Spring is typically a season for letting bonsai grow freely. For black pines, some of the main tasks include fertilizing and removing young pine cones.
Tea bag with cottonseed meal fertilizer
Removing young pine cones
Spring is also a good time for catching up on needle plucking and cutback.
I generally don’t recommend working on pines after the new shoots start elongating as it’s easy to damage tender foliage. The alternative is to wait until decandling time.
For the black pine below, I thought the foliage was fairly dense and that the tree would benefit from additional light in the tree’s interior. Here’s the tree before cutback and needle plucking.
Black pine – 16″ tall
And here’s the tree after this work.
After cutback and needle pulling
The tree goes right back into the sun and will receive lots of fertilizer between now and decandling at the end of May.
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