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.

Final Peter Pulldown

The Laughing Buddha Peter Pepper is entering the home stretch in it's bonsaification process.  Today is a little over a month since the last pulldown, and it was ready for one last round.

The soil has now been pulled all the way down to the base of the statue.  The smaller roots have been flared out to ensure a nice wide base.

Since there's no way to know which ones of these will end up filling out like the top ones did, we're trying to give the plant as many positive options as possible.  That way, no matter which one it selects (or even better yet, which ones), we'll end up with something nice.

You will have noticed by now that I have tied the roots down once again.  There isn't anything wrong with the roots, as you can see by the above picture they are still pretty firmly locked onto the statue.  However, the bottoms are still new enough that they aren't locked into shape yet, so some jute twine to pull them in close while they thicken up will help ensure a nice flow down the contours of the statue, as it already has on top.

Now, just because we've done the final soil pulldown doesn't mean we're through, far from it.  It just means that we've finished elongating the roots.  There's still a checklist of things that need to be done over the next several months to finish this one out.

1) Base Roots

Its going to take months before those roots fill out enough to be considered "done", and a close eye will have to be kept on it as before to make sure it doesn't suffer any insect damage.

2) Root Polish

Don't know if there is a better term for it, but its what I call it.  You can see in some of the closeups above that the top roots that have been exposed for months still have stubby root nubs coming off the main root trunks.  I've been leaving them there for the plant to clean up as much as it will, but eventually I'm going to need to go in with a sharp knife and start shaving those off so that the main root is nice and smooth.  If this were truly a full sized tree that had any great age to it, those roots would be perfectly smooth, and while we could wait 5 years for the plant to finish the job itself, I'd rather help it along now (or at least in the near future).

3) Canopy Shaping

We've done some basic shaping to the canopy as we've gone, but I've gone fairly easy on it so far.  Reason being that we've been stressing the plant by messing with it's roots this whole time, so messing with the leaves at the same time would have probably been a bit too much for it to handle.  Oh, it would have lived through it, but that much stress would have stunted it and slowed it down quite a bit.  Not what we want when we're trying to get everything done in a single season.  Once the roots are done, we can really go at the canopy though.

Number 3 there will be the most long term need.  Up until now, we've been basically shaping roots and only paying lip service to shaping the limbs.  Now that the roots are almost done, we can start treating the top like a proper bonsai.

Its easy to get discouraged by the slow pace of projects like this, as when you're looking at it every day you don't really notice the changes.  So, here's a picture of how it was looking in February:

And way back in last November when we started him:

So not too bad, considering we've only been actively working on him for about 8 months.

Fear the Reaper

Even when buying from a reputable source, you always have that nagging doubt in the back of your head "Did they actually send me the rare pepper I ordered, or did they pull a Pepper Joe on me?".  But h yeah, these are definitely Reapers.

The one with the twisted trunk is also proving to have some quite interesting root development going on.  While I was pulling back the soil to expose the top roots on all of the big Reapers, I noticed the name that was on this one, Reaper #1.  I had forgotten that this was the lone survivor of that first batch, the ones that died when I went to New Orleans.  This is the zombie reaper that looked dead but came back to life, and it looks awesome!

Going to have to come up with an equally awesome pot to put it in, because this one is definitely a champ!

Just Look at the Flowers

Just look at the flowers...

Sorry, the Reapers are flowering and I just had to do it.

The top one with the actual open flower isn't the skull Reaper, but the bottom two are, and you can see its not far behind despite it's smaller size.

On a side note, the Buddha bonchi has leafed out it's canopy nicely, so I did some shaping on it while I was out.

One of the spots I trimmed off included a pod, but I think it was far enough along that it will finish ripening on it's own.

If it doesn't, well no great loss.  It wasn't an iconically shaped pod for this plant, and I don't actually eat the pods from this one anyway, so worst case scenario is I sterilize the seeds in the microwave and toss it in the composter to feed the next generation of peppers.

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.

Slow Going

Its still slow and steady over here in bonchi land.

The one on the left in this picture is the one the skull is buried under, so of course its now the runt of the pack.

As you can see, I have it tied back and to the right with one of the tent pegs I first used on the Laughing Buddha bonchi.  Its a little hard to make out in this, but it is leaning over and then growing back up straight quite nicely, given it's small size.

If you recall, this pepper is sitting on top of the left eye socket (which would be on the right in this picture since it would be facing us if it weren't underground), so this bend would be pulling it further to the skull's left out away from center, and towards the back of it's head.  The next pull when it gets taller will be further back and to the left, to create a bit of a spiral to wreath the skull with.

As a comparison, here is one pepper right next to it, growing much taller.  Not sure exactly why that two peppers right next to each other would be having this noticeable of a growth difference, but considering all three of the non-skull peppers are doing better, I can only assume that it has something to do with the skull.  First thought would be that the skull pepper can't grow it's roots straight down, so it has a harder time getting away from the dryer surface layer, and hence not growing as quickly.

I'm not overly eager to try and water that end more than the others, because ideally the "its not getting as much water as the others" is exactly what we want.  It means that once the roots do fully grow out, they will keep trying to go deeper to get to the water, and will encircle the skull better.

I could dig it up and see for myself how the roots are going, work on repositioning things, but I'm trying not to right now because messing with any of them now would cause them to be delayed.  Once its bigger, I'll take a peek at how the roots are going just in case something needs moving around, but for now I'm just letting it do it's own thing.

Did give it a bit of extra fertilizer though, just in case.

Speaking (earlier) of the Laughing Buddha bonchi, here it is.  It has several pods on it, and I've decided to let them ripen.  That will dramatically slow the growth of new leaves and branches above ground as it diverts all of it's energy into fruit production, but the increased demands on the roots will really help things along.  As evidenced by this:

Those roots are getting nice and fat, exactly the way I wanted them to.