In this video, Jason goes over how to prune your maple bonsai tree once the leaves have grown out too wide. He demonstrates how to use one shear to make the necessary cuts to bring the tree back to a manageable shape. He also discusses design tips to keep in mind while pruning. Hosted by Jason Chan of Eastern Leaf.
Hey how’s it going jason here and in this video we’re going to be talking about this maple that i repot about two months ago the growth on it is starting to get out of hand so we got to go in there and do some cuts to make it look good again [Music] so the first thing i’m going to do is i’m going to get some shears and for this this growth has actually been growing for the last two months you guys saw in the video where we repotted it basically had no growth at that time some of the buds were starting to emerge but it had it did not look like this so now you can see that we’ve got branches growing everywhere and that’s kind of the thing about maples is they come out really strong they come out really aggressive and they come out really fast when spring hits so now we’ve got to go in there with a sheer like this one i have right here um it’s kind of a bigger bones this year and this one will make it a little bit easier to grab a couple branches at once and make quick cuts like that we’re not going to be worrying too much about ramification we’re really just going to be trimming this back so that light can penetrate back into these branches that we want which are the ones inside right here basically the branches that we spent all that time rampifying are underneath right now and all this foliage out here is just covering it and if we continue to let it grow then basically all this inside is not cooking any light and that’s not going to do too good in there so we gotta go in here and just trim out some of this so for this process don’t think too much about it it’s really we’re just trying to prune it back so with this these bigger shears i can grab a whole bunch at a time and just kind of cut them back now we’re just trying to get rid of growth so we can start to get back into the structure of the tree and compact it down and that’s what these shears are good uh for is that you can grab multiple these branches say like right here grab multiple these at a time and just give it a cut until these are all coming out just be careful with your fingers you don’t want to cut your fingers so what we’re doing is basically trying to find the shape and it’s in here if i’m looking at the front right here it’s just right in this section right here just right in there this is the section we’re looking at as you can see all these branches are just all over the place and it’s just too much underneath the doll you can kind of visually see in here that your ramification is still underneath there but there’s just so many so many leaves in the way you just can’t see anything so what we want to do is just eliminate so that we can start to narrow down back to the pad that’s down there and really if you don’t be scared about cutting too much because the maples during the season are just growing so fast yeah you’ll be doing this again okay what i’m doing the ones i’m paying attention are basically there are ones that are coming out too far in the pad layer and the ones that are going up i don’t want that i still want my pad to be visible right here so i make sure that the ones are going straight up and cutting off bring the tree up right here you guys can see that this section here is pruned back a lot more now i might still go in there later and do some more but right now i’m just trying to compact this down everywhere uh just to make it look a little bit better now one thing that i’m keeping in mind while doing this is my triangles i’m always looking at that i can tell from here i’ve already got one here on the pad layer now i’ve got one on the overall side of the tree like this now when i’m talking about overall of this tree like this when i rotate this tree you guys can see that this is kind of a big male this big ball right now i’m going to kind of find my line my triangle there and i’m just going to trim around it like for instance these ones right here are going outside of that triangle so i’m going to cut them off and i’m just going to work myself around the tree find my triangles on every angle of it and then just cut it back [Music] all right so i finished cutting this you can see that the shape is much better now and really all i did was trim it back follow those triangles and cut it back and back to the pads that i actually spent all that time developing over the last couple years i noticed here it’s sticking out a little bit you’ll notice i didn’t cut that back and that’s because i realized if i bring these down just a little bit with guy wire it helps to fill in this crown a little bit so i’m gonna do that really quick all right so i think that looks a lot better um you guys remember before basically all this all these leaves were just growing out um wider than they needed to be and all i did was go in there with the sheer this one right here this one right here and just cut it back to my triangles and back to the pads identify the pads a little bit more here here and also just kind of created it full over here just so it looks like a nice natural tree i think this guy’s a little bit long so he’s gone okay i had to cut that one really quick i could see it in the frame that it didn’t look that good but now you guys can see that this tree is trimmed back you know maybe i’ll end up going with a bigger pot later um you know i cut this back and put in this one but now that i’m looking at it maybe i go a little bit wider but if i’m going to be sort of potting it in a way if i’m going to be up potting it or going to a bigger size that’s going to be way easier to do than what i did initially which was reduce all the roots and put it in this pot so i might end up going a little bit bigger after looking at this tree with all the foliage on it all right so hopefully you guys enjoyed that video um you can kind of see hopefully hopefully that gives you an idea of the progression of you know a tree that’s in a can and then the roots are reduced put into a pot and then you know spring comes around all the foliage comes out comes out too wide and then a little bit of pruning just to make it you know put it back into a nice shape like it is right now if you have any questions just let me know in the comments below um you know i’ll keep on doing a follow-up on this one but i think this one really the only thing that’s going to happen after this is putting into another pot maybe i’ll show you defoliation on this one later but if you have any questions leave in the comments below otherwise thanks for watching [Music] you
