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.