Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio...
Dug out our skull from it's storage spot since last time we saw him.
...he was an asshole and I'm glad he's dead.
Out in the raised bed, dug a nice hole big enough for the skull and just deep enough for the top of the skull to be just below the soil line.
Now this is where it gets more important what we're doing. Here I've taken the biggest and strongest looking of the Reapers (sadly, it was not the zombie reaper, but it was one of my final 4), removed most of the soil, and found the main root. Now while peppers don't have an actual taproot, they do have a main root which was the first to grow after the seed germinated. The plant is going to try and grow it's roots in the direction that that root is going, so its important to find it and get it positioned where you want it to go, and the rest of the roots should more or less follow.
Here I've gotten the pepper and the roots laid out where I want them. You can see I've gone for a location over the skull's left eye socket. I decided I wanted this to be asymmetrical to keep it from looking too artificial. Also pulled a good bit of roots out over the back of the skull as well, hopefully they will all fatten up enough to where it will get a good grip on it.
And here's where I did something a little bit stupid. After I got everything in place I was pressing the soil down to compact it enough to hold everything in place where I wanted it, and I heard a crunching sound. Pretty certain the glue on the hinge of that damned jaw broke again. I would say that thing is fragile as glass, but that would be an insult to the glass. Oh well, I'm not digging the whole thing up now. Whatever condition its in when I dig it up later is the condition its going to be in for the bonchi.
And there we go, the raised bed now has the four best Reapers in it (along with a boarder of transylvanian garlic), and is being watched over by my disgruntled lawn gnome. The one with the skull is on the far right, opposite end of the gnome, as that spot gets the most sun.
Oh, and if anyone is wondering, the reason I don't trim those clovers and things that are growing tall around the raised bed right now is because I also keep bees. The bees love those flowers, so I'm letting them have 'em until the flowers fade. When there's no more flowers to feed the bees with, then I'll cut it all down and toss it in my composter.
----
And while we're at it, updates on the other practice projects.
The Laughing Buddha Peter Pepper is doing well. Its putting out lots of nice new growth, which I'm probably going to not wire again but tie down to get more of a canopy going. Also likely going to move him back into a large container for the season to really let it go wild growing. Only way to thicken those roots and trunk up to the max is to let the top grow as big as possible, so thats what we're going to do.
The oddball Halloween pepper continues to exhibit odd growth patterns. Its putting out a cluster of leaves, but only from one side. If nothing else, this should make an interesting bonchi simply because of how strange its growing.
Speaking of the Halloween peppers, here's the one I planted on the small skull. Washed the dirt off the roots, and look at that main root. Just like I mentioned before, they'll all tend to have one root that is bigger and beefier than the others, which was the first root the seed grew. If you look closely, you can see its got an interesting bendy shape due to it growing over the skull.
Some repositioning of roots, and making sure that nice big main root goes in an interesting place, and we're starting to look pretty good here. I also balled the roots up a bit under the bottom of the skull to try and encourage them to stay there and fully enclose the skull to make it impossible to remove short of cutting it out.
After that, replanted everything. You can see on the left where the top of the roots are still showing, then on the right where I just barely covered them (and pulled off a few low leaves to give it a little air at the trunk).
This is the one that I didn't do anything to other than let it grow. As you can see, it has pods set already. The mini skull one I went back and pruned off the wilting flowers (which most likely set fruit), but this one I will let go. Why? Because producing fruit requires a large investment of energy on the plant's part. While its true that it also uses a lot of water and nutrients, which encourages root growth, overall it slows the plant down. The skull pepper I want to put out as much vegetative growth (aka, leaves) as possible to build up the trunk, which in turn will cause thicker roots. This one though, I'm letting it grow however it wants. Later on I'll compare how it's roots came out to the others and see what we've got to work with.
Multiple plants, being treated in multiple different fashions. Thats how you experiment and learn, do a lot of different things and see what works, and what doesn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment