When the fall color is just passing it’s prime, it’s a good time to remove leaves and do a little winter pruning on maples. The leaves tend to come off easily, and it’s a good idea to clean them all off to expose any bugs or eggs that may be hiding out for the winter. Peter Warren suggests the 10 days following leaf fall is a good window to do some maintenance pruning.
It’s a good idea to balance the strength of shoots by removing long and coarse shoots; which will be readily visible when the tree is leafless. Always seal wounds, and prune back to a spot that has buds ready to break next year.
Strong branch:
This one was left long to provide scion for thread-grafting, so it’s a bit exaggerated, but you get the idea? The image below is a subtler example.
I have been studying bonsai since 1994, in an ever-increasing obsessive fashion. In our last 5 years prior to moving from Iowa to Alabama pursuing a career in the foodservice industry, my bonsai collection was limited to a few varieties that could survive brutal winters outside, or winters under dim light in the dank basement of our humble duplex...my wife puts up with a lot. Including the trailer hitch I put on our brown 1983 Chrysler New Yorker to pull a U-Haul full of trees to Nashville for a 3-month stop along the career path that led us to Alabama. 12 years later, we no longer have the New Yorker; and not a single one of those trees remain on my bench, having given the last holdout to a new club member this summer. I prefer collecting native trees and buying the classical species used in Japan, feeding organic, and reading everything I can get my hands on.
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Nice!