Broadleaf & Deciduous Bonsai Seasonal Tips
Welcome back to a brand new episode this time around we’re going to be talking about everything broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees in specific we’re going to be essentially making a maintenance schedule that starts out in the spring goes through summer and ends in fall so that you guys can keep these species on track throughout the growing season and keep them progressing forward year after year after year now before we actually get into the maintenance schedule for the year what i want to do is give you guys some basic information some kind of horticultural information about the plants that we’re going to be working with now of course we’ve got broadleaf evergreen on one side these are going to be species like kuchinashi which is gardenia or elyagnus which would be a silverberry on the flip side with our deciduous trees of course these are plants that lose their leaves in the fall through a process called abscission so these would be things like your maples your hornbeams your beach and a whole plethora of other species now regardless of whether or not the species that you’re working with is a broadleaf evergreen or a deciduous tree you’re going to run across essentially two basic leaf patterns or phylotaxi on those trees first and foremost you’re going to see opposite leaf pattern trees these will be trees like maples for example where in the spring as the new shoot emerges you have two leaves opposite of one another on each side of that chute and they’ll continue down the length of that chute on the flip side of that you have alternating leaf pattern trees these are plants like stewardia flowering apricot hornbeam beach as a matter of fact the majority of the trees that you work with are going to be alternating leaf patterned trees and of course these are plants that if you look at the shoot the leaves and buds actually alternate down the length of those shoots so it’s good to know this information to begin with here because it has implications for how we prune these species later in the growing season so definitely put that in the memory bank for now now again my goal in this episode is to give you a basic maintenance schedule throughout the entire growing season to keep your trees on track so we’re not necessarily going to dive deeply into specific techniques but i am going to give you that schedule that you can follow so you can keep your trees on track going forward and into the future as well so without further ado let’s jump into the very first section here and that is going to be spring maintenance schedule for your broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees [Music] okay first things first here let’s talk about repotting in spring a vast majority of the species that you’re going to be working with in both of these categories here we’re going to repot just before or just as the new buds start to swell in the spring now this is going to shift a little bit depending on the species and the age of the tree as to the exact timing but as a general rule of thumb early spring as the buds start moving it’s perfect timing to do it now specifically when we’re dealing with older trees and in particular when we’re dealing with older japanese maples for example i would recommend you actually wait a little bit later into the spring season after the new buds have actually popped open and you start to see a little bit of that fleshy growth starting to emerge from those buds before you repot the reason being is that if you repot an older japanese maple too early in spring say before the buds move or just as the buds start to swell quite often because those trees tend to be somewhat weak as they get older those trees will actually shed older branches or interior branches so in other words those branches on the interior of the plant that are weaker may not fully open later in the spring and they may die off in favor of the external growth on the plant so you definitely want to be careful when you’re dealing with older japanese maples now when i say older japanese maples we’re talking you know 35 40 plus years old so i would imagine that a majority of the plants that you guys are working with are going to be much younger material so i wouldn’t worry about doing the early spring repotting just before or just as the buds start to swell now in terms of the soil that i use for most of my deciduous trees it’s going to be essentially a 50 akadama 25 lava rock 25 pumice mix the akadama of course holds a lot of moisture it also retains some fertilizer as well because it does have cation exchange within the soil so with our deciduous trees they tend to prefer a little bit more of a moist soil than our conifers for example so that’s why i use 50 akadama the pumice at a 25 rate pumice will provide some aeration and some drainage but it also does hold some moisture and then the lava rock is going to be your most free draining component within the soil so 50 25 25 or 211 works quite well for our deciduous trees now keep in mind here in nashville we are very humid here in the summer so that mix works quite well for us if you happen to live in a much more arid environment you may want to be putting in more akadama and maybe even more pumice as well into the soil to hold more moisture if you’re living in a much wetter environment you may want to use less akadama maybe a one to one to one mix like a conifer mix almost for your broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees so you’re just going to have to adjust a little bit based on your particular environment all right next up let’s talk about growth maintenance in the spring so what i want to do here to begin with is talk a bit about hormone exchange within your plants and that’ll give you a better idea as to how to prune or why we prune in certain ways so first and foremost first thing in the spring as the new growth is starting to emerge on your trees the terminal shoots or those new shoots that are starting to emerge and elongate in the tips of each of those shoots there’s a growth hormone called auxin this hormone is actually going to be transported back down through the tree via a process called polar auxin transport down to the root system of the tree once it gets to the root system it’s going to interact with another hormone called