On the needle cutting, I always do it to trees in training. It's just another way of reducing the vigour of that shoot. This particular tree is massively strong and even if I removed all the needles from a few shoots and left just the buds, it would still shoot away in spring. Also if you look closely at the last pic, you will notice a branch hidden by a black cloth. This branch has more foliage on it than the rest of the tree combined. From now on I want the new needles/internodes to be as short as possible because there's not too much more extension to develop. If fact the height of the tree is pretty much there already. Cutting the needless helps a lot with this. As I said the tree is still so vigorous that I still may have to remove the spring shoots as well as cut back on the feeding this coming season.
