A big airlayer that (almost) worked

A year ago I decided to deal with the ugly roots and an obvious graft line on a large maple.

So after considering it for a few years I decided to airlayer it above the graft line. As often is the case, Carrie and I did it together.

I have been pretty successful with airlayers, as in all live, but some don't get 360 roots, but I have never done one on a trunk over two inches. One of the problems of doing it at the same time from both sides is that sometimes the lines don't meet.

A year later we decided to look inside the big pot and see what we got.

Well, what we got was wonderful roots

But only on one side. Turns out it is important to rotate your airlayers, even if the tree is over 50 pounds and is hard to deal with.

After some wrestling with separating this thing without cutting the roots off I came up with the idea of wrapping the roots in a t-shirt and sawing through the stump. It took some time.

I was pretty sure there were enough roots there for the tree to survive. I recut the side with no roots and added more rooting hormone with the hope of better luck next year. I guess I don't need to rotate it anymore :)

The tree seems to be doing well a month later. I hope it growth new roots this year.

Progress on a large Virginia Pine

This pine was collected in February 2013 and potted up with Russell Baggett in a box that he built for me. I think it was about 3 feet by 13 inches by 10 inches. The tree was growing on top of a crack on a rock and was really easy to lift out, but came with a long rootball.

The top two pictures are from August 2013 and March 2014. It spent about a year and a half in the box growing undisturbed with minimal pruning until...

The big bend!

In August 2014, Juan Andrade stopped by and we bent the pine in the section that was almost 2 inches thick. It took some preparation and I had a acquire a few tools, like the large jack, stainless wire, a steel rod. My band saw came in handy to cut a notch in the 2x4.

This is what it looked like before we started cranking.

After about a 30 degree bend the copper wire we were pulling with (#10) broke!

So we switched to stainless steel wire, but we did not want to take any more chances and use 10 loops of it. An overkill for sure.

At the end it was about a 90 degree bend. We stopped every few cranks on the jack and checked that the rig was ok and gave the tree a chance to adjust.

And then we pruned it. A lot.

I took the wire and the plastic rope off in September 2015, a year after we bent the trunk. I put a screw into the trunk and tied the top to the screw with stainless steel wire so that when I cut the pulling wires the tree did not spring back.

Then at the end of February 2016 my friend Carrie and I repotted the pine into a smaller (20x14x6) box. We worked just one side of the rootball and removed a big root. My plan is to start grafting it next year and repot again in two years working the other side of the root ball.
After then I can start working on the upper part of the tree. This is a long term project, but with collected material they are all long term.

PS. right after posting this story I got a Facebook reminder of the picture I posted on FB three years ago - and it this pine.