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! 

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.

Eucalyptus repotting and trunk fusion

3 months ago I've sown Rainbow Eucalyptus seeds. From 80 germinated seeds, 30 survived first couple weeks. Then they grew up like crazy. In April I moved them to larger nursery pots, and periodically I removed plants that looked too small or otherwise ill to give selected others more living space. Eventually, I ended up with 10 plants in 2 pots:

One pot recently suffered from a local draught and surviving seedlings lost some leaves, but I look at this as a kind of natural selection, I want to have somewhat draught resistant trees.

I started with removing plants from pots, combing and separating roots. They've developed quite dense root system these few months:

These roots grew from drainage holes. Looking very healthy:

My original plan was to trunk fuse all eucalyptuses together, but one seedling really stood out in a good way. Much taller than others, it measured 65cm height and the trunk was 4mm thick, featuring nice layering bark.

Not quite like on ads yet, but getting closer, I think

So I decided to grow this one on its own. I root pruned it, trimmed the stem and put it to a small training pot:

This time I made a soil mix from 50% Akadama, 40% pumice and 10% compost.

From 9 plants left, I chose 3 weakest ant planted them back to a nursery pot. They'll be a backup in case some of fused trunks die. I defoliated and hard trimmed the best 6 seedlings and bound them using wooden stick as a core and paper covered steel wire to twist them together:

I kept them a bit taller than I want them to be, to increase survival chances. I'll trim them more when I'm sure they are alive. Also, I was able to keep a few leaves on some plants, but not on all. When new leaves start growing I may remove old ones to keep equal opportunities for each fused plant.

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.

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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