cytokinin which is also actually being transported up through the tree to the chutes so this hormonal exchange going up and down to the plant of the oxen going down to the roots and of the cytokinin going up to the chutes is something called crosstalk it happens with all of your trees as a matter of fact everything from your conifers to your broadly favorite green to your deciduous trees so in the early spring if we’re going through and removing that new growth those new terminal shoots that are coming out you’re removing that native oxen from those tips and it is no longer able to transport down through the tree to the roots so you’re not going to have very good root growth and you’re not going to have very good subsequent top growth on the tree so as a general rule of thumb with a vast majority almost all of the broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees and as a matter of fact with most of your coniferous material as well the moral of the story here is in spring just allow everything to elongate and grow now you may be asking yourself what about like japanese maple for example i heard you’re supposed to pinch out the center chute as it starts to emerge in early spring well it depends on the stage of development of the tree and it also depends on the health of the plant so for example if you’re dealing with a younger japanese maple and you’re trying to pump up the size of the trunk maybe you’re trying to get it a little bit larger or you’re trying to grow out the length of a branch or thicken a branch you’re going to want to leave all of those terminal shoots intact in the early spring you’re in early stages of development there’s no need to be working on ramification necessarily at that time if for example you have a japanese maple that’s a little bit weak from the previous growing season perhaps you don’t do that pinching in the spring either just allow it to grow so you get that hormonal exchange happening within the plant and then you get a better growing plant for the growing season once you start moving a little bit further into later development and into refinement this is when you’re going to switch over your technique with your japanese maple and actually pinch out that center chute as it starts to emerge in early spring now if you’re doing this year after year after year the tree might weaken a little bit over time so there may be a year say three years down the line where you allow it to grow again in the spring and then you start repeating that pinching process the next year so it’s all dictated by the health of the tree and the stage of development of the plant as well so definitely keep that in mind but again as a general rule of thumb in the early spring just let all of your trees grow unimpeded don’t cut them back let that hormone exchange happen and you’re going to have healthier more vigorous plants for the rest of the growing season all right next up here let’s talk about fertilization in the spring so both the type of fertilizer that i use and the timing for the application of the fertilizer is going to be dictated by the stage of development of the tree so we’ve got trees that are early in development trees that are kind of mid-range development and then trees that are moving into refinement so let’s start out with trees that are in early stages of development like this japanese maple right here so first thing in early spring i’m going to be applying a synthetic high nitrogen fertilizer to plants like this the reason being is that i want to put on a lot of top growth on the tree in a very short amount of time for one specific reason and that is really to thicken up the trunk so in the spring i’m going to be allowing a terminal shoot at the top here to elongate over the course of the entire growing season and potentially up to two or three growing seasons depending on how thick i want the trunk to be so to get that really early fast rapid development on these trees i’ll apply something like an osmoko plus which has a 15 value for the nitrogen so again that nitrogen is going to put on elongating internodes and larger leaves on the tree but a lot of fast rapid top growth on the plant which is exactly what i want now in terms of the application rate for something like this i recommend that you follow whatever the recommended application rate is on the packaging based on the volume of soil in your pot one thing about using a high nitrogen fertilizer is that that nitrogen can burn off or damage those fine new roots that are emerging in spring so if you overdo it you can really weaken and damage your plants so make sure to follow directions so for example a tree like this guy right here i would be putting on about one teaspoon not tablespoon but teaspoon of osmocote plus in the early spring and then over the course of the growing season i would be adding more osmocote plus every say three to four months depending on how the tree is responding so what about trees that are a little bit further along in their development so for example let’s take a look at the two trees that are beside me here these are stewardia monodelpha that have been in training for about six to seven years they were started out as cuttings and then several trunks were actually fused together at the base and over the last six to seven years we’ve developed them to the state that you see them in here so again at the very beginning in early development we were throwing on that osmocote plus letting the terminal shoots elongate on these guys essentially doing very little work to them other than basic pruning as we got further along into the summer now about two years ago when they were about five years into development i started to switch up the fertilizer regiment both the type of fertilizer i was using and the timing for the application of that fertilizer so the reason that i started to do that is because i wanted to start working on the ramification development on the tree and as you guys know when we’re trying to develop ramification on the tree we want small internodes and relatively small leaves on the plant so in order to produce that what i do is i actually completely hold off on fertilization in the early spring once they get to this stage of development so that’s going to give you tighter inner nodes on the plant again smaller leaves on the tree we’re