Pruning Aftercare Advice For Your Bonsai

You are probably going to end up pruning your bonsai a lot over the course of its life, so it is important to know how to actually care for it afterwards.

Luckily you don’t really need to do much, but it is still good go through everything so you can prune your trees with the peace of mind that you are not forgetting anything and keeping them as healthy as possible.

Do Nothing After Pruning Your Tree

In all honesty, you don’t really need to do anything after you prune your tree.

You can just carry on with your normal daily care …although I would pay a little more attention to the tree.

After you remove some foliage you may notice the trees needs may be a little different, it may not use the water up as quickly now, which makes sense, as there is less foliage.

However, if you know how to actually care for you tree, then you don’t really need to do anything. If you understand how to read what your tree is saying, you will understand it doesn’t need as much water and you will wait a little longer to give it more.

Really the secret to good aftercare …is to just know how to care for the tree in the first place.

Apart from a few subtle changes you may notice and adjusting your watering for this, you don’t really need to do much afterwards. The tree will deal with the problem and it will heal its own wounds and start activating new growth.

So long as you just caring for it, it will bounce back in no time.

Look Out For Signs Of New Growth

Really the only thing you need to do after pruning your tree is to just keep an eye out for new growth, which really means you are watching for signs of recovery.

Every time you prune, the tree should react, hopefully positively by pushing out new growth, which you should see within a few weeks.

Even if you are pruning your tree in late winter, you should be doing this a few weeks away from spring, so even here it shouldn’t take long before you see signs of recovery.

You need to pay attention to this every time you prune so that you can get an idea of how your tree reacts. Over time you will get a better understanding of your tree and you will know if it is reacting normally or not to the work you did.

You may notice that if you prune extremely hard, it may react differently to a light pruning and it’s good to spot this so you can make sure your tree is staying healthy or not.      

Clean Up And Large Cuts

Sometime when we prune, we can make big cuts and these can be a little rough around the edges at times. This could be through our tools not being super sharp, or just that we kind of had to hack at an area and take a few bites out of the branch with our pruners.

If you had made big, rough cuts, you should clean these up right away. So maybe this isn’t so much “aftercare” as you are still doing it during your pruning session, but either way it’s important.

Leaving messy cuts doesn’t look great, but it can also cause a problem when it comes to healing. These types of rugged wounds are more likely to die back more, causing the wound and the final scaring to actually be bigger than it needs to be.

The scar is also likely to heal in an uneven fashion too, since the wound is rugged, which again, just doesn’t look great.

You can fix this by using sharp, clean tools and just making the cuts more even. Sometimes just taking a razor blade and going around the edge can be more than enough to tidy things up.

You also do not need to worry about this for small cuts made with scissors. These wounds are small and are going to heal over quickly and easily, so although you want them to still be clean cuts, they are more forgiving.  

(You can read more about – What Is The Difference Between Heavy Pruning And Light Pruning Of Bonsai Trees?)

Why Do You Need To Make Clean Cuts?

Having clean cuts really comes down to healing and scars. The cleaner the wound, the more likely it is to heal over without scaring.

It’s kind of like our own skin. A clean surgical cut will heal a lot nicer than a large nasty rugged wound. 

For a lot of species of bonsai, scars do not look good, so the more we can avoid large ugly scars, the better.

Taking the time to clean up some of the rugged edges really can make a difference to the final look of the scar and reduce it, as well as really help speed up the healing process.

(You can read more about – Frequently Asked Questions About – Pruning Your Bonsai)

Use Cut Paste On Large Wounds

It is also common to use cut paste immediately after making large wounds on your tree. This is going to help seal the wound, which will prevent disease getting in, but more importantly, stop it drying out.

The less a wound dries out, the less it will die back. This really means that by preventing die back, you are stopping the scar getting any bigger than it needs to be.

I personally don’t use this, as the tree can heal its self, but I do believe it has its purpose and can help.

Using cut paste in conjunction with cleaning the wounds up with a razor blade is a lot of work, but it can really make a difference to the final scar on your tree, so if you are trying to minimise these as much as possible then it is worth the time to put effort into these two activities. 

(You can read more about – Healing Wounds On Bonsai Trees)

Conclusion

Hopefully now you can see there is not much after care needed after you prune, especially if it is only a light prune, or you are only making small cuts with scissors.

You really only need to worry about aftercare when you make large wounds and you want to reduce the chances of ugly scars …but even this “aftercare” is very simple and something you only need to do right away.

Once you have cleaned up the wounds and added cut paste, there isn’t much more to do apart from care for the tree like normal and wait for it to recover.   

(You can read more about – How To Prune A Bonsai Tree – A Beginners Guide)