It is interesting to note that this is the first time my grow cabinet is being used for it's intended purpose. I built it last winter, but all it ever got to do was sprouts. This time the moveable shelf is all the way down and it has full sized plants in it, and it has been working great.
You can see that after the trimming for the aphid problem last month it has really started bushing out very nicely. Thats the goal of this winter, to get a nice shaped canopy going. The project Reaper has been aphid free for a while now, but the zombie Reaper had a small outbreak of them again just this morning. Another round of neem oil for everything in the box! Spray it on the leaves, the soil, everything.
The moss test I started last time is doing... okay. I wouldn't say its thriving by any stretch of the imagination, but it is still alive. Its been getting regular hits from a spray bottle to try and keep it moist without waterlogging the pepper.
Also happy to report that there has not only been no further loss of roots, but that we pretty clearly have some very nice fattening up of the roots we have left. One of the reasons I've been keeping this blog is so that I can go back to past pictures and compare progress, since to me just looking at it the progress is so slow it feels like its the same as it ever was. But going back and looking at some of the pictures from early August, I can definitely see that the roots are a little thicker now.
Its subtle, but its there. It'll be another year or two before its really night and day difference, but things are turning out quite nicely (and a year or two for a pepper bonsai beats the hell out of 5-10 years for an actual tree bonsai!).
Heh, I'd like to see anybody else get this kind of progress out of a bonsai in less than a year using a "traditional" tree!
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