allowing everything to elongate even the terminal shoots i’m still letting those elongate i’m allowing all the lower growth to elongate as well but once we move a little bit further into late spring going into early summer once that new growth starts hardening off at that stage we can start applying a fertilizer you’re not going to run into elongated internodes or large leaves at that point so of course this is going to allow us to produce those fine branches down at the bottom that we can then start to develop into nice tight ramification as the tree progresses into the future now the type of fertilizer that i’m going to be applying as we get into late spring and into early summer is going to shift as well so we’re going to shift away from that osmocote plus over to something like a grow power which is what i use here at asan now grow power is a 1288 so it’s a little bit lower on the nitrogen value it’s also an organic fertilizer as well and it does have a lot of micronutrients in it too like molybdenum zinc copper iron and actually humic acid as well so you’re going to get a lot of knock-on effects again for these plants as you move into the growing season switching over to that slightly lower nitrogen fertilizer with all of those micronutrients in it so as we get into summer i’ll explain the fertilizer regiment a little bit more but i wanted to give you guys an understanding in early spring with our trees that are early in development and mid development here okay so quick side note here i’ve jumped forward a few months and we’re in early winter right now but i wanted to show you the effects of the fertilizer regiment in late spring going into early summer and how it actually affects the growth on the tree so of course i mentioned that we’re trying to keep the internode small at the base of the tree so that initial flush of growth i don’t want to apply any fertilizer to so that we can create that really tight compact growth here at the base now once i actually start applying the fertilizer after that first flush is hardened off i’m pruning this section back possibly defoliating this section but i’m allowing the upper portion of the tree to elongate to thicken the trunks so you can see here once i start applying the fertilizer in late spring early summer after that initial flush of growth is hardened off the inner nodes at the top here are noticeably larger and longer than the inner nodes down here at the base so you can really see the effects of holding off on the fertilizer for that initial flush of growth and then applying the fertilizer to that second flush of growth as you get into early summer going through the summer growing season so let’s move on to trees that are further along into refinement so i’m going to treat those trees basically exactly the same way as the trees that are in this stage so again no fertilizer in the early spring we’re working on that ramification development or we’re essentially just maintaining the ramification that’s there so again we don’t want elongated internodes we don’t want large leaves no fertilizer in the spring once that growth again hardens off late spring early summer i’ll start applying a fertilizer at that point with those trees though i’m not going to use such a high nitrogen fertilizer like the grow power i’m going to switch it down to something with a very low nitrogen like a tamahi or a biogold so these fertilizers are going to have n values anywhere from six to eight but as long as it’s below about a ten you should be absolutely a-okay that’s not going to produce overly thick branches and it’s going to allow you to maintain the health of the tree throughout the growing season okay so the last thing i want to cover here for our spring segment is the application of fungicides and pesticides so as a general rule of thumb i don’t typically use topical sprays in the early spring as the new fleshy growth is starting to emerge i think you know quite often you can run into problems if you over apply it for example or if you mix the wrong ratio of whatever you happen to be using so what i tend to like to do is actually apply systemic granular both fungicide and pesticide to the soil so in early spring just as all that new water is being absorbed up into the plant to produce that first flush of growth applying something like infuse which is a systemic fungicide that’s going to be rapidly absorbed up into the plant right at that time of year and help inoculate the plant against diseases going into later spring now at that same time i will be applying something like imidacloprid which is a systemic pesticide that’s also going to be rapidly absorbed into the tree and take care of things like bores mites and all sorts of other pests in early spring too so the application rate for each of those is going to be dependent on the size of the pot that you’re working with if you’ve ever looked at the big bags of those granular pesticides and fungicides you’ll notice that they’re designed to be spread on like football fields or at golf courses for example so you have to make sure that you’re applying it at the right rate and it’s pretty much impossible to calculate exactly what you need so just to give you kind of a general guideline here what i’ll do is for shoheen size trees i’ll take a teaspoon and i’ll apply essentially a quarter to a half of a teaspoon per pot of our shoheen trees as we get up to medium sized trees i’ll apply essentially a full teaspoon of each of those to the soil and for our larger trees we’ll apply up to a full tablespoon if it’s a massive tree so anywhere in that mid-range from a full teaspoon to a full tablespoon for your larger tree should absolutely be totally fine so just don’t overdo it you know you could potentially run into issues with killing off beneficial bacteria and fungi in the soil if you overdo it so just keep that in mind but in any case i just want you guys to sort of understand the spring maintenance section here hope that makes a lot of sense to you guys and we’re going to move on to our summer section coming up here next [Music] okay so in this segment i want to talk about the pruning techniques for your broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees as we move into summer now the best thing here is to divide all the species that we’re working with into those two big