Juniperus Squamata Meyeri pt 5

The proof of the pudding, is in the budding. Or something.....

While you ponder the intricacies of regional English parlance and why similarly spelled words don't rhyme in the South, but do in the North, do you remember the Squamata here?

http://dj-bonsai.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/juniperus-squamata-meyeri-pt3.html

I spent a very long time stripping back old needles to allow light to growth from 2 years back, to allow any dormant buds to pop. Of course, they'd need a little persuasion on the way, but evidence of this working is now abundant.

As spring allows new extensions to push out, they push lime green buds which extend into new shoots. In many/most cases these are one strong central shoot, and two smaller side shoots, in a trident shape. Once the central strong shoot starts to push out and you can see the first couple of needles start to open, pinch it back to activate the two smaller buds either side and create bifurcated growth

The shoot on my finger tip here has a strong central shoot 2 weaker buds, one each side, waiting for a bit more energy to go into ballistic activation mode. It also has two buds at the base of the shoot right on my finger tip, so this is a perfect time to just pop that central bud out.
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The added bonus of this is that it could also activate dormant or weaker buds back in the areas we stripped last year - and below are a few examples to see for yourself where this has happened.

In the following pic you can see where I cut back the old needle growth earlier this year, then pinched the terminal bud a few weeks ago, resulting in 2 new extensions back down the branch. 

There are actually 8 separate back buds on stripped areas on the four branches here - can you see them all?

The trick is to keep an eye on this tree every few days and keep rotating the it for maximum sun exposure. Look out for areas of strong growth and take out those shoots which are pushing too strongly for the weaker buds to activate. Once they are just opening out, pop them off and watch the others extend. 

A good note to make here is that some areas will back bud like crazy and others will look less vigorous. Leave the weaker sections to grow out to gain vigour, don't be tempted to pop the main bud off if there's nothing lower down to activate or if that branch is generally quite weak, you'll potentially weaken it further and kill off the whole branch. 

Thanks for reading