I have the pleasure of attending a monthly workshop given by John Boyce and hosted by various members of the club. Since the departure of Ben Petrasanta, who generously provided space at DDCC for our meetings we have spent the spring and summer going from one house to another each month. This month our meeting happened in the back yard of Joe Dellea.

John, Ron Weaver, Joe and I started by examining the recently completed firing of pinch pots from our July meeting. Discussion and review of what we have been up to seems to help us all stay on level footing for future endeavors. In August John helped me wire a Yatsabusa willow that I had won a few months earlier in the club raffle. I had a discussion with him about how it had started to grow so quickly after I placed it in a tray of water that it almost looked, three weeks later, as if we had never cut anything off.

I brought a few small trees to work on including three pine trees that I started from seed in the spring of ‘05. They have reached sufficient size to be wired for the first time…indeed if I wait past this fall I will lose my opportunity to wire them at all. I started, though, with a maple that I have had for a couple years. I dug it from the ground a while ago and John and I had cut back and thinned out the top at the beginning of summer. After years of training maples, I still feel that I have a lot to learn about these trees. Whenever I try to wire them I find a few weeks later that the wire is cutting in; whenever I cut them back I find a couple months later that they have put out so many buds that I am in danger of getting knobs on the trunk. We trimmed the extra buds and branches, thinned the top again and put the tree aside. I thinned two other maples before I moved on to the pines which I wired and shaped so that when the trunks are half an inch thick (or three inches) that there will be movement.

Ron continued wiring an Alberta Spruce, which he had started last month. Spreading the branches on this particular tree is a priority since they don’t respond well to thinning and this tree had a full crown of foliage at the top, with no lower branches. He also removed some old wire from a recently purchased coast live oak.
Joe worked on various trees to start, removing browning leaves from Japanese beech and treating moss at the base of a few trees with vinegar to kill it. I had a great time examining Joe’s trees, from a tiny cascade corkbark pine to a large grove of JBP that he and John did a little cleanup on. Thanks to all for a great workshop, Joe especially for cooking up some chili to ward off the chilly weather.

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