Ficus trunk fusion

It's time to try some trunk fusion on my Ficus Religiosa seedlings. Currently I have 7 larger 4-month old plants I grew from seeds since last November, and they're looking ready for some training. The tallest plant in 20cm from ground to top leaf node and the thickest trunk is 9mm at just above ground level.

I choose 3 largest ones to work with this time:

First, I mixed some soil. It's my first time soil mixing, so I can't certify it's the best proportions, but I took 45% akadama, 25% pumice, 25% compost mix (it's actually kind of premixed soil, but I believe it contains mostly compost) and 5% sphagnum (because why not, a have a bag of it and some people say it's arguably the best organic soil).

I sieved and washed akadama, it had a lot of fine particles and dust because it's pretty fragile and breaks apart from slightest impact, and surely during transportation.

I din't sieve pumice because it looks much stronger. I washed it though, and there were a lot of dust.

I din't wash compost, because fine particles are basically half of it anyway. That's how the final mix looked like:

Now back to seedlings. They looked somewhat pot bound and deserved repotting anyway. I was not going to root prune them this time, but I had to remove soil out of roots, so some finer roots were lost during this operation.

Combed

After washing

I kept roots in water while working with other plants to make sure they don't dry out:

After stripping roots and removing some bottom leaves, I found optimal way to connect 3 plants and cut all leaves that were looking inside. Then I used 0.5mm steel paper-covered wire to connect first two trunks:

And then added third one. I used pliers for twisting to make sure trunks are connected tight enough.

Then I connected them higher

And higher. At the top I didn't twist too much because trunks were gentle up there.

After binding, I planted the result in a larger pot an cut some of top leaves making sure I don't discriminate any one of plants:

Four days later, a few leaves died out, but the rest look good and new leaves are growing on top, red in color by some reason:

 The color may be due to lack of nutrients, or just a normal thing under plenty of light (last few days were very sunny). Wired connections also look fine:

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