Low Stakes Bonchi

Okay, hasn't been any updates in a while because, honestly, there hasn't been much to update on until now.  I'm sure nobody wants to hear me talk just for the sake of hearing me talk.

So, whats the update about?  Tent stakes and jute twine, of course!  The Laughing Buddha Peter Pepper bonchi has been having a growth spurt, and has some nice long branches on it now.  Problem is, they're all going straight up, as peppers are want to do.  I however want this bonchi to have a nice canopy so that it looks like its shading Buddha underneath, and peppers are not known for growing low flat canopies.

Problem number two, I don't like wiring bonsai.  Sure, its great on bonsai trees that are rigid and have to be held in place for 6 months or even years at a time for them to hold their shape.  Its the only practical way of shaping the branches.  However, peppers are not trees.  Their green growth is very flexible, plus I'm not interested in tying the branches into knots, I just want them to be more lateral.  So, instead of spending all day trying to wire this thing again, I went for a... "less intricate" method.

I tied it down like a tent.

These are just super cheap aluminum tent spikes from Walmart that I had laying around, and some jute twine I bought from the craft department.  All I did was put the spikes down in the pot, loop the twine through them, and tied the branches down with a simple square knot.  If I cinched it a little too tight and pulled the branch too far down, I simply pulled the stake up a little bit until I got the branch angle I wanted.

Unlike trees, peppers can take this kind of extreme bending pretty easily with the new growth, although if you look closely you might see where I bent one a little too far and broke it off.  No worries though, it was a small branch and I found a suitable replacement for it anyway.  The biggest branch bent over easily, you can see it there quite well in the second picture.

Now I can just leave it like that for a while.  The limbs will start growing new branches pointing up again as the main branch lignifies to where it will hold it's shape on it's own, and then I can do the same thing to those new branches to get a nice flat bottomed canopy.  Added benefit, this jute twine is pretty thick, and not tightly coiled around the branches so it won't bite into them.  No worries about scarring the branch this way!

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Other misc updates, the Reapers are still growing slowly.  We've had some nights of low 50's to upper 40's which will stall pepper growth, but I'm hoping some slowed above ground growth will help promote faster root growth as they try to dig down for some warmth.

I have no idea if thats true or not, but its a more productive line of thinking than "they're just sitting there doing nothing".

I'm also hoping to see good results from the tent pegs used above to use on the Reapers later.  I want a twisted trunk for the main Reaper bonchi, and tying it down with twine and stakes to pull it in the directions I want it to go is going to be a LOT easier than trying to wire it or digging it up to replant at an angle.

Also some disappointing results from the weird Halloween plant.  Thats it on the bottom there, and you can see its quite green now.  There's some black shading to the leaves, but they are no longer solid jet black.  Mixed bag though, because one of the others (the one that is unfortunately in the shadow of my phone) is now displaying more black on the leaves, while the two on the left (the free growing on the far left, and the one on the skull in the middle) have no black at all on their leaves.

Might still be worth trying to cross pollinate the two darker ones.  I might still be able to breed up some solid black ones, just doesn't look like I was lucky enough to get it for free in a single generation's worth of mutation.

Spring Planting Time

Okay, our last frost date here is 4/1-4/10.  Last night we hit 36°F/2°C briefly, but the 10 day forecast calls for nothing but warm wet weather from here out, so lets plant us some bonsai peppers!

Alas, poor Yorick.  I knew him, Horatio...

Dug out our skull from it's storage spot since last time we saw him.

...he was an asshole and I'm glad he's dead.

Out in the raised bed, dug a nice hole big enough for the skull and just deep enough for the top of the skull to be just below the soil line.

Now this is where it gets more important what we're doing.  Here I've taken the biggest and strongest looking of the Reapers (sadly, it was not the zombie reaper, but it was one of my final 4), removed most of the soil, and found the main root.  Now while peppers don't have an actual taproot, they do have a main root which was the first to grow after the seed germinated.  The plant is going to try and grow it's roots in the direction that that root is going, so its important to find it and get it positioned where you want it to go, and the rest of the roots should more or less follow.

Here I've gotten the pepper and the roots laid out where I want them.  You can see I've gone for a location over the skull's left eye socket.  I decided I wanted this to be asymmetrical to keep it from looking too artificial.  Also pulled a good bit of roots out over the back of the skull as well, hopefully they will all fatten up enough to where it will get a good grip on it.

And here's where I did something a little bit stupid.  After I got everything in place I was pressing the soil down to compact it enough to hold everything in place where I wanted it, and I heard a crunching sound.  Pretty certain the glue on the hinge of that damned jaw broke again.  I would say that thing is fragile as glass, but that would be an insult to the glass.  Oh well, I'm not digging the whole thing up now.  Whatever condition its in when I dig it up later is the condition its going to be in for the bonchi.

And there we go, the raised bed now has the four best Reapers in it (along with a boarder of transylvanian garlic), and is being watched over by my disgruntled lawn gnome.  The one with the skull is on the far right, opposite end of the gnome, as that spot gets the most sun.

Oh, and if anyone is wondering, the reason I don't trim those clovers and things that are growing tall around the raised bed right now is because I also keep bees.  The bees love those flowers, so I'm letting them have 'em until the flowers fade.  When there's no more flowers to feed the bees with, then I'll cut it all down and toss it in my composter.

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And while we're at it, updates on the other practice projects.

The Laughing Buddha Peter Pepper is doing well.  Its putting out lots of nice new growth, which I'm probably going to not wire again but tie down to get more of a canopy going.  Also likely going to move him back into a large container for the season to really let it go wild growing.  Only way to thicken those roots and trunk up to the max is to let the top grow as big as possible, so thats what we're going to do.

