Small curly black pine

I didn’t want to wait for September with pruning, beacause I hope to see new buds in August/September, maybe they will be ready to become actual branches next year spring. So I cut all buds but the very small branches at the back. Also the middle leading shoot I didn’t touch. Since I’m on a mission to understand the budding behaviour I additionally removed some old needles, where buds aren’t as useful for the “design”. Maybe this can also contribute to budding behaviour of pines

The plant grows nice and I think it could be good to cut the ends a bit, while I want to keep the odd middle branch either as a sacrifical branch or maybe use it in a bigger tree. A sacrifical branch is a branch to grow the stem thicker and cut it of when it has done its work. Older cuts at the ends seemed to work good: The upper left hand branch has forkes into two and the right hand that is a bit to near the stem loop is forking into three branches. But sadly this project wasn’t existing at that time so I was lazy and forgot to document it.