broad phyla taxi categories or leaf pattern categories that i mentioned earlier in this tutorial so on one side of the spectrum we have our alternating leaf pattern trees these are going to be trees like flowering apricot stewardia beach hornbeam and a whole plethora of other species and then on the other side of the spectrum we’ve got our opposite leaf pattern trees which will be things like maples so what i want to do here is start out with the alternating leaf pattern trees so first and foremost here let’s address the growth that we allow to elongate in the spring season as we get into the first part of summer which here is going to be essentially early to mid may at that stage that growth that we’ve allowed to elongate in spring will have hardened off by that point so what does this mean this means that that new fleshy growth that came out in spring that was kind of a fluorescent green color will have turned to a dark hunter green for example with most species and the fleshy texture will have turned more to a hard kind of waxy texture at this stage we can say that the tree has hardened off so in your environment that could be a little bit earlier or it could be a little bit later but as a general rule of thumb we’re looking at sometime in the month of may for this to be the case now at that stage if your trees are nice and healthy if they’ve elongated if they’re looking good you should have anywhere from six to eight leaves on each of those shoots that has elongated what we’re going to do with each of those shoots is somewhat dependent on the long-term goal with that particular branch so for example if you’re working with a branch that you’re trying to elongate and thicken you’re going to allow the terminal chute to elongate unimpeded we’re not going to do anything to those shoots if on the other hand we want to start working on pushing the growth back starting to develop ramification starting to develop movement within the branches we need to actually prune at this time of year now with those shoots that have elongated to six to eight leaves what we’re going to be doing at this stage is actually cutting back on average to two leaves with a dormant bud at the base so to make this process easier we’re going to go into the workshop and take a look at a chinese quince which is an alternating leaf pattern tree i’m going to show you exactly what this process looks like okay so the first technique we’re going to be applying to this tree is just a simple cutback of all the elongated shoots i’m going to bring the camera in a little bit closer here and we’re gonna talk about the nuances and details of how we decide where and how far to cut back all right let’s take a look at this shoot right here you’ll notice that we’ve got one two three four five six seven leaves on this particular shoot so this is perfect timing to do a simple cut back across the entire tree now you’ve probably read in various locations on the internet or in different books about cutting back on average to two leaves across the entire tree well technically this is true but what we want to do is be a little bit more careful than just willy-nilly cutting back to two leaves on each chute there are a couple things we need to keep in mind so number one is going to be that the first leaf back here on the interior it’s almost always a misshapen leaf a little bit smaller than the leaves further out on the chute and it doesn’t have a bud at the very base down here this is what’s called a suzuba in japanese which basically translates to a budless leaf so what that means is at the very base of this leaf right where it attaches to the chute there is no latent bud here so just as an example if we were to cut all the way back to that first leaf because there’s no latent bud there it’s likely not to form a new shoot here and we may actually end up killing off this branch so what we want to do is ignore that first leaf and start our leaf count from the second leaf out so this is going to be leaf number one then leaf number two and we would cut back to here like so again you want to ignore that first leaf right there now one thing you can also do is if the canopy is very very full on the tree and a lot of light is not really penetrating to the interior you can actually go ahead and remove that suso bot it’s not really serving any purpose it’s not going to be detrimental to that particular branch on the tree and again it allows a little bit more light to penetrate to the interior another thing you should be considering is the directionality of the secondary shoot so in other words what that means is whatever leaf that we’re cutting back to whatever direction that leaf is pointing when we cut back you’re going to activate the bud at the base of that leaf to elongate and grow and it’s going to grow in the same direction that that leaf is pointing so on this particular branch right here you’ll notice that this is our susoba back here this would be our second leaf or really our first leaf in the count and then the second leaf in the count a little bit further out but the problem is if we were to cut this back to here that next shoot is then going to emerge from the top and shoot straight up which is not ideal we’re trying to create a downward sort of lateral undulating branch pattern on the tree and this would destroy that so in the case of this branch we are actually going to cut back to just one leaf here again ignoring the suso bob because this leaf is in the right direction and that secondary chute that will start emerging over the next few weeks will emerge in the proper direction this is essentially clip and grow or directional pruning on alternating leaf pattern deciduous and broadly species here is another example where directional pruning is very important so for example you see the shoot coming out here we’ve got this leaf sort of protruding back towards the interior this leaf here coming out towards the exterior you never want to cut back to a leaf that’s going to then produce a shoot that goes back in towards the interior of the plant we always want to cut to a shoot that’s going to protrude towards the exterior of the plant it always looks messy and jumbled to have a lot of branches going back towards the interior so again always look for cutting back to leaves like this that are sticking out towards