Pruning My Itoigawa Juniper Bonsai

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Notion Bonsai and today we're going to be working on this Itoigawa Juniper. This tree was started from a piece of pre-bonsai material. You can see the progression of it on my channel and today in this video we're going to be doing a little bit of refinement to it just to take it that next step further into becoming a really great bonsai. So I've been really excited about working on this tree over the last year. Whenever we worked on it last year we just put the branches down into nice positions. I tried to create the beginning of some pads on the tree. Whenever I pruned it last year I pruned it a little bit harshly. Sort of making the tree look like a skeleton of what I want it to look like long term where the pads fill out. And from then until now I've just watched it get more foliage. Just put out a lot of growth in just one year. And a lot of you guys ask, Adam your trees grow so much compared to the ones that I grow how are you fertilizing your trees? When it comes to Itoigawas I find they just love high nitrogen all the way through the growing season. Then when it comes into winter I won't fertilize them at all. But with these on top I've got these little fertilizer pellets. The NPK value of these is 1266 so it's really high nitrogen. So every time I water the tree gets nutrients. Once a week I will apply a liquid fertilizer on top of this with a balanced ratio of 10-10-10. Then on top of this one week every Monday I will use a seaweed fertilizer in the soil. Then the alternating week a fish emulsion and these will alternate back and forth. Seaweed one week and fish emulsion the other. Just look at all this growth that it's put out in the last one year. The pads that we pruned last year and began to develop they're really filling out just how I want them to. It's looking a little bit congested because it's just grown so much. So we're going to have to go in today and do a little bit of cleaning up. And now just before we start on this tree the tools that I'll be using in this video today are some twig cutters, branch cutters, bonsai tweezers, wire cutters, knob cutters and some gin pliers. And as always you don't need all these specialized bonsai tools to be able to do bonsai. If you're just getting started you can get by with just a cheap pair of garden scissors or secateurs. You just want to make sure that whatever tools that you are using are clean and sharp because you don't want to introduce any bacterial and fungal infections between all your trees. And you want them sharp because a sharp blade will give you a much cleaner cut on a branch. And in horticulture clean cuts heal so much faster and more efficiently than a blunt cut with a dull tool that just squashes the branch. And the wire that I'll be keeping on hand today is some copper wire. This is a lot heavier than the aluminium bonsai wire. And if you've never used copper wire before you may be thinking, Adam, what is the difference between aluminium and copper wire? Generally speaking we use aluminium wire for more deciduous trees like Japanese maple, Chinese elm. But with copper wire we would use this more for conifers like junipers, pines, sometimes Japanese larch. And the reason why two different wires are used is simply because copper can actually give you a little bit more hold on a branch and I find it gives you a little bit more precise bending because it self hardens. So this is simply where if I take a piece of this copper wire, let me just cut this off. When I bend this wire like this and then I try to unbend it, it's really difficult to do this because the very act of bending copper wire rearranges the molecules of the wire itself. It kind of locks them in place. And this is what I mean by self hardening. Whereas if I were to do this with a piece of aluminium wire, you could bend this back and forth and it won't have any problems with this. So this is what I mean when I say aluminium is a little bit easier for beginners. Because if you were to put aluminium onto a branch of your tree and you didn't wire it how you want or you made a mistake, you can just unwire it, reapply it and get it right. But with copper you only have I would say maybe one or two shots before it really hardens up. And if you want to try again, you're going to have to cut it off the branch. Copper wire is also a lot stronger. So where a thicker piece of aluminium would hold a certain thickness of branch on a tree, it takes a lot thinner piece of copper to hold that same thickness of branch. So in the end, the tree will look a lot neater if you use something like copper because you won't have all these thick bulky pieces of aluminium wrapped around the branches. And when it comes to sort of gauging how thick does the copper need to be when putting it onto the branch, I would say just as a general rule, I find using a piece of copper that is a quarter the thickness of the branch you're applying it to does a good job. Copper wire is also a lot more expensive than aluminium. If you're just getting started and you don't want to lash out a whole pile of cash on all different gauges of copper, I would say start with aluminium. You can still shape branches in this way. Even if I'm starting a juniper from scratch, I'll just use aluminium and only then when it comes to the more refinement details of the branches that I'll be doing today, then I would use copper. Now what I want to do today is just delineate the pads, meaning make the pads look more separate from the pieces above it. As you can see, if I just separate this out here, you can see this is clearly its own pad. It's all in that one level. I'm really happy with how this bottom pad is developing. It's really getting ramified. There's a couple of problems with this tree still. With junipers, you can only do so much at once before you have to just let it take a little break. Normally, I would start by taking off all of the dead parts, but there doesn't seem to be any dead parts on this tree at all. It's all pretty healthy. The light's getting to inside and to continue this health on top of delineating the pads today, I'm also going to be thinning out the foliage. That way light can still reach the inner parts of the bonsai because if that doesn't happen, any growth that is inside will die off. So I'm just going to start by taking a wire brush and I'm just going to scrape off the old bark. And by doing this, this allows us to reveal that beautiful red color that junipers have underneath. I'm going to be very gentle as I do this. I don't want to scrape beyond the bark. And now to really bring out