3 trunks ficus fusion update

6 weeks ago I started to fuse 3 ficus religiosa seedlings. Here is some progression. 

This is how they looked on the fusion day:

This is 3 weeks after fusion

This is now, 3 more weeks later:

Trunks at ground level have practically fused, wire is hardly visible. This is in less than two months!

One trunk is blackened in the bottom by some reason. It doesn't look rotten, just black.

Trees grow vigorously. During this time, they grew from 20cm to 50cm tall. I have to periodically add new wires on the top to keep them connected.

This is full view of the composition, after couple new wires added and some minor defoliation. New leaves grow red first, like the one on top. Later they become green and very large. Since trees were not clones, they look a bit different, have different height and width. I don't think it's a problem, future trimming should equalize them. Currently my plan is to let them grow unrestricted until they reach roof of greenhouse (it's ten more centimeters), then trim top to encourage branch growth. Branches should make trunks even thicker and I can bind them to the main stem as well.

Five ficuses trunk fusion

I grown several specimen of Ficus Religiosa intending to fuse them together from the beginning, and first attempt in trunk fusion is going well so far (I'll update on it later). Now it's time for another one. My plan is to get something resembling these:

The idea is to fuse several trees, let one of them grow straight to make an apex and bend others at different heights to form branches. I measured available plants and made a wire model of today's procedure:

Here are 5 participants, 5 month old Ficus Religiosas, grown from seeds. They were initially sowed in small nursery cell container in December 2016, then in January 2017 I slip potted them to slightly larger containers, and finally in April 2017 slip potted again to a half cut 500ml glasses.

Now it's time for a proper repotting and root maintenance. Slip potting traces were very visible in roots, as kind of layers of root ball density. I pruned the roots removing ones growing downwards and keeping radial structure. Some root balls were relatively modest and easy to clean up:

And some were very messy and large. Especially this one, I spent a lot of time untangling roots and cutting non-radial ones. This plant is 10mm thick just above ground and had even thicker curled roots below. That's what I got after pruning:

Done with roots, I started binding. This time I decided to use rubber bands cut from bike tube instead of steel wire. It's easy to make very tight knots with it and it's supposed to stretch as trunk grows, hopefully not damaging the tree at all. First I bound two trees:

Then added third, the thick one. They actually already look somewhat fused:

I used curly roots of the fatso as additional bonding. Hope that's OK in terms of nebari.

Then I added last two trunks and started to tighten them higher up:

Binding complete:

Another task needed to be accomplished today is wiring. I needed "branches" to grow sideways immediately, because now they are still small and easy to bend and also this way they're going to get more light. That wasn't hard, I used some rubber- and plastic wrapped aluminum wire:

Despite I kept roots moist all the time, the top leaves began to wither by the end of third hour of work. Luckily, it was almost done and after pruning some too large or overlapping leaves I planted the result into a pot. I used a mixture of 50% akadama, 25% compost, 15% pumice and 10% lava rock. Watered generously with root hormone and put to greenhouse.

 Next day it's looking good, withered leaves are stiff again, no visible signs of damage.