plucking but maybe a little less harsh and decandling again this time of year as more harsh that what boon suggests. Overall in a climate that you would expect the pine to flourish in then this could bring on faster results? Maybe that is worth a try as much as we say you should try the method Boon teaches?