the exterior so that that next shoot that starts emerging here also emerges towards the exterior of the plant [Music] all right now that we have a grasp of how to prune our alternating leaf pattern trees in the early part of summer let’s talk about a secondary technique that we can apply at that same time of year and this would be defoliation more specifically what i call partial outer canopy defoliation so before we get started here what i want to do is divide our alternating leaf pattern trees up into two separate categories so we have trees that can be partially defoliated and trees that i recommend you not partially defoliate so trees in the latter category that i don’t think you should defoliate would be plants like hornbeam and beech if you were to defoliate those trees you’re likely to produce an imbalance of energy across the plant so for example if you do defoliate them you may get a second flush of growth that has large leaves on certain branches small leaves on other branches and no leaves on other branches and those branches would likely die off so you know you might try it on younger trees for example but i don’t recommend that you do it year after year after year on those species on the flip side though we have our alternating leaf pattern trees that can be defoliated these would be plants like flowering apricot stewardia eliagnus and a plethora of other trees so the benefit of course of being able to partially defoliate those trees is that you’re going to produce a smaller second flush of growth you’re also going to produce more growth on the plant so more ramification and finer branching as well so this is when we start moving into the later stages of development into refinement when we’re going to be doing this partial ladder canopy defoliation on these species so the time for doing this defoliation technique is going to be essentially right after you do the first cutback of those elongating shoots in early summer so we’ll cut those shoots back we’ll then defoliate essentially 80 to 90 percent of the outer canopy of the entire tree that’s going to allow light to penetrate to the interior of the plant and strengthen those interior buds again you’re going to get a second flush of growth on the externality of the plant which is going to be smaller growth more growth and finer growth which is what we want because again with our deciduous trees for the most part we’re going to be showing them or ideally showing them in the winter in their silhouette form so this is what’s going to produce that really fine beautiful ramification on the plant now once you’ve defoliated those trees i recommend that you do not then apply fertilizer at that stage because essentially you’re not going to trees back to an early spring setting which means that next flush of growth that’s going to come out is going to elongate just like the first flush of growth so at that stage if you start throwing on a bunch of high nitrogen fertilizer you’re going to produce elongated internodes and very large leaves on that second flush of growth so you’re going to want to hold off on fertilization on those plants at that stage you’re going to want to wait until that second flush of growth has completely come out and hardened off and then you’re going to start the fertilizer application just like we talked about earlier in the spring now on the flip side of that those species that i recommend that you do not defoliate you can actually start applying fertilizer to those after the first cut bag that’s not a problem at all and again depending on where the tree is in development i would use one of those three types of fertilizers that we talked about earlier all right so what about our opposite leaf pattern trees like our maples for example so again i want to divide these guys up into the same two categories we’ve got the trees that can be partially defoliated and those that should not be partially defoliated so the trees that can be defoliated would be like your trident maples for example these guys are very vigorous growing plants and you can actually do multiple defoliations over the course of a growing season depending on where you live and depending on the vigor of that specific tree now on the other end of the spectrum those trees that i recommend you don’t partially defoliate would be like japanese maples for example now if you’re dealing with a very young tree that’s very vigorously growing or even an older tree that has really elongated internodes maybe you do partial outer canopy defoliation but not on a yearly basis say you do it this year maybe skip one or two years and then do it again whereas with the trident maples you can reliably do it year after year after year no problem at all so the timing for doing this technique is going to be exactly the same as the timing for our alternating leaf pattern species so just after the first flush of growth has completely hardened off and the elongating growth has really come out on the plants now you know i talked earlier about your japanese maples pinching the center shoot out in early spring that’s really with trees that are further along in refinement so with those plants you’re really not going to be defoliating those anyway so you don’t have to worry about that with the trident maples though i would treat them like your alternating leaf pattern trees let them flush out elongate grow unimpeded in the spring and then you can do that first cut cutting back to the first pair of leaves and defoliating the externality of the plant all at the same time in may basically kill two birds with one stone that way you’re not wasting time pinching out the center shoot on your trident and then defoliating it later you can do it all in may at the same time now with fertilization of course we’re going to hold off on applying fertilizer to the trees that we’ve defoliated until that second flush of growth has hardened off if you’re working with a trident maple though that can be defoliated two three four times over the course of a growing season i would not fertilize until the final flush of growth after the final defoliation has come out and hardened off so for example a tree like this will do the first defoliation in may second defoliation possibly in late june early july and maybe a third defoliation in late july early august so we may not be