There are many commonly known and understood guidelines I’m struggling with right now. I’ve been hitting the archives hard in preparation for spring bonsai activities.
If you style a tree, you need to wait at least a year before repotting. Obvious. Makes perfect sense. Give the tree a break, ya know? It needs to rebuild its foliage and strength to be able to recover from root work. But I feel in this case “styling” is assumed to mean significant branch and foliage reduction, bends, cuts, etc. But what about other degrees of “styling”?
I’ll be specific to my situation:
Yamadori Englemann Spruce. Collected by Randy Knight prob 4 years ago at this point, purchased from Jim Doyle at Natures Way Spring 2018. Styled with Todd Schlafer September 2018. We did NOT remove any branching or foliage. No rebar or raffia bends. Just wired and shaped. Plenty of buds were formed and set over the summer. Had a nice long fall here in NE Ohio so it still had time to be fed and store energy after styling.
So is it reasonably safe to ignore the conventional wisdom and do a gentle repot into a bonsai container Spring 2019 or do I need to keep my hands off till Spring 2020?
I know patience and tree health are top concerns in bonsai, but even with the depth of education provided by Mirai, there’s still so much nuance and “grey area”
Thoughts?
I had another point of confusion on spruce work from the Spring Fundamantals stream but I can’t remember what it was at the moment.