2017 - End of Season

Got lots of pods off the old girl again this year.  The titular Reaper grew quite large and bushy, which meant the weight shifted how the roots sit on the skull.  Some roots were lost, others bulked up tremendously, and the overall look of the bonchi has changed.  Such is the way of the bonsai, it becomes it's own creation over time.

As you can see, the entire thing slid backwards when the weight pulled it that way, which made the lower jaw pop out.  I rather like whats happened to it, actually.  The way it laid back now means it has a full back while the front is more open.  Makes a better display aesthetic.

The jaw coming out also gives it a more natural "its just scattered here" look, less "this has been intentionally set up".  I guess "more organic" is a good way of saying it?

Anyway, apologies for basically disappearing for this season.  Been planning a wedding (mine!) and haven't had nearly as much time to document incremental changes.  But never fear, the Living Death Bonchi is alive and well!

Winter is Coming... Again

Okay, I do remember this blog exists, I swear!

Its just that there isn't a whole lot going on that isn't a retread of things we've already gone over, so haven't felt as compelled to give blow by blow updates of things that are basically just reposts of existing material.

That said, its been getting colder and I've chopped the Reaper down for it's second year of overwintering.

As you can see, its alive and well.  Although it didn't grow up as big as I had really hoped it would during the summer, we still got some nice thickening on the roots all the same.

We did lose a lot of the roots in the mouth, but some are still holding on.  Most of the root development was on the sides, as you can see at least one really big thick root on either side of the skull.

All in all, a good year with some good progress.  We're well into actual bonsai territory now, where growth is slow and incremental now that the initial shaping is complete.  Its still going lightning fast compared to traditional bonsai though.  This would be a good 5-10 years worth of growth for a normal bonsai tree, and we've accomplished it in less than 2.

Less noticeable but even better for subtle realism, the skull now has been buried for one season and left exposed for one season through wind, rain, and sun.  Its taking on a very nice natural grime and weathered look.  You can fake that to some extent, but the real thing just looks so much nicer!

Moss Test Grade: C-

Okay, its been a little over a month since I started the moss test, and I think the results are in.

Despite daily spraying from the bottle with rain water, the moss is looking pretty... autumnal?  Is that a word?  Spellchecker thinks it is, so I'm going with it.  Yeah, it looks more dead than anything else.  Its not entirely dead, as you can still see green underneath the top layers on the soil surface, but it seems the dry indoor air and the fans in the top of the case make it just too dry for it to thrive.

So, verdict overall is a C-.  Its not a complete failure, but its not very good as a permanent fixture either.  For a short term thing though, it looked great!  I'll be sure to give it fresh moss when I dress it up for final show-off pictures.

On a related note, the cultured moss I brought inside is also suffering from dry air, though I have been keeping it in soggier soil so its done better overall.

Same dead extremities, but a much greener under story.  I decided that since its rainy and fairly warm out for the time being, I'd put it outside with the stuff I left out there this whole time (and give it a good soaking of rain water).  The comparison picture here tells the story, IMO:

What I've had indoors is struggling, but is much darker green.  The stuff that has been outside is thriving, but is a much lighter, almost neon green.  Tells me I probably haven't given the indoor stuff as much light as it would have liked, along with the indoor heat and air making it too dry for it.

Anywho, I dug the mostly dead moss out of the skull.  I was kind of hoping that maybe the moss would hold enough moisture to encourage some new roots into the eyesockets from the pepper, but that didn't happen.  Just didn't stay damp enough for long enough at a time, so oh well.

But as you can see, the peppers are loving the conditions in the box.  I gave them a feeding about a month ago with some miracle grow mix (they've been in these containers for a while now with nothing but what was in the leftover soil), and I didn't want them to go hungry on me.  Nice dark green leaves mean happy peppers!

Steady as She Goes

The roots on the main project Reaper have stiffened to the point I was able to remove the ties.  Kind of wish we had been able to get more roots over the back of the skull for aesthetic reasons, but it looks like we'll have enough for practical anchoring purposes.  I have read about some techniques to get lignified roots to put out new growth in specific places, so I'll probably try those out later once everything else is done.  Not worth the risk of messing with things that aren't technically broken at this point.

We've also got a lot of big roots across the face that look like they may all stick around.  Have to see how it goes, but we may end up pruning some of them to give better visibility to the skull.