fertilizing these guys until the end of august or early september now that’s a bit extreme i don’t typically defoliate that many times in a growing season but it is possible and i just want you guys to know how and when to fertilize these guys following defoliation all right in this section of the tutorial i want to talk about heavy pruning and major cutbacks on your broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees so coming into early summer just after the leaves have hardened off is the perfect time to do major cutbacks on a vast majority of your broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees the reason being is that in the spring as water is being sucked up from the roots into the tree to produce that first flush of growth you have a lot of moisture within the tissue of the tree so if you were to do a major cutback in the spring season as the new flush of growth is coming out you could potentially cause a lot of bleeding and maybe even die back of certain portions of the tree or at the very least you could weaken the plant so once we get to the point where that first flush of growth has completely hardened off which here in nashville is the first or second week of may a vast majority of that water has already been brought up produced the leaves and then you’re getting a transfer of hormones back down to the base of the plant at that point so at that time of year right after the leaves have hardened off it’s a great time to do major cutbacks on most of your broadly feather green and deciduous trees now as a general rule of thumb i recommend that you try to avoid making wounds that are bigger than about two to two and a half inches in diameter on any given tree anything larger than that is going to be very difficult to heal or if it does heal it’s going to be very obvious so try to be strategic about how thick you want branches to be before you cut them off you’re going to be doing a trunk chop for example on a tree make sure you’re doing it strategically so that trunk isn’t already four inches in diameter because you’re probably going to run into major developmental problems or little healing or potentially even major scarring on those trunks if the wounds are too large so definitely keep that in mind but more of the story here the best time of year to do those major cutbacks is going to be in may to early june so you know the early part of summer basically one of the other worst times of year that you can do major cutbacks is going to be in the winter season so if the tree is completely dormant at that point which it should be if you’re living in a temperate climate you do a major cutback you make a wound that’s you know an inch or two or even three inches in diameter that is not going to heal there’s going to be no callus formation at all over the remainder of the winter so what’s going to happen is that wound is going to dry out around the edges and potentially become bigger than it was when you initially created it so you want to avoid doing major cutbacks in the winter wait until everything hardens off in may to early june do your major cutbacks at that point and then you’ll get a second flush of growth so this tree right next to me here is a good example of what i’m talking about here this is an eely agnes or a silverberry this is a type of tree that you can actually pick up at a lot of home depots and lowe’s around town but they make excellent bonsai this tree right here originally when it was purchased looked like this so it was a giant bush as a matter of fact this came from the same stock that this guy is from here it was a giant bush that looked like this we hacked this tree way back removed all of the foliage on the plant we hacked it back to essentially nothing just a basic simple structure on the tree looking for good primary lines did a little bit of wiring on the plant we did that again in late may here so perfect timing and then right now we’re in mid july so you can see it’s just a little over a month later it’s really starting to fill back in and look really nice so a vast majority of younger trees that you’re working with broadly fabric green and deciduous trees you can do this type of major cutback too as the tree gets much older in its development if it needs a major cutback you’re going to have to be a little bit more strategic and careful about how aggressively you cut those trees back so for example a japanese maple if you were to do a major cutback on a very old tree cutting things back to nubs for example they may not flush out with a second flush of growth and you might end up losing major branches on the tree or even whole portions of the trunk so you have to be somewhat careful but i would assume that a majority of you guys out there are working with younger material like this right here vast majority of this material you can do major cutbacks in may early june no problem at all now you’ll notice on here too we did a little bit of cut paste application as well that’s to heal those wounds over to seal them up so we don’t get any fungal diseases entering through those wounds and potentially causing further die back on the trees so this tree once it was all styled up we put it outside in partial shade under 30 shade cloth allowed everything to flush back out and then later this season once we get some better extension growth on the tree we’ll do another cut back on this plant at that point but keep in mind you know this is very early on in the development of this tree so it still looks like you know a skinned chicken basically at this point but getting things cut back to a basic primary structure with good primary lines is absolutely necessary early on in the development of your broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees all right so this brings us to the section of the tutorial about how to close large wounds once you’ve created them on the tree now right here we’ve got a japanese maple just a standard acer palmatum this tree was field grown for a number of years and then trunk chopped and some of the larger lower branches were also hacked off of the tree so this has left the tree with a few relatively large wounds the largest of which is about two inches in diameter so there are a couple of things that we need to do with a tree like this to help heal those wounds first things first is to get