it starts by doing the seedling cutting technique so there's no long initial growth of the stem. instead of elongating off it's first tap root(s), the needles have to make new roots after you cut the stem off. that's why i cut close to the first needles. out of these needles you get the adventitious buds.
these low shoots are really sacrifice branches, too. just as these shoots came from adventitious needle buds on the main trunk, the final branches will be selected from adventitious buds closer to the base of these low shoots; though probably more like the adventitious buds of those buds. in the first zoomed in shot you can see some small needle buds coming out. these are what we cut back to to compact the size of the tree. really healthy shoots will back bud on jbp, so i didn't want to prune too much at this stage of growing out. ill probably decandle a few shoots that i want to slow down, but i don't really need bifurcation of these shoots at the tips for more ramification at this stage because these shoots are still just sacrifice branches. see what i mean 🙂
