You may wish to read at the - NPK topic, it is on the second or
third page. .
Additionally, we simply use Miracle Gro Lawn fertiliser at 1/3
strength into moist soil and the Bougainvillea, responds with
green growth, once in a while some flowers.
Mostly N
Good day
Anthony
Turned out to be more red than pink.
Branches grow to 3 feet and are cut back to 2 or 3 or 1 inch.
Many years to a bonsai
View attachment 200987
Am gonna check that thread out I've got it tabbed right now (if it hasn't come up already at least there's enough subscribed people that I should get solid #'s! I should be able to calculate it so I know that adding 1tsp / gal of phos.acid is comparable to adding 1tbsp / gal of X% phosphorous fertilizer!) I imagine you mean the 24-8-16 miracle-gro, that's what I use as a liquid feed every ~5-7d maybe, I aim to make it ~50% of my fertilizer regimen (the other half is 15-9-12 Osmocote extended-release pellets, am liking the idea of having a combination so there's
always some fert there *and* I can give it nitro boosts if I know it's going to be a strongly-sunny week!)
That pic there...I'm made of questions and hope you've got a moment & the kindness to help because that ^ is such a great example of the type of stumps I have so many of, that I'm trying to learn how to develop...
- you say you grow to 3' and then cut back, that's what I'd been doing and was told not to, because at 3' the bases / collars are still pretty thin, I'd been convinced you're not supposed to cut back anywhere near that hard
until the primaries' bases are ~about as thick as you want them to be (whereas in your, and my old, approach the branches are thin when they're cut, this leads to a lot of ramification on thin primaries but, since growing the primaries out is step#1 in development, the idea would be to force growth and doing a hard-prune (to 1-3 nodes) every time a branch hits 3' seems like it would only hinder things..very curious here!)
- I'm very curious about the # of primaries, and the approach you'd take with them on a stump like the one pictured- I know you've gotta grow-out a bunch of branches off the bat to get a good root-mass but, once you're there,
how many primaries/branches would you leave on a stump that size, would it be more like 8 or 25? I guess I'm starting to think that some of the 'block trunk' bougies are developed in a way where the goal
is not to try and grow primaries that are properly tapered-into the block, but rather to have lots of branches just radiating from the central block, each branch essentially being its own 'pad', and the pads altogether forming a shape that works for the stump....is that kind of how you'd approach that? Or would you be trying to grow-out 3-5" thick primaries? If the latter, I'd think that the pruning is counterproductive, though if the former then I can see the pruning making sense, since the ultimate composure would be one where there'd be a relatively 'tight' canopy, one that'd look good when it had foliage but wouldn't look like a regular bonsai when defoliated (because the trunk-to-primary taper just wouldn't be there)
I know Erik Wigert recommends doing 'silhouette'/hedge-trim style prunings ('shape pruning') on bougies right out of the gate (I actually just pruned one that way today to give his method a shot), the word on Reddit was 100% that I shouldn't be growing to 3' and then cutting back hard, but that cutting back hard was determined by the girth of the collars (regardless of the length of the branch)
(you don't happen to have a progress-album for that bougie do you? Or know of any prog-albums with 'blocky' stuff like that? Have had a hell of a time finding good progress albums of block-style stuff, graham potter's youtubes are the best I've found for learning how to turn blocks into art! Or "trying to", anyways ;D )
Example for the lulz, my first-ever collected specimen (I didn't choose the trunk-line I found it already-cut, though I'm not sure how much better I'd have approached it TBH!)
aaand after many, many hours:
This guy ^ is the bastard-stepchild of my collection lol, have no idea what I'll ever do with it so just keep growing it out, keep carving-back the dead/dying areas, figure maybe I can do some real heavy carving in a year or two and make something 'unique' but yeah I've got a lot of 'blocky' material that's just ~1yr old that I'm hoping to develop over the years and don't want to waste time by growing half as fast as I could've due to my pruning-tech! I
do know Wigert got a bougie on display at Epcot just 2yrs after collecting it, tbh that in and of itself should've had me following his recommendation (he has 1 article on bougie-development on his site) over anyone else's, I took pics & measurements on several bougies today so will be able to gauge the results of the one I just trimmed in his fashion ('hedge'/silhouette type pruning) It actually makes sense in a way, I mean the two extremes both have flaws: cutting back hard every time they hit ~3' and start slowing growth / readying to flower is just so taxing to the plant, but to just let branches grow until their collars are the appropriate thickness means to leave it un-touched for a long time (pruning certainly stimulates growth when done right!), Wigert's reco is basically the halfway point and he deals with a LOT of bougies, am seriously regretting not having done his style from the get-go, at least on a handful of specimen, to try it out- I've
only done your way (which is how I'd done it since the start, til I was told it was wrong and that if the collars aren't thick enough then hard-prunes aren't appropriate yet) and the 'let it grow unrestricted' way (all season this year- I pruned all my bougies very early in the year and have been letting the majority of them bush-out since, just unrestricted growth:
For something like that ^ my instinct is to go prune it, but the bases of those shoots aren't where I want them to be...I actually just pinched the very tips of every shoot on that one last week, as it was starting to flower so I figured tip-pinching would just force a stronger flower-flush (the idea being to let it flower for a lil while and then go in and hard-prune,
hoping I get vegetative growth after the prune instead of more flowers- have found no rhyme or reason for why this does/doesn't occur after hard-prunes, can't figure it out it seems 100% arbitrary!)
I'm halfway through my growing-season right now, have maybe 4mo tops before it's too-cold for any growth- I'm starting to think that
now is the time I've gotta do any hard-prunes
if they're to be done this year, it sucks because I've got so many specimen that want a couple more months' growth before that but it's too late in the season for both! But, if I'm doing silhouette/hedge/Wigert-style pruning, maybe I can have the best of both worlds, forcing the growth-spurts after prunings w/o cutting so much that it's gotta re-grow substantial amounts of foliage in a short time!!
[for posterity: Wigert's article:
http://www.wigertsbonsai.com/bougainvillea-development/ ]
