Don't use rubber for trunk fusion

It's been 3 months since I fused 5 ficuses into one, they grew well since then, so it's time to check what's really going on there. This is how it looked today, a lot of leaves:

It's quite hard to see through this mess, so I performed defoliation, leaving 1-2 leaves on tip of each branch. Defoliation is fine for these trees, in nature animals like giraffes do it all the time.

Now the branch structure is clearly visible. Several new branches have grown. I don't want the tree to be any taller or wider at the moment, and some branches are growing in wrong directions. I'm cutting some of them and wiring the others. This is after removing old wire and trimming:

For this project I used rubber bands from bicycle tube to see if they made less damage to trees while still facilitating fusion. Well, it looks like the fusion part is failing:

Stems are bound together no problem, but they are not fusing after 3 months. Compare it with how other ficuses bound with steel wire fused just after 6 weeks! Even correction to number of plants and maybe better genes doesn't explain the difference.

Actually, during my manipulations with the plant, one of rubber bands have snapped so I could see its impact on trees, which was clearly visible dent. So hope for low damage was in vain as well. I decided to replace rubber with steel wires.

Now a bit of wiring and ready to go back to the greenhouse! 

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.