I decided to try my hand at a forest since I had about 35 elm seedlings and didn't want 35 pots of elms. I put about 20 in a large shallow training pot and let them grow last year.
Now I am looking at it thinking I will need some root pruning, etc., in the spring. How do you root prune a forest? It seems not right try to separate all the root balls and then try to put them back together. Just trim around the edges, treating it as one large root ball? That means the outer trees get lots of trimming and the inner ones get overly compact roots.
A couple of them have died, so I need to do something about them. Just pull them out?
I may want to do some rearranging of trunks. Would it make sense to make a few clumps of trees and move them around. Would that make sense?