Spring Pruning of Katsura Maple Bonsai –
In this video Corin showcases his Katsura maple bonsai. He then trims the extension growth to keep this specimen tree up to standard.
I’m going to do a short video for you on this cat serum maple bonsai this is an acer pomatum it’s a cultivar japanese mountain maple bonsai it’s in my own personal collection and i’ve owned this tree for about five years. Here’s a photograph of when i first bought this tree it was in quite a small rectangular pot and the branches weren’t that developed it should just come into leaf but i did manage to slide it out of that pot and put it on into a more suitable handmade oval bonsai pot.
As you can see in early spring it leafs with a quite a bright orange colour and this third photograph was taken just about a month later as the mature as the spring growth has dulled down and you’ve got a mature leaf color to it and here’s a photograph of it after i’d owned the tree for two years here it is this year so this is five years on from the first photograph that you’ve just seen and you can see it’s really started to fill out it’s grown very very well this year we’ve had a lot of late frosts here early in early spring in the uk so this tree has been in an unheated greenhouse just to shelter it from the frost casserole always leaf quite early they’re one of the first japanese maples to come into leaf here in the uk so this one has got a head start on some others and because of that it’s got quite a lot of shaggy growth here it’s already putting out and it wants pruning back and one of the main jobs we’re doing now here in nottingham at the moment is doing this early spring pruning of japanese maple if we let these growths get too long this extension get too long we’ll get thickening of branches and particularly the upper part of the tree that isn’t what we want so we’re going to take a good clean sharp pair of scissors and we’re going to start to prune this back to shape to get the canopy more organized so we can start just here on this sort of side and always trimming i say with a good clean pair of scissors trimming back to an internode back into the tree all these leaves come out in pairs so you can see here we’ve got our power leaves here at this point another one here and another one at the tip so we’ll go back one pair two pair three we’ll go back to this pair here and remove those three pair of leaves and i’ll just work the way around this side of the tree doing that it’s always better to do it as precise as you can you know this is a quality tree it’s one of my own trees and this isn’t there isn’t a uh this isn’t the time for just sort of shearing trees over that sort of thing it’s not really what this tree deserves you know it’s in a fairly good state of uh of growth and it deserves a bit of time and care spent over it to make sure that when we prune this we’re putting in the right place and we’re not leaving any long stubs we’re doing it to the best of our abilities and a few more off in here like this as we get to here to the top so we’re just finding these these long shoots just chasing them back to see where they come from and taking it back to one or two pairs of leaves on the tree so just work your way over the tree try and be quite methodical about it seeing it miss out any sections just like this you can see i’ve already done this section here and this section here we’ll do it to this sort of standard and once i’ve done this standard i have another look and i might even then go in and trim individual leaves off this leaf is quite large i’ll take it take that those pair of leafs off we might get a few other to go in between the foliage pads or just an odd errant long leaf like this you know people say oh you know they look at my maples so you’ve got lovely small leaves how do you make your leaves small or one of the weights i make these leaves small on this tree is by cutting the big ones off yeah it’s not uh it’s not magic yeah if you cut the big ones off then the average leaf size of your tree is smaller and it looks more more sensible so this sort of pruning and i’m doing it here in early spring this actual procedure uh i might do three or four times this year just depending on how much the tree grows depending on how much i feed it and what sort of weather we have so we’ll just continue to work way around the tree taking these shoots back to get it into shape so now i’ve finished pruning this tree it’s going to go at this time of year we’ve got there’s no chance of any late frost fingers crossed so it’s going to come out of the greenhouse it’s going to live outside a little bit of semi shade to start off with and to keep out the full sun it hasn’t yet been fed this year i find with these aces if i feed them too early in the year they put on excessive large size leaves but now it’s in leaf the leaves are fully out and hardened off we’ll feed it with naruko bonsai fertilizer we feed about once a month with naruko from about may through till the end of september so this can have its first dose of bonsai fertilizer for this year and just go outside with my other acer bonsai i hope you’ve enjoyed watching this video please like and subscribe to our channel and check out our other videos we’ve got quite a few now all sorts of different topics thank you very much