that nice red texture, I'm going to use some of this stuff. This is just some camellia oil. This is my own product that's available on my store, but you can use any camellia oil that you like. I'm just going to take a little microfiber cloth, spray it onto it, and just put a very light layer on the trunk of the tree. And as you can see, it instantly brings out that lovely red of the juniper. Look at that. That is just absolutely beautiful. With this particular camellia oil, I've actually infused lots of different essential oils into this particular one, like tea tree, lemon, eucalyptus, scots pine, all sorts of different ones with all different benefits. There's antifungal and antibacterial benefits of each one, but I also just really love the smell. Okay, so if you can't reach it all at once, we can do this at the end also and just a little bit of cleanup. But I like to make it look good before I apply the wire because once the wire's on, it can be a little bit tricky to get in between the pieces of wire. So let's have a look at this first pad. This is where I'm going to start. As I style, I'm going to work from the base of the tree up. Already I can remove this piece that's growing straight up. Keep it nice and flat. And you hear this growing straight down also. And immediately I'm seeing a big problem. This branch right here is actually growing on the inside of a band. Well I would say, let's say if we remove that, we've got all of this nice negative space and then even the branches up here can come down into that and this pad can come a little bit lower. That's growing straight up. I'm just going to take off all these branches, these starter branches that would continue to grow up and then become a bigger problem in the future. If you get them like this or when they're even smaller than this at the start of spring, just knock them off when they're tiny and you won't even have a problem this big. Then moving over to this side of the tree, all this is really long. So I know I don't want to keep all of this anyway, so I'm going to be cutting it into here. This will actually make a lovely cutting. Cut this into here. That's another cutting. But there's just some that's really problematic that's growing directly upward in the wrong places. We can just get rid of them. Coming around to the back part of the tree here, I'm just going to shorten these in. And now from this point, I think the tree is starting to look really nice. As you can see, we've got a nice structure. You can actually see the trunk line now the whole way up to the top. But there's just one problem I have with this. And before I begin wiring, I have to remove the crotch growth. And that is just growth growing from like in the elbows of branches. This becomes a real problem whenever you start to wire because you end up crushing all of that that's there. Then what happens is that dies off because it's crushed. So instead of the tree wasting its energy into foliage that's going to be crushed, I like to pluck it off with my fingers first. That way it's never a problem to start with. I think this is a really good example of what I mean here. I want to put wire up these two branches but you've got all this crotch growth in here so you can just pluck that out with your fingers. Make this a little bit easier to wire. This isn't really going to be needed for now. But you do want to keep some like this one back here. I would say this is going to be the future of this tree and the future of this pad. Once all of this is reduced back, this one will get stronger and become another branch. But they are all growing from the same place. So even then, I could remove this one here. That one's gone. And now instead of this one being the leader of that branch, these thinner ones can be allowed to take over. So with not even wiring, just purely clip and grow, we can get a more dense structure that's closer to the trunk. And then just to shorten this one here, I'm going to print it right back to here, leaving some green on the branch. Because if you print a juniper and you don't leave anything on the branch, it will more than likely just die off. So you always want to keep some green when you prune. I will apply wire to this branch just to make this pad a little bit more horizontal like that. But I think here's a really good example of one of them puzzles where I want good taper on the branch. So I want it to go from thick to thinner and then to even thinner again. And as you can see here, there's a little side branch just growing there and it's got lots of nice green foliage on it. And I think here in this case, I can push all this back just a little. So just taking the branch cutters. I'm going to start by just pruning it here first. I want to go back even more so we get nice taper on this branch right to there. And although I haven't got the perfect pad yet, I don't want to do too much where I stress out this area of the tree and then the foliage will start to all die. I want to leave a good amount on it so that it continues to grow and it doesn't lose this momentum of pushing out growth. But just every time I come back to this, we can get closer and closer to what we're wanting to achieve. This is growing back towards everything in there. See how that's just growing in that way? We'll get rid of that because that's not what we want in the final design. I'm just going to start by measuring a little bit of copper wire along here. I'm using 1.8 millimeter copper wire or 13 gauge. Now this one is quite thick because I also want to wire this section. I'm going a little bit heavy on this one. And just like aluminium, in Bonsai we wire with what is known as the two branch principle. And this is wiring two branches together with one piece of wire. So I'm going to wire this branch to right to the end of this one. So because I want to wire this that way, I'm going to coil the wire on this branch in that same direction. I'm going to start by just going under here and up and around. Then with this, I'm going to go around the trunk once. That gives us a nice anchor and then we can come up and around this other branch. And then as we come to the end, you can just take some gin pliers to help you just coil it at the end. And then just to wire this thinner branch, I'm going to change gauge. This is 1.2 millimeter or 17 gauge wire. I'm just going to measure up along here and then we're going to anchor this to this. And as we come to the end of this branch, instead of cutting off this piece of wire, what I like to do is just make like a little loop and that way we can use that as almost like a little pedestal to hold that foliage up. So now we