The oddball Halloween pepper continues to exhibit odd growth patterns.  Its putting out a cluster of leaves, but only from one side.  If nothing else, this should make an interesting bonchi simply because of how strange its growing.

Speaking of the Halloween peppers, here's the one I planted on the small skull.  Washed the dirt off the roots, and look at that main root.  Just like I mentioned before, they'll all tend to have one root that is bigger and beefier than the others, which was the first root the seed grew.  If you look closely, you can see its got an interesting bendy shape due to it growing over the skull.

Some repositioning of roots, and making sure that nice big main root goes in an interesting place, and we're starting to look pretty good here.  I also balled the roots up a bit under the bottom of the skull to try and encourage them to stay there and fully enclose the skull to make it impossible to remove short of cutting it out.

After that, replanted everything.  You can see on the left where the top of the roots are still showing, then on the right where I just barely covered them (and pulled off a few low leaves to give it a little air at the trunk).

This is the one that I didn't do anything to other than let it grow.  As you can see, it has pods set already.  The mini skull one I went back and pruned off the wilting flowers (which most likely set fruit), but this one I will let go.  Why?  Because producing fruit requires a large investment of energy on the plant's part.  While its true that it also uses a lot of water and nutrients, which encourages root growth, overall it slows the plant down.  The skull pepper I want to put out as much vegetative growth (aka, leaves) as possible to build up the trunk, which in turn will cause thicker roots.  This one though, I'm letting it grow however it wants.  Later on I'll compare how it's roots came out to the others and see what we've got to work with.

Multiple plants, being treated in multiple different fashions.  Thats how you experiment and learn, do a lot of different things and see what works, and what doesn't.

Porch Peppers

As you can see, things are coming along nicely.  Everybody has been out on the front porch getting morning sun for about a week now, with them staying out at night for the past several days.  Three of the Reapers are getting nice and big, three are still straggling a bit.  But, thats why I started so many of them, to have a wide range of choices to select from when it comes time to pick the perfect one to start crafting into my bonchi.

So far, this one is the front runner.  Its the largest and healthiest looking of the 6, and hence most likely to continue to grow larger at a fast pace this season.  Overall size is going to be very important when it comes time to chop them down into bonchi, we want them to have as large and as thick of a trunk as possible.

This one grew with a twisted, mutant looking leaf, and it isn't as big as the others (in the first picture, this one is bottom row, far left, where the front runner is bottom row, 4th from left).  However, its already leaning over sideways without any intervention from me.  Why would I consider that a reason to keep one of the runts in contention for the main bonchi plant?  Well if I can get them to lean over (something I plan on trying to get the other one to do through tilting it later on), I can place it more down over the eye socket or face of the skull and rotate it so that the leaning direction points straight up or even up and slightly back over the top again to give a more dynamic pose.

I'm still pinning my hopes on the big one right now, and will be taking steps to get it twisting a bit as it grows, but I'll be keeping an eye on everybody, especially the ones that are straggling behind but showing interesting characteristics otherwise.

Speaking of interesting characteristics, the oddball Halloween pepper is putting out new leaves in earnest now.  They're green at the moment (as were the black leaves when they started), but that biggest one there already shows signs of abnormal coloration developing.  Hopes that the entire plant will have this leaf coloration are slowly rising.

And last but not least, update on the Laughing Pepper.  Now you can really start to see how some of the roots are thickening while others are dying back.  I have not done any root trimming to this, all of the root reduction you are seeing is entirely the work of the plant itself.  You can also see in the first picture in this post that the plant itself is doing well and putting out good new growth (its the one in the red pot), so it is doing quite well.

I'm going to give it another month or so before I try taking that last bit of soil around from the bottom of the statue though.  The roots weren't *quite* long enough to give good purchase for all the roots I wanted to be sure and keep, so I want to be absolutely sure they've had more than enough time to grow before I pull it down again.

The up side is that all of the new vegetative growth on the top of the plant will put increased demand on the roots for water and nutrients, which will cause them to fatten up faster as well.  Right now its a balancing act between keeping the plant happy and healthy enough to grow at a good pace, and shaping the roots into doing what I want them to.  Too much either way will hurt the other end, so gotta find the middle ground as much as possible.

Halloween Night

Okay, so as you know (if you've been reading this blog), I have a NuMex Halloween pepper I sprouted from some saved seed I had. All of the seed I started came from the same dried pod from last year, but one of them turned out different from the others...

Go on, guess which one.

Seemed runty and damaged from as soon as it sprouted, but since I have this big grow cabinet, there was no reason to cull it, I had plenty of space and rain water is free, so I let it go.  Figured it was probably damaged enough that it would eventually just die.  Well, while watering today, I noticed this.

You see what I see?  Its finally putting out a new leaf.  My level of interest has now flipped from "Eh, just let it do whatever until it dies" to "What if this new leaf maintains the dark coloration?  What if this isn't a damaged plant, but a mutation?"

I have the grow box, so I have the facilities to grow year round now.  If this plant proves to be a unique phenotype, I'm going to isolate it as soon as it starts to bud to prevent any potential cross contamination and see if I can get it to breed true.

If it proves to be a unique genotype as well, I'm definitely going to try to stabilize it.  Lol, wouldn't that beat all?  Spend all this time and effort trying to make a kick ass Reaper bonchi, and the real success story being one of the "something to keep busy and practice on for the blog" side projects ends up being a whole new pepper strain that makes me millions of dollars?

Yeah, probably not, but it will at least be something interesting for you guys to follow along with while we wait for the reapers to get bigger.  But pie in the sky here,  I think I'll call it the Halloween Night pepper... assuming it keeps the black and orange pods.