I guess you could wrap up the rootball in plastic before you refrigerate it, to conserve humidity. It sounds drastic to keep it in the fridge, but I totally get the urge of keeping temperate species in our climate. Guilty pleasures!! Sadly, you get used to all the ficuses after a point. I'm considering covering my pots in ice cubes every night starting next winter.
I guess you could wrap up the rootball in plastic before you refrigerate it, to conserve humidity. It sounds drastic to keep it in the fridge, but I totally get the urge of keeping temperate species in our climate. Guilty pleasures!! Sadly, you get used to all the ficuses after a point. I'm considering covering my pots in ice cubes every night starting next winter.
I guess the point of going down the literati route was to accommodate the branchless first two-thirds of the trunk. I now want back budding only on the three primary branches on the top, but I don't expect any major trunk chop hereafter.
. If I have longer sections without finer branching, it might have to become a cross between a literati and a cascade - which I think would be weird.
. After the wiring and the repot, it didn't seem to skip a beat so far - green everywhere, no needles dropped, candles getting pushed all over. Fingers crossed. 
.I don't think interrupting the Spring flush is an issue. You can hard prune pines any time of year - provided you leave some healthy needles where the new buds will grow - but results will vary depending on timing. Early Spring will usually yield strong growing new shoots. Early Summer will achieve a similar result to decandling - shorter new shoots with smaller needles. Late summer and winter pruning will often yield new buds that wait until the following Spring to grow and open (usually long, strong new shoots)
I think it's a bit early in the process to be worrying about equality. This comes later when we are trying to equalise strength and vigour of all the branches. There's no harm in trying to end up with equal foliage on all branches but probably not necessary.
This is usually OK but pines are apical dominant so allowing one upper branch to grow strong can sometimes weaken the others, especially if they are pruned. Keep any growing sacrifice branches away from the 'keepers' so it does not shade them too much. We often strip lower foliage from sacrifice branches to ensure enough sun gets to the ones we want but that's not an issue for this tree now.
The only times I've experienced this is where lower branches were pruned while stronger upper branches allowed to grow. I hard prune JBP quite regularly and the vast majority of JBP I've chopped bud well and grow strongly.
This was my thought as well… bend twist and compact.
Hey Shibui, In regards to your red marked line for cut back, you would cut these off there even with no buds showing below hoping that, with the needles being there it will bud back? Pretty cool if that happened. Do you think that will work on Lodge Pole and Ponderosa pines also? If so what time of year would you do that? Thanks
This question makes me nervous! Isnt this how everyone does it?
I'd say all experienced pine growers but there's still plenty of people still trying to come to grips with all the conflicting info on pines as bonsai.
Cutting back to healthy needles is a standard way to reduce pines. It's usually done in the early stages of development before moving on to decandling to develop and maintain ramification in teh later stages. There's more than 99% chance of new buds from healthy needles. I've never had a failure, though if the branch is particularly weak or something else goes wrong before buds initiate you sometimes only get a couple of shoots. On strong, healthy branches it's more likely to get many new shoots, especially in the upper parts of a tree. I'd say the only caveat is if you leave strong branches unpruned above the pruned ones the tree will sometimes not bother with the low branches and put all its effort into the high branches.
bonsaitonight.com
"so I assume it will work on most pines." as long as one has needles in the area, right? No needles, not buds? Thanks for the clarification.
