You can remove the second leader now. You can plant it whenever you want to

whats your hurry.. think in tree time ...

i do no pruning for the first year or two.. except for broken stuff ...

more leaves.. means more food production.. means more root growth for faster establishment ... removing half or a third of the leaves would not be high on my list ...

you might want to protect it from winter wind.. the first winter ...

ken

I was just thinking that pruning the second leader might make less competition and therefore transfer more "growth energy" to the other, but maybe that's not how trees work. I don't want to stress the plant any more than I have to, so I guess I'll wait until next year. It looks like it has already been pruned a bit.

Can you post a photo? I would say that it is a very unusual occurrence to need to remove a second leader from any Hinoki. I've grown and planted scores of them and have not ever seen this before........

Both leaders were taped to the stake when I picked it up. I removed the tape and tied the straight one, letting the other one droop. It's still vertical at its base, though. I was wrong about where the fork occurs. It's actually less than half way up from bottom. I suspect they were taped together for quite some time.

Ken's correct for a small plant with not much foliage but it has a lot of food makers. I would trim it off now. Like you said, there's no use in expending all that energy into a branch that your just going to cut off when it could be put to good use elsewhere. =)

Keep the one on the left, that forms a straight line with the rest of the trunk below and snip off the elbow-like one.

Mike...Thanks, Embo.