Recap
In case you didn’t see the original post, here is a recap to get you up to speed on what happend to this tree. The Black Pine pictured above had all of it’s needles pulled in April of this year. We heard about this technique and thought we’d try it out on this tree. The basic technique is this, pull all the needles off in the Spring causing the tree to weaken to the point where the new candles will grow short with short needles. The picture above showed the tree with a few needles left. After I took the picture, all of the left over needles were pulled off.
Observations
Well, the first thing we noticed is that the tree didn’t die. Cool! For the most part, the needles are about 2 1/2 inch (6.3 cm) long. The photo above shows that the neck of the candle is about 1/2 inch (1.5 cm) long. Over all, the needle length and neck lengths were fairly consistent from top to bottom (Very interesting…). I also noticed that the new candle buds were all strong (can see in picture above). During the year, we didn’t start feeding this tree till about May and the feeding was moderate organic fertilizer in the range of 5-5-5. Overall, the tree seems to be very healthy and we didn’t loose a single branch.
The future
I believe that since this is the first year we did this technique, a lot of the previous year energy played a part in the long needle length and neck. Next Spring, I’m going to pull the needles again and see what results that will bring. Hopefully, the next time we pull the needles off completely, we can get the tree to slow down some more and get some shorter needles and necks. If the tree continues to grow long needles, I may play with the soil and make it less porous so that the tree will grow even slower.
I guess you’re going to have to stick with me for another year to see further results. ;o)
If you have any specific question about this tree, please feel free to ask them in the comment section below and I’d be more then happy to supply more specific answers.
Thanks for reading and waiting.