HELP! San Jose Juniper dying?

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Hello all! :)

I hope i am posting this in the right place.

Have a BIG problem here and really need help :( i bought this San Jose Juniper from KaizenBonsai late last year since i wanted a Juniper in my collection and the price was right.

It was looking fine when i got it, not great but fine, light green foliage (in the picture it looks greener then it was) and the soil was very wet.

Winter was coming (Scandinavia Zone 5), so i put it in the winter protection with my other trees.
I live in an apartment with all my trees living on my balcony, so i have built a big Styrofoam box witch i have fiber blanket (to protect from frost) and then plastic film over to also protect trees from wind and rain, and blankets around the pots, all other trees look just fine, so cant be that it was badly winter protected?
Inside the winter storage (juniper already taken out).

Spring is right round the corner, but the tree has just gotten worse and worse so i took it in to take a closer look.






Most of the foliage is light gray/brown and dry, breaks of easy and probably dead, but it has a few green flexible pads of foliage left (not many at all).
I also noticed when removing some moss to examine the soil that its super compact, no drainage at all!!

What can i possible do to hopefully revive this what looks like a dying Juniper?

Thanks!
 
I had one do the same thing, it was very root bound it now only has one branch alive.
You need to remove from this pot DON'T TOUCH/PRUNE any roots just place it in another pot with more room and use pumice cover above nebari base to keep it moist but not damp.
Act quick or lose this tree... Based on my own experience with same tree.
 
Very compact soil can be tricky in that one is always a little afraid of overwatering but when dry it sometimes requires a very thorough drench for moisture to penetrate to the centre of the rootball. Also when slipped into a bigger pot the dense soil can guard the free draining mix below, periodic quick submersions from the bottom, only as high as the new bottom layer of soil can help. Water often around the edge where the new soil is and check the compact rootball with a chopstick often. Similar to newly collected yamadori with very compact footballs.
 
Thanks for the answers guys :)

I took the root ball out the pot and it was a dry brick, hard as stone with dried thin white roots around, this tells me that water could not penetrate the soil and was running along the side of the pot, or water did penetrate but stayed there casing rot (may be wrong) when i gently raked out a small corner of the root ball just to look, it was all dead black feeder roots inside :( and the thin dry white roots was not connected to nothing alive.
So i did go crazy on it (feels like it was the only choice, i may be wrong) i gently raked and washed out almost all of the dead roots, finally i found some brown roots still white inside.

Ris, thanks for your advice, and sorry i did totally different from what you said, i just think leaving the rock hard brick root ball and just putting it in bigger container with well draining soil around it would not help (again i may be totally wrong).. just a gut feeling... time will tell...

After that i potted the tree in a bigger plastic pot with 100% perlite with a layer of cat litter on top so the perlite will not float. And finally watered with some root stimulator.

I may have killed it doing all this to a already very weak tree, or it was to late to do anything anyways, but i feel this was all i could try at this point...

I read a blog some time ago about a guy from Italy who use pure perlite to pot collected pines with almost no roots at all, and they grew roots out the pot in one season!!

And also heard other people revive near dead trees using perlite, so i am hoping for the best, even do i am prepared for the worst.

Will update the thread once i know if its dead or made it.... fingers crossed.
 
Wireme, it was super hard to even get a chopstick in to the root ball by hand, just as hard to get it out... and the root ball was bone dry even do i did water it just some days ago, and i did water it good and long..

Well now i did what i did, stupid maybe, will see i guess... this can very well be my most expensive mistake yet in this hobby.

Dont think i will buy any more trees, atleast not from a website where one never know what the soil and root will be like, yamadori for life ;)
 
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Wireme, it was super hard to even get a chopstick in to the root ball by hand, just as hard to get it out... and the root ball was bone dry even do i did water it just some days ago, and i did water it good and long..

Well now i did what i did, stupid maybe, will see i guess... this can very well be my most expensive mistake yet in this hobby.

Dont think i will buy any more trees, atleast not from a website where one never know what the soil and root will be like, yamadori for life ;)

Did you ever water the tree after you put it into storage? If the soil is like a brick odds are the tree died of thirst. That is the main problem with most winter storage systems, it is easy to neglect or forget about watering. If you are not allowing the weather to get to the tree it is not being hydrated by nature and you have to provide that element for them.
 
That soil looks baked in. any chance it is alive at all? do a 20 minute soak.
 
Vance wood,
The tree was soaked before going in to winter storage, after that i laid snow on top of the soil so it could melt on days when temps where warmer, and when i saw it had all melted i put on some more a day or two later, it have worked fine for me every year with my other trees, but since i got this tree about a week before going in to storage, i did not know the root ball was this super compact, if i known i would have watered it different, have only my self to blame for not checking the soil better.

Jason_mazzy,
To late to do a soak now since i repotted already ... but i do think its alive, partly that is since many branches only has dead foliage, but the scrape test shown trunk and some branches that still have green flexible foliage are alive, and when i raked out all i could of the dead roots, i found brown ones that where white inside, but not many feeder ones, hope i am lucky and that the perlite and root stimulator thing works wonders..

a fun thing if it survives is major restyling, always something right...


Also did put a big transparent bag with a few holes in it over the tree, so if the roots have a hard time getting water then that can help keep humidity up some i hope.
 
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