Its been over a month since I started the peter pepper test run on the laughing buddha statue, so I think its about time to take a look at how it's doing and start the root lengthening and lignification process in earnest.
As you can see above, I've cut the top part of my plastic bag wrapping off the pepper. I then used a combination of a spray bottle and a watering can to wash the soil away while leaving the roots in place.
We've got some nice root work going on already, and its wrapping all the way around quite nicely. Had it not looked this good, I would have covered it back up, but I think we're okay to leave it exposed now.
Exposing this top inch or so of the roots will cause 3 major effects that we want. One, it will make the roots lignify (or become woody), and become thicker. Two, it will air prune the smaller, weaker roots for us. Only the largest roots that have good contact with the soil underneath will survive, as the plant cuts off the smaller roots that aren't going anywhere for us. Now, if later I see that we still have too many roots, I can still prune the unwanted ones away, but letting nature do much of the work for us means less work for me, and a healthier plant. And third, it will promote the pepper to put out deeper roots. The plant will "know" that the top roots are now exposed, so it will try to grow down deeper to compensate. This is a process we started last month with the bag and trying not to top water into the bag unless we had to, to encourage the pepper to grow down looking for water, but this will really accelerate the process.
As a reminder, here it was at the end of November just before I wrapped him:
You might notice in the current pictures, there are roots growing over his right shoulder that were not there when I positioned him, which is a good sign.
I'll leave him like this for another month or so, and then repeat the process. By summer we should have something very interesting to show off!
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