it into a very free draining very porous mix so that aoki blend that i mentioned earlier 50 percent akadama 25 percent ketu and 25 lava is actually perfect for healing large wounds on a tree like this if you have your tree in a very heavy organic soil you’re not going to get the drainage that you need and you’re not going to get the root production the top growth and therefore the healing that you want on the plant in an expedited fashion whereas if you put it in a porous mix you’re going to get all of those things so first things first we need to make the wound either concave flat or convex depending on the species that you’re working with so all of this is going to be dictated by the thickness of the tissue of that particular species so in the case of a japanese maple the tissue is actually relatively thin so if we were to do a concave cut on a japanese maple that tissue is then going to heal concave and you’re always going to be able to see where that wound was so what we want to do on a japanese maple is actually make the wound flat so you can take your concave cutters for example you know carve into it a little bit you want to be able to run your finger over the wound and make it feel seamless with the bark around it so you may even need to take a razor blade or a knife and smooth that wound out a little bit but you should be able to run your thumb over that wound to feel that it’s you know nice and smooth that’s going to provide you with a nice flat heeled cut over the course of two three four five years depending on how big the actual wound was to begin with now if you’re dealing with something like a trident maple for example the tissue on those is very thick so you’re going to want to make that wound concave if you’re dealing with an azalea you may want to make that wound almost convex because the tissue is incredibly thin on azaleas so each species is going to be slightly different and you need to address each individual species to see if that wound needs to be concave flat or convex now once you’ve created the wound on the tree what you want to do obviously is cover that with cut paste i tend to use a putty type cut paste here which works quite well now you’re going to start to see a little bit of callusing on these trees and again we’re doing these major cutbacks on these trees and creating major wounds in may so you’re going to put the cup paste on you’re going to see that calcium starting to form over the course of the growing season typically by about late july early august or so you can take that cut paste off and actually see the callus formation on the tree most calluses will move in a little bit and then stop so you actually have to reactivate the tissue by taking a knife and scoring the interior of that callus and then reapplying cut paste over the fresh wound it’s going to reactivate the tissue and cause the callus to continue to heal over the course of the remainder of the growing season and then the following spring you’ll have to repeat the same process so in a given growing season you’ll need to score that callus anywhere from two to three times typically depending on how long your growing season is so the second thing you need to do to expedite wound closure is allow some of the terminal buds on the tree to elongate unimpeded you don’t want to cut them back so for example we’ve got several down here that we’re allowing to elongate we’ve got some of the terminal shoots up at the top that we’re allowing to elongate what that does is it actually moves those hormones that we talked about with the crosstalk earlier in this tutorial the oxen and the cytokinin more rapidly and in greater quantities up and down the trunk that’s going to help expedite the healing of large wounds on your broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees so this tree we’re going to allow this growth to elongate for the remainder of this growing season i’m going to cut it back once we go into the dormant season this is a pretty mild cutback so doing this type of cut back in late fall early winter not a problem it’s not going to create large wounds but we are going to cut these longer shoots back once the tree goes dormant and then next spring we’re going to repeat the process again we’re going to score the wounds again in the spring put cut paste on them let everything elongate again and then score the wounds again two or three times over the course of the remainder of the growing season so hopefully that answers some of your questions on how to heal large wounds on trees but this is just a natural process of working with broadly february and deciduous trees okay so as we move further into the growing season what should you be doing in terms of fungicide and pesticide well here i tend to like to spray preventively rather than in reaction to those things emerging on my trees so once that first flush of growth has completely hardened off in late spring going into early summer i switch away from the granular systemics and actually start applying topical sprays so i try to get on just a very basic schedule so essentially here you know by about may 1st most of our deciduous trees the leaves have hardened off by that point so on may 1st what i’ll typically do is spray a pesticide on the foliage of all of our deciduous trees as a matter of fact i spray it on basically everything in the nursery including our conifers and my go-to pesticide is malathion you can pick it up i think spectracide is a company that makes it but you can get it at lowe’s and home depot and it takes care of pretty much everything that’s going to affect most of your bonsai species now i’ll do that like i said on may 1st and then one month later on june 1st i’ll switch over to a fungicide now the fungicides that i tend to use here would be something like a cleary’s 3336 which is systemic but i spray it on the foliage or i’ll use the spray version of infuse either or is totally fine once i get to the first of the next month i’ll switch back over to the pesticide then the following month back to the fungicide and i’ll continue to alternate through the rest of the growing season this tends to keep pretty much everything we have here on track and keeps most pests and diseases at bay for the entire growing season now that being said you may come across a certain pest or disease that whatever