can just position the branches how we like and we just want a small, small tweak. I'm going to just rotate this around this way. And I even think I can get some movement in this back branch now. I just want to get a slight bit of movement just to make this a little bit more interesting and make it a little bit more compact. So by doing that, I was able to get just this little band. And now with that really simple wiring technique, just wiring one branch to the other as I have done here with this primary branch. A primary branch is one that emanates from the trunk. This is a primary branch and this is a primary branch. And then doing it to the secondary branches, which are the ones that emanate from a branch. I'm going to apply the same wiring principle to all the other branches in the tree that I want to adjust. You don't have to do it to every single branch. Some branches like the ones up here, I'm happy with how they're coming out of the trunk. Actually even that one. I don't know if I'm happy with that at all because it's coming from a weird spot, but I'll deal with that when I get to it. This one definitely needs to be wired out like that. Okay, I think I have a big problem and that is a big competing trunk line branch and it's at the back. So it's like at the side facing you. Now it's at the side over here. So there's two branches. One is like in a really good spot, but it's too thick for, I think it's, it's very close to be in a competing trunk line, but the other one is in not such a good spot is the right thickness for the tree. So we have a choice. Do we choose the branch that is too thick, which would probably cause more problems long term, but it's in a good spot. The branch is really fun that it's just slightly below, you know, on second thoughts, looking at this top one, I actually don't think it's too thick for the trunk. Actually yeah, I do. I do. It's really annoying. This is a really difficult decision and I think one of these has to go because they're just simply too close together. Today's the day I'm going to remove one. If I remove that, all that is left is this as the back pad. We developed that from there and it's in a weird place. I think I removed the lower one that's still as nice depth at the back of the tree. I think there comes a time where you have to stop forcing a tree to be absolutely perfect because in this case I'm looking at this from the front angle and the thickness isn't really a problem because you can't see it. It's behind. I think this has better pad development. If I remove this, that could work and it does work. If I remove this, I have to bring this up. It's coming from a weird spot and also it handle bar branches with this branch over here that's a part of this right hand side pad. I guess sometimes you do have to bite the bullet. I'm going to cut this one off and I've settled. That's the branch. I'm going to keep that as the branch of the tree because it tapers nicely too, thick to thin. This one didn't really have much going for it. I want to taper this branch at the end because as I wear this one, this is in a good place. It's nice and thin, but this part is too heavy for the taper of the branch going from thick to thin here. So I'm going to remove this top one right here. It's hard to see on camera, but if I cut this, you can see what's come off. It bifurcates upward and we don't want any upward growth. I'm going to cut this right here and then this wire can then continue around this branch. And then again, it bifurcates there. Bifurcate just means it goes from one branch into two, just like this. I'm really happy with that. I think what would really make this tree into help on building the apex is this top branch here. If I pull this over this way, it shows off more of the trunk line. What if I remove that? I could remove it also, that's another option. I am going to remove it because it's just a little heavy for that top part of the tree. When I say heavy, I mean too thick. So let's get rid of that. If we zoom out and look at the entire tree as one whole composition, you can see the trunk line the whole way from the base right up to here. If I leave this, I'm not getting the taper I want because I still want it to go and have one of these branches then become the leader. I'm not going to go too crazy on it, but I am going to cut it here like that. And even then, you know what? Put one of these in the future, one of these side branches, I think this one back here would be nice. Any one of them would work really. And if you look close, what if I took it even further down and this became the leader? Because I don't like how straight this section still is and I feel like this will always bother me. If I keep it, I think it's going to be worth making it look sort of bad for a little while so that long term, I'll never have this problem of this very straight part of the trunk. So this is going to be quite drastic, but I think it is appropriate and I'm just going to cut this down to here and then I'm going to take this branch back here and point that up and that will become the leader. By pointing the branch up, all the hormones in this branch, the auxins will be at the top that will tell the tree this is a leader and it will send shoots up that way. And as a final touch, I'm going to remove all the dangling growth and that is just these little bits hanging downward. They're not going to be in the final design. Usually what happens to the hanging growth anyway is it dies off because it doesn't get light underneath the top part. We're just helping the tree by doing this. And I think with that, we went pretty harsh on this juniper today, but I've had junipers like this before and I went a little bit harder than this and they've recovered no problem. And because this tree is on energy positive, I have good confidence that this tree will recover from what we did today. And there you guys have it. On that, I'm going to end off this video right here. If you enjoyed, please be sure to leave a like on this video. It really helps out the channel a lot with the YouTube algorithm. And let me know down in the comments what you thought of this video. Perhaps there's something you would have done differently on this juniper. I'd love to hear it and I'm always open to new and different ideas in bonsai. If you would like to support me in the things that I do on this channel, hit the thanks button down below. Or if you'd like to become a channel member, hit the join button. That way you will get early access to new videos before they go out to everyone else and you will get access to membership posts. But on that, thank you so very much for watching.