Clearance Colorado blue spruce; next steps?

[Bowhuntmuledeer]

Hello all! CBS was half off at Home Depot, so I picked one up, had a thick trunk and a little slant to it. We’ll see if there’s a giant knot in the trunk below the soil at some point. Wondered what you all thought about doing some pruning now. Could repot next spring or skip it until the following spring. I do have a completely enclosed (with windows) screen porch, so I could keep it pretty well protected through the winter months. Seem to find various opinions on chopping up spruce in the fall vs in the spring. Would be excited to give it some rough shape right now, but I could wait if that’s required. Whatcha think??! Thanks I’m advanced for your knowledge and replies!

 

[James W.]

My preference would be to do nothing now. In March do a repot removing 80% of the old soil (maybe more?). Leave as much foliage as possible to drive recovery. Late next summer you can begin to prune and shape.

 

[Bowhuntmuledeer]

Sounds like solid logic James, thank you for your reply! Would you trim off half of each of the new shoots after elongation to encourage back budding and to balance energy, or just leave it all until September or so to do the more drastic pruning and shaping?

 

[Potawatomi13]

Hard to tell does tree have second trunk?

 

[James W.]

Sounds like solid logic James, thank you for your reply! Would you trim off half of each of the new shoots after elongation to encourage back budding and to balance energy, or just leave it all until September or so to do the more drastic pruning and shaping?

No, do not trim the buds. If/when you do that on a spruce it will only be in its final stages of refinement.
You will evaluate the strength of the tree after next August. If it is healthy then it can be thinned, remove bar branches and other obvious structural problems removing no more than about 1/3 of the foliage (the tree is still weak and recovering). If it is not happy happy happy then it is best to wait another year.
The hardest part of spruces is waiting for them to recover between work.

 

[Bowhuntmuledeer]

Hard to tell does tree have second trunk?

No it doesn’t.

 

[Bowhuntmuledeer]

No, do not trim the buds. If/when you do that on a spruce it will only be in its final stages of refinement.
You will evaluate the strength of the tree after next August. If it is healthy then it can be thinned, remove bar branches and other obvious structural problems removing no more than about 1/3 of the foliage (the tree is still weak and recovering). If it is not happy happy happy then it is best to wait another year.
The hardest part of spruces is waiting for them to recover between work.

Thanks again for the reply. It’ll be a ways before refinement time.

 

[Bowhuntmuledeer]

Update!


Repotted this spring. Didn’t really cut much for roots off. Had to really hose at it to get the sticky mud out of the roots that were there. It does in fact have a big knot where the graft was. I packed all around that area with sphagnum moss, so we’ll see if I can work the roots up the trunk, would be nice! I also wired all the lower branches down as well as I could to encourage some light and air flow in there. So far so good on taking some of the excess off this September i think!