Now, I'm not sorry I did those things, because I still think its for the best in the long run, but I got worried that the larger sister plants so close to it may have been shading it out a bit, making it even slower going.
As you can see, the project plant there on the end is much shorter than the backup/production Reapers, and they do shade it out in the late afternoon. More I looked at it, more I questioned it, and long story short I've dug the project pepper up and put it in a container.
Two reasons for this. One, as already stated, I can make sure it gets more sun this way. Two, it also means I could check up on the root and start doing some pulldown on it as well.
Good thing I did too, because there was definitely some issue with the root placement.
The good news is that there is some good shape going on here in the front. You can't tell from this picture (I can't even find it in the picture and I saw it in person) but there was a pronounced bulge on the inside from where I had pressed the roots into an eye socket. What you might be able to tell from this picture though is that almost all of the roots are in the front. Now, we want the roots to be fairly front heavy because thats where the main center of focus for the piece will be, but we still need some in the back to help hold everything in place. That just wasn't there the way I wanted it, so the potting let me catch a defect in plenty of time to correct it (hopefully).
Since the roots were not in just the right places, the plant wasn't able to lock onto the skull completely on it's own yet, so I had to resort to using some twine to tie it down in place. But you can see where I was able to pull some roots back over to the rear of the skull. Was actually pretty happy with the amount of roots it had, if not exactly with the layout of them. With some work though we should have some very interesting placement later on.
You can tell by the leaves here that it was indeed getting crowded out by the plant next to it. Had to tie it back a bit to pull that branch over so that it would fill out a bit better.
Since I had plenty of root length to work with, I've gone ahead and left this as the pulldown soil level. Its a little lower than I had originally intended, but it looks like all the roots are plenty long enough to get good purchase in the soil, so should be fine.
And since I mentioned working on the other projects, here's updates on them as well.
The Cumari on the skull made of skulls. Had a lot of small roots, but not much in the way of anything well defined. Pretty much just spread it all out evenly over the skull and reburied. Much like the main Reaper, the length of the roots were enough that I felt I could safely pull it down fairly far on the first go.
The Halloween pepper on the miniature skull is turning out to be less than I expected. Did a pulldown and had to tie it down to hold in place. This strain of ornamental pepper stays pretty small, so there is less root structure here to work with than I thought there would be. This one may end up being a failure, but I'll see it through to the end, maybe it'll surprise me.
Was out shopping the other day and found this ceramic pot that was just perfect for the Laughing Peter pepper. Since the plant was showing no signs of stress from the pulldown, I went ahead and repotted it in this smaller container. I figured that since the pulldowns were done, I might as well go ahead and put it in something more decorative and let it really settle in.
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