The Cumari is doing well after it's pulldown.  Just like with the Peter, you can see where key roots are fattening up while lesser roots are drying up.  The grip isn't as skin tight as I had hoped (really wanted roots snaking around the little surface details), but that might be something we can improve upon later.

The Halloween mini skull is coming back better than I expected.  It's been struggling a bit but seems to be doing better now.  Not 100% sure the small roots going around the back of the skull will make it, but we'll just have to wait and see.  They're not all going to be winners, it's always a bit of a numbers game.  Make lots, and then only show off the best ones.  Outsiders don't always get to see the failures like you are. ;)

Speaking of it being a numbers game, just the other day I took the strongest of the spare Halloween peppers and started it out over the rock wall Buddha decoration that I think I showed you a while back.  Again, doing this on the phone makes it hard to go back and check, sorry about that.  But like the others, I've spread the roots out over the front and a good chunk over the back to give it some grip.

This one didn't really have much if any in the way of dominant roots, so it's just kind of splayed out there at the moment.  Should prove interesting to follow along with, because I have no clue exactly what direction this one is going to go in!

Visible Progress

While out doing some pulldowns on the various secondary peppers, I started looking at the main project pepper.  It has been at a slower growth pace than the others ever since I put the skull under it, and some of the trimming I did earlier slowed it down even more.

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.

Mother Nature: The Ultimate Showoff

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

Finally, Something Happens

Weather forecast for today was fairly cool (relatively speaking), mostly cloudy, and 0% chance of rain.  Perfect weather to work on some bonchi.

As you can see, the peppers are finally starting to really take off.  The ones not sitting on a skull are still doing better, but the little guy is starting to catch up.  Too bad about what we're about to do to it...

(I'm baaaaack!)                                                   

After trimming some lower branches to expose the trunk, I dug it up to work on the roots.  I'll have to admit, I had hoped to have more to work with at this point, but there's enough.

Hard to hold everything in place and still take pictures.

Pressed some roots into the eye sockets so that they'd help hold it in place later on, pushed some into the sides of the open mouth, and all around spread things out.  Its kind of hard to see in the photos, but the main central root was curling nicely around the nose bone.

Got everything replanted, and you can clearly see the bends that the tie ropes caused in the trunk.  Didn't come out quite the way I had hoped they would, but we'll see how it ends up looking later on.

Next up, the Buddha Bonchi.  As you can see it's canopy has started filling out nicely, and the branches have lignified, so they should hold their shape after I take the stakes away...

And they do!  Perfect!

The main roots are nice, thick, and gripping the statue tightly.  Pulling on the trunk gets very little movement, so time to do some work on it.

This really illustrates the difference that the pull down makes on the nature of the roots.  The roots I exposed earlier are thick and woody, but even after all this time the roots that have been down in the soil are small and thin.  You can pretty clearly see where the soil line was just by the sudden transition in the root structure.

On a side note, I'm holding only the statue here, the pepper is gripping tightly enough to hold itself in place.  Thats excellent news.

Now, the next thing I did I didn't get pictures of, because it required both hands to do.  The roots you can see dangling beneath the statue in the previous picture?  I gathered them up and gentle twisted them under the base of the statue.  This pulled them all around under the bottom into a nice partial ball.

The reason for this is further insurance that the pepper keeps it's grip on the statue and can't be pulled off later.

After that had been done, I put it back in the pot, put some more soil in, and pressed firmly around the base in a diagonal direction, down and towards the center.  You can see the small trough this made around the base of the statue, this was again to press the roots up under the statue.  Then I put some more soil in to level everything out.

Once I've let it recover for about a week, I'll take a squirt bottle and knock the rest of the soil off the roots and start the last phase of pulldown on this one.  I'll pull it down to the base of the statue at the very least, and I may actually end up pulling it down even further by setting some spacers under the statue.  The reason for this would be to get the roots to fatten up under the statue to completely lock it in.  We'll see if thats needed in the following weeks.

And making it's transition into Bonchi-in-Progress is the *ONE* Cumari do Para pepper I got to germinate.  Must have tried a dozen seeds, only one ever came up.  Pretty unforgiving odds with these things, but everybody says they're great little semi-wild peppers, so I'm giving them a shot.

Putting it on the skull made of skulls I got in New Orleans earlier this year because I don't really have anything else to put them on at the moment.