Yamadori Miyamoto 2
24. April 2019
Air Pruning – When the pot prunes the roots
15. August 2023
One year of air pruning – a first result
On this side, most roots grew along the pot wall because there was a large root nearby. Nevertheless, all root tips stopped growing in length and ramified.
This field maple was in a Tie Pot for over a year.
Time to examine the roots!
In a normal pot I would expect a Acer campinus to grow circling roots of up to one meter length.
The roots trace the structures in the pot according to plan. They do what they should ...
Here you can see how all the roots have been influenced - no circling roots!
Here in this case the air pruning worked without exeption: every single root grew to a hole – as hoped. So due to the contact with the dry air outside the pot, the root stopped growing in length.
- I loosened up the root ball and was perfectly happy with the result: a dense, fine branched root ball. Not even one root had grown excessively long.
- So I trimmed the roots a little and put the tree back in the pot with a little fresh substrate. The amount of lost roots was minimal – in this case this is perfect because the tree is supposed to continue growing quickly. I did not want it to loose speed due to the disturbance oft he roots.
I surely could have planted the tree in a much smaller pot at this point without weakening the tree.
Here I start loosening up the root ball.
This is the root ball loosened up: dense and fine branched. Nothing is cut here yet.
And here again the dense root ball after one year in the Tie Pot - still nothing cut off!
May 5th 2019