you’re spraying for doesn’t cover so you may have to spray a specific type of fungicide or a specific type of pesticide to take care of a certain pesto disease as it emerges over the growing season but as a general rule of thumb if you’re spraying preventively once per month alternating months between your fungicide and pesticide that should keep you on track for the growing season all right this brings us to our fall maintenance section here for broadleaf evergreen and deciduous species now we’re going to be talking here about fertilization pruning and then what happens to the trees as they start to go into dormancy into late fall and early winter so first things first here let’s talk about fertilization in the fall now there are some myths out there that are floating around in the ether on the interwebs and in books that say you should never use a high nitrogen fertilizer in the fall so you should be using something like a 0-10-10 rather than a 10-10-10 so this comes from the idea that nitrogen is going to produce elongating growth on the tree and it may not harden off by the time the tree goes dormant in late fall or early winter so you may get tremendous die back on the tree well what you need to understand is that nitrogen does not induce bud break on any tree whether that’s a coniferous piece of material or deciduous or broadleaf evergreen it does not induce bud break it doesn’t cause the buds that are dormant there to open up and elongate what causes those buds to open up and elongate is pruning so what you need to keep in mind here is as you’re getting into late late summer early early fall the new buds for the next spring have already set up by that time of year basically so if you were to go back and start pruning on your deciduous trees say in september october maybe even in november if you prune those trees back at that time that is going to induce bud break on those trees so you don’t want to induce that blood break for obvious reasons again buds break they pop open they start to elongate produce new fleshy growth that growth doesn’t harden off by the time you get to the first frost and you get tremendous die back on your broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees so the moral of the story here is don’t prune at that time of year but you should be fertilizing with a high nitrogen fertilizer so again here we’re using grow power which is a 1288 again it’s got a lot of really nice micronutrients in it as well so we’re using that fertilizer all fall season with the intention of pumping up the nutrient base that’s in the soil so by the time the tree gets to the following spring we’re not going to be fertilizing in the spring but it has that nutrient base there to produce a good solid flush of growth in the early spring so putting on a 0 10 10 in the fall is an absolute myth you can use a high nitrogen fertilizer you just got to be aware that pruning in the fall season is a terrible idea you want to wait until the tree goes completely dormant late fall early winter basically drops all of its leaves through the process of abscission goes completely dormant and then you can do like a silhouette refinement or a slight cutback at that time of year but again you don’t want to be doing massive heavy cuts in the late fall early winter because big wounds on the tree aren’t going to heal over the course of the winter you could get even more die back at large wound sites and you could run into major problems come the next year so light pruning you know once the tree goes completely dormant it’s totally fine no pruning during the fall season as the tree is starting to go into dormancy you should be a-okay and again fertilize with your regular old heavy nitrogen fertilizer not a problem at all okay so as we start getting into the fall season you’re going to notice that most of your deciduous trees are going to start to change color that’s essentially the chlorophyll from the leaves being reabsorbed into the plant or at least the nutrients from the chlorophyll and they’re being reabsorbed as essentially a way to create an anti-freezer protection for the cellular structures of the trees going into winter dormancy at this stage once the leaves start to fall off i would recommend going ahead and actually removing those leaves it’s going to help keep your garden a little bit cleaner you know we’re dealing with a lot of deciduous trees like what we have here at acn if we let all of them fall on the ground it just creates a giant mess here that we have to clean up so the best thing for us anyway is to go through and actually remove all of those leaves as we move into late fall going into early winter okay so the last thing i want to talk about here is the fungicide and pesticide regimen as the trees go dormant in late fall going into winter and essentially what i do here not only for our broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees but also for our conifers as well as i spray everything with lime sulfur now you can use anywhere from two tablespoons to about five tablespoons per gallon when you spray i tend to stick with about three that seems to take care of pretty much all the diseases all the pests going into winter but it doesn’t turn my trees that stark white color so if you don’t want your trees to turn that white color i would recommend about a three tablespoon per gallon ratio now of course i recommend that you make sure everything has gone completely dormant before you spray the lime sulfur but again that should take care of you for the rest of the winter going into early spring and then you can repeat this whole process all over again okay i know that that was a ton of information jammed into a very small demonstration here but again like i said at the very beginning my goal was to give you kind of a basic schedule through the growing season to keep your broadleaf evergreen and deciduous trees on track there’s a whole lot more detail that we could get into in terms of the technique but you know like i said this is just a basic overview so that you guys can keep your broadly pepper green and deciduous trees progressing forward in a positive direction year after year after year so i want to thank you guys so much for checking out this episode and i look forward to hearing all of your questions until next time take care [Music] you
