Hi everyone Just signed up again today. We were on the forum years ago when we operated "rise and shine japanese maples" in chilliwack BC. For many years we sold our grafted container grown specimens at Granville island, east van farmers market and the van dussen garden show. We retired in 2008 from the nursery trade. We still garden and enjoy all of our "mother" trees. Most of these specimens were used to take cuttings for all the varieties me sold over 20 years. I continued to pursue and study music and my wife continued with her studies, acquiring her masters degree and became a registered clinical therapist. I did create a youtube channel for my music and I also added a japanese maple playlist. The first video describes some of our varieties in our garden with size, colors, etc. The next two video's show my pruning technique. the original music is composed, performed and recorded by myself in my home studio Enjoy and greetings to you all! Otto Bjornson our personal collection how to prune, part #1 how to prune, part #2
Good evening Otto and welcome back to the forum, I've just watched your videos with the very laid back music that went really well with Japanese maples. I did wonder where you were at the start of video 3, but soon saw the dissectum branches dissappear and there you were. Lol. I do hope you stay around here for a very long time. I can see you are going to be a great asset to the maples forum. D
well thank you very much for the kind words. Video #3 is actually from the security camera of the home owner. They did give me permission to use the video for my youtube video.
I'm glad they did Otto. Lol. It does show well that the early Summer pruning can be quite severe. I always work on around 30% of the tree maximum. Is that your opinion also ?
Generally I do what is required to bring a tree back to its glory. Most trees when pruned regularly require minimal pruning ( 10 -30 % ). But in some cases like the video I posted, I believe I removed over 50% of the foilage. A large part was the inner dead branches that just took over the underside of the tree. It also seems to create perfect habitat for invasive insects that can really do a lot of damage. I always try to retain the overall tree shape regardless of the amount I remove. Unless of course it needs to be scaled back in size. The nice thing is, japanese maples are resilient and rebound back to their glory quite quickly when looked after.
