As those who have been following the blog know (is anybody following this thing in real time?), I am currently growing four Carolina Reaper pepper plants. One of them I have been shaping and trimming and growing over the skull in an attempt to make an impressive bonchi out of it. I'll show the update on that one first.
Last entry I showed where I had dug the whole thing up and re-positioned the roots to spread them out better, and it stayed droopy for quite a while afterwards. I may have caused it more trauma then I really meant to, because it took this long for it to recover. But, its doing fine now, so I went ahead and started the first phase of an in-ground pull-down.
As we saw with the Laughing Buddha Peter Pepper last time, these roots do not like to grow large on their own. If left to itself, a pepper plant will just put out mass amounts of thin feeder roots, which is great for the pepper, not so great for our bonchi. The Laughing Buddha is in it's second summer now, and you saw how thin the roots at the bottom still were.
So, I gently scooped some soil away, and used a cup to pour water from the rain barrel over the roots to wash the soil away from the crown of the skull. For those that rememeber how this started on the Buddha, here we go again, but for real this time!
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And remember I mentioned the other three Reapers? The ones I've been letting grow however they want, mostly for pod production but also as emergency backups for the guy above? All three are now much larger than this one as I haven't been messing with them, and two of them have the pretty standard trunks you'd expect to see on a pepper.
The third one though? I found this today.
Lets look a little closer at that.
Its a little hard to tell from the pictures, but left entirely on it's own with no coaxing or training, and it has tied itself practically into a perfect knot and started producing some large surface roots.
Just good old Mother Nature going "Uh huh, I see what you're trying to do. Now let me show you how a pro does it." I concede defeat, Mother Nature, you made a much more interesting trunk than I did without even trying!
Am I disappointed? Hell no, I'm thrilled! Just look at that thing, it tied itself into a knot! Just because it isn't growing over a skull
right now doesn't mean it won't make a great bonchi at the end of the season! And if something happens to the skull one, its great to know I've got such an amazing backup just waiting in the wings.
Just goes to show you, no matter how hard you work at making something, sometimes the best answer is to just sit back and keep your hands to yourself. Life will find a way... to show you up every damned time. :D
