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Pyracantha. Fun trees to work with. Nice trunk.

I guess I would run it daily for a much shorter duration. Your pots are still going to dry out in 3 days, even buried.

That is a goner. No reason to have a JBP in the garage if you live in AL. If you wired it recently, that probably didn’t help as it likely disturbed/damaged the roots. Try again, just leave it outside in full sun, get good at watering timing and wait until fall to try any wiring.

Thanks. I will probably widen it a little more now that it has started to close in, but not much. The back of the trunk is all Shari to the ground, so I don’t want to be too aggressive on the front, even though it looks like it could handle it. Traditionally, you want the live vein to be...

Agreed, if you carefully excavate the soil to see where they’re connected to the main trunk, you’ll see what to do. Chances are the trunk is swelling (which is normal and good) just below the soil and those suckers are growing from that bulbous base. If that’s the case, I would remove them...

As in suckers? Maybe a photo would help.

After a little chop-chop…

Ended up not showing it last month, and noticed last night when shooting the assassin bug hanging out on it, that it had gotten rather bushy again. Today, it got another haircut…had to relocate the bug who was still there today. Before and after:

Sorry, but I’m with @leatherback in that is neither Itoigawa nor 15 years old. Been growing various varieties of Shimpaku for quite a while and this looks like a 3-4 year old rooted Shimpaku cutting. Just for comparison, here is a thread starting with a 10-year old itoigawa nursery stock in a...

Congrats and good luck. Aaron is a good dude and that museum is a pretty amazing place with some iconic trees.

Assassin bug on Itoigawa…big guy.

Most of us are in these two obsessions…er hobbies.😂

Nice and tidy!

Thanks, Leng Sy cap, but correctly from Jason Fox (so were my Vermatid snails I think😂). Yes, full mixed was tough, but with only 75g we wanted a little of everything. The acans ended up being about our favorite, along with the 24k gold torch. Acros were cool, but really fickle. Things...

Nice! This was ours…

Beautiful reef and impressive growth on those corals! My daughter and I built a reef tank for a couple years, and it’s way more effort than bonsai. Rewarding, and very demanding. On the OP Atlas cedar, good luck, they can make some really nice bonsai over time.

Mostly I treat it like a JBP. Soil is lava/akadama/kiryu sand in about equal parts. 100% full sun all day long, and feeding heavily with Bio-Gold cakes and +/- weekly fish emulsion mixed strong. I try to keep it outside as long as temps are above 40f. Last winter it got days, if not weeks...

Not a good time to mess with roots or soil, so instead of slip-potting it, stake it. You could run rebar through the bottom of the pot and into the ground, and tie it off up along the sacrifice branches. I’d recommend you keep the sacrifice branch in blue for now, and if you cut anything, cut...

Here it is, getting full. This is about where I would have preferred to show it, but these really don’t take off until the temps are in the 80s. The middle-left side is getting too strong, so I’ll have to start some branch selection and ride hard on it to keep the rightward movement.

Fat and happy yet again…

Here it is, looking full and just a few weeks to candle-cutting time. This winter it will need to be fully rewired and thinned out a little. This pine has the sharpest needles of any I have worked with. Kathy S once told me they were sharper than any JBP she’d worked with outside Japan.

No, they are trash and a gimmick for newbies. They can cause damage, and frankly only put a crook in one plane and returns the portion above it right back to where it started. Using rebar and wire is much more effective.

Looking good Dave.

Today, finally had a chance to feed the trees for the first time in a few weeks. Been hectic at the Van Fleets…moved everything out of the first floor on 5/20 into Pods in the driveway…kitchen remodel started on 5/21 along with replacing old tile with hardwood throughout. We lost our...

Mostly it has been good. Coverage is a little tricky because all of the emitters are on the sides and back of the bench, so I have to be careful to place pots into the stream. Big pots and canopies near the emitters can block smaller ones. I used to have the ability to se pots anywhere on or...