3-trunks fused ficus wiring

Trunk fusion I performed almost 5 months ago was certainly a success. Steel wires I used are now totally hidden under the bark, fused trunk has perfectly cylindrical shape and seams between original trunks have almost vanished. Scars from wires are still there, as well as their cut ends, which now serve as some kind of thorns. But I believe it's just a matter of time until they disappear. Also, several branches have grown in various places.

I added new wire bonds as it grew taller approximately every month and cut the tallest trees to let the lagging one to catch up. Maybe they way I did bonds or alignment of lighting in the greenhouse made the plant to grow in a very curved manner.

In this case that's not what I wanted. My plan for this specimen is to grow straight and tall. I tried realigning it relative to light, but this just added curvature in opposite direction. So I had to wire it while it's not too late. I have 1mm aluminum wire in thick rubber coating. When I wound it around trunk, it didn't held shape. So I made a few holes in the pot and used more wire to stretch the tree in opposite directions of one plane, attaching it on different height. Some curvature stayed, but now it looks not that morbid:

I also strapped new lower branches to main trunk with this thick wire. Binding is less tight than I did previously, but it's temporary anyway and branches are too thin so far. Now I'm going to leave it like this for several months until it's time to repot.

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.

Ficus trunk fusion

It's time to try some trunk fusion on my Ficus Religiosa seedlings. Currently I have 7 larger 4-month old plants I grew from seeds since last November, and they're looking ready for some training. The tallest plant in 20cm from ground to top leaf node and the thickest trunk is 9mm at just above ground level.

I choose 3 largest ones to work with this time:

First, I mixed some soil. It's my first time soil mixing, so I can't certify it's the best proportions, but I took 45% akadama, 25% pumice, 25% compost mix (it's actually kind of premixed soil, but I believe it contains mostly compost) and 5% sphagnum (because why not, a have a bag of it and some people say it's arguably the best organic soil).

I sieved and washed akadama, it had a lot of fine particles and dust because it's pretty fragile and breaks apart from slightest impact, and surely during transportation.

I din't sieve pumice because it looks much stronger. I washed it though, and there were a lot of dust.

I din't wash compost, because fine particles are basically half of it anyway. That's how the final mix looked like:

Now back to seedlings. They looked somewhat pot bound and deserved repotting anyway. I was not going to root prune them this time, but I had to remove soil out of roots, so some finer roots were lost during this operation.

Combed

After washing

I kept roots in water while working with other plants to make sure they don't dry out:

After stripping roots and removing some bottom leaves, I found optimal way to connect 3 plants and cut all leaves that were looking inside. Then I used 0.5mm steel paper-covered wire to connect first two trunks:

And then added third one. I used pliers for twisting to make sure trunks are connected tight enough.

Then I connected them higher

And higher. At the top I didn't twist too much because trunks were gentle up there.

After binding, I planted the result in a larger pot an cut some of top leaves making sure I don't discriminate any one of plants:

Four days later, a few leaves died out, but the rest look good and new leaves are growing on top, red in color by some reason:

 The color may be due to lack of nutrients, or just a normal thing under plenty of light (last few days were very sunny). Wired connections also look fine:

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