Finally, Something Happens

Weather forecast for today was fairly cool (relatively speaking), mostly cloudy, and 0% chance of rain.  Perfect weather to work on some bonchi.

As you can see, the peppers are finally starting to really take off.  The ones not sitting on a skull are still doing better, but the little guy is starting to catch up.  Too bad about what we're about to do to it...

(I'm baaaaack!)                                                   

After trimming some lower branches to expose the trunk, I dug it up to work on the roots.  I'll have to admit, I had hoped to have more to work with at this point, but there's enough.

Hard to hold everything in place and still take pictures.

Pressed some roots into the eye sockets so that they'd help hold it in place later on, pushed some into the sides of the open mouth, and all around spread things out.  Its kind of hard to see in the photos, but the main central root was curling nicely around the nose bone.

Got everything replanted, and you can clearly see the bends that the tie ropes caused in the trunk.  Didn't come out quite the way I had hoped they would, but we'll see how it ends up looking later on.

Next up, the Buddha Bonchi.  As you can see it's canopy has started filling out nicely, and the branches have lignified, so they should hold their shape after I take the stakes away...

And they do!  Perfect!

The main roots are nice, thick, and gripping the statue tightly.  Pulling on the trunk gets very little movement, so time to do some work on it.

This really illustrates the difference that the pull down makes on the nature of the roots.  The roots I exposed earlier are thick and woody, but even after all this time the roots that have been down in the soil are small and thin.  You can pretty clearly see where the soil line was just by the sudden transition in the root structure.

On a side note, I'm holding only the statue here, the pepper is gripping tightly enough to hold itself in place.  Thats excellent news.

Now, the next thing I did I didn't get pictures of, because it required both hands to do.  The roots you can see dangling beneath the statue in the previous picture?  I gathered them up and gentle twisted them under the base of the statue.  This pulled them all around under the bottom into a nice partial ball.

The reason for this is further insurance that the pepper keeps it's grip on the statue and can't be pulled off later.

After that had been done, I put it back in the pot, put some more soil in, and pressed firmly around the base in a diagonal direction, down and towards the center.  You can see the small trough this made around the base of the statue, this was again to press the roots up under the statue.  Then I put some more soil in to level everything out.

Once I've let it recover for about a week, I'll take a squirt bottle and knock the rest of the soil off the roots and start the last phase of pulldown on this one.  I'll pull it down to the base of the statue at the very least, and I may actually end up pulling it down even further by setting some spacers under the statue.  The reason for this would be to get the roots to fatten up under the statue to completely lock it in.  We'll see if thats needed in the following weeks.

And making it's transition into Bonchi-in-Progress is the *ONE* Cumari do Para pepper I got to germinate.  Must have tried a dozen seeds, only one ever came up.  Pretty unforgiving odds with these things, but everybody says they're great little semi-wild peppers, so I'm giving them a shot.

Putting it on the skull made of skulls I got in New Orleans earlier this year because I don't really have anything else to put them on at the moment.

Slow Going

Its still slow and steady over here in bonchi land.

The one on the left in this picture is the one the skull is buried under, so of course its now the runt of the pack.

As you can see, I have it tied back and to the right with one of the tent pegs I first used on the Laughing Buddha bonchi.  Its a little hard to make out in this, but it is leaning over and then growing back up straight quite nicely, given it's small size.

If you recall, this pepper is sitting on top of the left eye socket (which would be on the right in this picture since it would be facing us if it weren't underground), so this bend would be pulling it further to the skull's left out away from center, and towards the back of it's head.  The next pull when it gets taller will be further back and to the left, to create a bit of a spiral to wreath the skull with.

As a comparison, here is one pepper right next to it, growing much taller.  Not sure exactly why that two peppers right next to each other would be having this noticeable of a growth difference, but considering all three of the non-skull peppers are doing better, I can only assume that it has something to do with the skull.  First thought would be that the skull pepper can't grow it's roots straight down, so it has a harder time getting away from the dryer surface layer, and hence not growing as quickly.

I'm not overly eager to try and water that end more than the others, because ideally the "its not getting as much water as the others" is exactly what we want.  It means that once the roots do fully grow out, they will keep trying to go deeper to get to the water, and will encircle the skull better.

I could dig it up and see for myself how the roots are going, work on repositioning things, but I'm trying not to right now because messing with any of them now would cause them to be delayed.  Once its bigger, I'll take a peek at how the roots are going just in case something needs moving around, but for now I'm just letting it do it's own thing.

Did give it a bit of extra fertilizer though, just in case.

Speaking (earlier) of the Laughing Buddha bonchi, here it is.  It has several pods on it, and I've decided to let them ripen.  That will dramatically slow the growth of new leaves and branches above ground as it diverts all of it's energy into fruit production, but the increased demands on the roots will really help things along.  As evidenced by this:

Those roots are getting nice and fat, exactly the way I wanted them to.