I thought I heard that the best time to prune Dawn Redwoods was late winter/early spring. Is this true? I couldn’t find anything in the in the library about work this time of year.
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My notes (possibly from a stream on 6/8/21) say post harden prune late spring to early summer when it’s in an energy positive. End of July at max, but end of June is the best. And don’t prune late fall to spring. Trunk chop in spring before push (from 7/22/20 ministream).
Post harden flush was my understanding.
With a trunk chop as the buds swell in the spring (same signal as time to report).
Question: Would a less optimal option be late summer heading into fall for a trunk chop? Obviously depending on your climate but at the point where you allow anything the pushes to harden off and then you can grab the gains from the fall vascular growth?
A hard trunk chop is best when the tree is in a peak energy positive state. Keep in mind a maple will bleed in the early spring, so after spring harden is better.
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spring prior to bud push- tree is at maximum capacity of energy storage. Massive push for new buds/new leader, but less for chop site healing.
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after 1st spring growth when 2nd push is starting, energy positive state, less of a push but more available energy to heal immediately. A bigger cut is better here.
In a late summer chop you’re taking resources away from the ramp up to fall. You’re taking away some of the trees solar panels that it won’t replace, and it needs for the best energy push into the vascular growth. Less sugars mean less cold tolerance, less spring energy. You also don’t want to possibly trigger new growth right before it gets ready to shut down. New growth wouldn’t have time to harden off and might die off.
I get all that… but if you think of “bud swell” as the peak energy positive state. The stored sugar starch is all loaded and ready to make new solar panels.
So based on that premise a trunk chop at this state would reduce the to trees “stored energy” let’s say by half before it’s able to get any return on the investment on those stored resources? How do we square that circle?
If you do the chop before bud break isn’t the stored energy in the roots? Prior to its northern trip up the vascular system and to the tips of branches or the top of the tree?
Not in deciduous trees or repotting at this time would literally be the most dangerous time to follow that premise.
My understanding is that it is species dependant. For example in a Pine I think this is accurate (energy stored in roots) but they also are not gambling all the resources in the sam fashion as high water mobility species. With the ability to move much less water they always keep some resources at work with every green needle mass.
Elongating species I believe the storage is in the vascular system. To continue the analogy . They are always putting some resources to work but with the ability to move more water they can bank X amount of excess resources into the vascular after new tissue (highways) are built.
Deciduous conifers with the ability to move water more than a pine but not like a Maple are an amalgamation of them all. They are storing excess resources in the vascular system it’s why we treat them like an elongating species when we prune but like confier when repotting from a root perspective…allowing for nuances we can also treat them like a deciduous trees at repotting time.
Long winded but no it is not stored in the vascular system based on the above understanding. If I wrong or missing/ misunderstanding something please let me know so I can get it correct and apply it!
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Thanks for all the comments. I was not referring to a trunk chop. This is a mature Dawn Redwood purchased from Carl Young in California about 35+ years ago. It has a beautiful 5" nebari and I have been dev.eloping the branching for many years. I thought I heard Ryan say that you could cut back almost anywhere on a branch before bud break in Spring and get new growth. I guess I confused it with something else, maybe regular Redwoods. Oh well, Thanks for all the input.
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No he does say that is the best time to prune and I know I don’t know a fraction of what he has even forgotten. I will also be pruning 2 dawn redwoods I have post flush but that’s only because I am repotting them or else I would be following Ryan’s advice and doing it at bud swell.
I am assuming the nuance here comes down to a “theory of tradeoffs” not a single timing decision. I was responding because I am still learning and was hoping if I was wrong someone would correct me, thanks and good luck with your dawn redwood!
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Actually there are quite a few videos in the library about Dawn Redwood. Sometimes you can’t stop viewing for a minute because that may be the minute when pruning timing is mentioned. I also struggle to find specific pertinent information within a 2 hour video. I have noticed tho that a lot of the specie specific info is presented within the first 30 minutes or so, but there are still good nuggets of info dropped throughout the rest of the video. I’ve heard that pruning procedures for a Bald Cypess can be used for Dawn Redwood as well and there are several Bald Cypress videos in the library.
Why I watch via the library most of the time. I can stop, take notes, rewind to confirm, etc. Plus it is easier to review 2 - 10 pages of notes in a composition book for a stream than the stream. I have notes on 292 streams on 900 pages of composition books with an Excel file listing the stream title, date, location in the books, and sometimes a note or two.
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Impressive compilation of notes!
Wow Marty, that’s dedication and also a smart way to catalog the library information. I do something similar but on a smaller scale. I list the species in alphabetical order in my Apple Notes and then the videos relevant to the tree or procedure; video title, date and time length. One advantage is that the files are searchable. I’ve read on here of others doing something similar. Would be great if you could publish your library index. It would be a lot of work since it’s handwritten notes but I would pay for something like that. Maybe it’s something Mirai could do in the future and offer to subscribers. I remember some periodical magazines used to do this, like National Geographic, and offer it to subscribers on an annual basis.
Thanks @topaz1850. It would be fairly easy to publish the index - I would just need to convert the Excel file to jpg. It would add some additional information to the Mirai indexing, but not much. Where it would be really useful is if I transcribed my notes into Word or another searchable format. A task that is beyond my current level of interest even though I would find it useful.
I know Marty, it would be a Herculean task. It’s a great concept tho and you may inspire someone else to do something similar.
You can convert handwriting to text using online OCR apps or OCR mobile applications . These OCR software can recognize the text in the handwritten notes and convert them into editable/searchable digital text format. Some examples include Nanonets, OneNote, OfficeLens, CamScanner.
The most likely one you already have is Google which has a few tools that can turn handwriting into text, and chances are you’ve already got them.
The first is Google Drive. Open the app on your phone, hit the + icon in the bottom corner, and select (Scan). The PDFs it saves aren’t editable in Drive itself, but they are searchable. If you’ve got handwritten notes that you just need to index, this is the ideal solution. 
But when you do need to turn handwritten notes into editable text as well, a combination of Drive with Google Docs is what you need.
First up, scan your note to create a PDF doc, as before. Then jump over to your desktop and open Google Drive.
Locate the scanned file, right-click, and select Open with > Google Docs.
This opens the PDF as a text file in Docs, and you can edit, or copy and paste the text into another document. It also automatically saves the editable version into Drive.
Now you have some options -I would be happy to convert them for you since you did 99.9% of the heavy lifting. Marty you should have my email but for ease (jcamillo9@gmail.com). Either way now you have options!
