https://livingdeathbonchi.blogspot.com/2018/04/living-death-bonchi-next-generation.html

Pictures can be found on the blog, along with the entire journey of making it.

https://livingdeathbonchi.blogspot.com/

I'm going to be doing a full on roots over rock bonchi using a life sized replica resin skull, and the hottest pepper known to man, the Carolina Reaper.

I've decided to document everything that goes into it from start to finish using a blog, in case anyone wants to read along.

http://livingdeathbonchi.blogspot.com/

(Note: I'm in the Northern hemisphere, so its currently the beginning of winter.  Will be a while before it gets to having an actual plant being grown, but I'm working on things like concepts and containers now.)

Going to try shaping this one into an actual cloud tree niwaki bonchi.



I intend to make one nice round cloud blob at the end of each stem for a nice staggered three tiered bonchi.  Would have liked to have staggered the trunks a little more evenly, but thats where the existing growth nodes were, so thats where I cut.  Doesn't do any good to chop the trunks at pleasing places if nothing will grow from those places.

This was/is up over on the GardenWeb hot pepper board, but its definitely something that needs more exposure, so I'm reposting it around.

Basic jist, ebay only allows feedback to be left for 60 days after purchase, after that the window closes.  Ebay seed sellers take advantage of this by selling large amounts of "rare" seeds knowing full well that by the time anyone can grow one out and discover they've been had, its too late to leave any form of negative feedback or report them for it.

Don't know if it'll do any good or not, but pass it around if you can.
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/increase-the-feedback-time-on-ebay-on-flowers-trees.html

This was/is up over on the GardenWeb hot pepper board, but its definitely something that needs more exposure, so I'm reposting it around.

Basic jist, ebay only allows feedback to be left for 60 days after purchase, after that the window closes.  Ebay seed sellers take advantage of this by selling large amounts of "rare" seeds knowing full well that by the time anyone can grow one out and discover they've been had, its too late to leave any form of negative feedback or report them for it.

Don't know if it'll do any good or not, but pass it around if you can.
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/increase-the-feedback-time-on-ebay-on-flowers-trees.html

My main project is the big three pepper merge graft, but who says I can't work on two things at once?



While digging around, I found another aquarium ornament I bought last year and promptly forgot about.  The ornament is this:



I've got a douglah planted right in the crook between the two skull peaks.  As it grows, I'm going to slowly pull the dirt away to reveal the mountain and force it to grow longer roots to stay in contact with the soil down below.  By the end of the season when I'm ready to cut it back, I should (hopefully) have a nice big trunk with craggly roots snaking down the mountainside (and I'll likely direct some into eye sockets and mouths as I go, while keeping the inside of the mountain filled with soil).

I'm going to be preforming an additional experiment with my peppers this year.  Out of my various superhots that I'm growing I'm going to pick one that I will try to watch carefully and snip one half of the branches off any time it tries to fork on me, and then try to train the remaining branch to keep growing straight up.  My mission will be to see if I can grow a normal pepper plant into a small tree.  Think a bonchi thats maybe 6 feet/2 meters tall with a single as-straight-as-possible trunk before making a nice canopy.

Why would I do this?  Why not?

As a big Halloween nut, I enjoy things most people would consider to be, um, creepy?  Anyway, last year I got into making bonsai out my peppers, and ended up buying some neat plaster skulls during Halloween.  My plan was to somehow use them as flower pots or bonchi decorations.

This was the first thing I used one for:


Thats a NuMex Halloween ornamental pepper, supposed to grow black and orange fruit.  As you can see, right now it only has black on it (well, dark purple, but you probably guessed that already), and haven't gotten any more fruit to set during the cold dreary winter, but the plant itself is doing well in it's unusual container.

The second one of these I got I decided to cut at an angle, and I was going to graft three bhuts together, one coming out of each eye socket and the nose.  Graft them together as close to the skull as possible so that when they reached full size it would look like one MASSIVE trunk growing into the skull's face (I mentioned it I liked creepy things already, remember).



Might need to cut it little further so it lays a bit more flat though.

But then I got to thinking.  If I'm going to graft peppers together using this method anyway, why use just bhuts?  Why not make each of the three a different superhot?

Right now I'm planning on having one bhut, one butch T scorpion, and one... haven't decided yet.  I was thinking I have naga morich seeds, but they're too similar looking to the bhuts.  I could get a moruga or a brain strain, but those are again too close to the other two.  I've got some "lesser" peppers I could use, but if I'm going to be merging these together over a partially buried skull, I want each of them to be lethally hot on their own.  Maybe a Chocolate 7 Pod?

Anywho, I'll update as I go!

On one of my bonchi, I ended up cutting the stem significantly above the nearest node (maybe an inch) in a couple of places.  Those stems have recently started dying back down towards the living branches coming off of it.  Makes sense, those sections of stem aren't supporting anything, but still take up resources, so the plant is cutting it's losses.

My question, should I trim those dried out stem sections back, or is it okay to just leave them there?

One of my overwintering plants is a dragonfruit cactus.  Apparently the soil got some fungal spores in it at some point, as its growing a few yellow cap mushrooms that I've been picking out every time I see one.  Was just wondering, they are interesting looking mushrooms, would they be dangerous to use as some living bonsai decoration?

Going to be trying this for the first time in a month or two after my Halloween ornamentals are bigger.  My question is, "Has anyone else done this successfully?"

Never tried to intentionally fuse pepper stems together, so not quite sure how to go about it.  Do I just gently twist them together once they're big enough and cross my fingers?  Should I try scoring the inside edges that will be touching so that they will heal together faster?  Should I sacrifice a chicken and I don't know, whatever the voodoo people do with chickens to appease the pepper gods?

Was shopping at Walmart and found this over in the floral bouquets next to the produce department:


Hey, said it was a chili, and it has the most awesome little pumpkin shaped fruit, so I bought one and started harvesting seeds to grow my own.  Something wasn't right though.  Once cut open, the fruit smelled like bananas and had no heat at all.  This was no pepper!  Did some digging, turns out its called a "Pumpkin on a Stick" and is actually a type of ornamental eggplant!

Still, the stems it was on were very pepper like, and the research I've done so far has said that it does indeed get woody stems...

Considering which forum I put this in, you can probably guess what I'm going to try doing to it after growing it up nice and big next year, right?

Question is, what do you call an eggplant bonsai?  A bonegg?

Has anyone else had any experience trying to root bhut cuttings?

I have some cuttings that are several weeks (at least 2, possibly 3 by now) that show absolutely no signs of rooting.  I've got some in moist potting soil, I've got some in coir, I've even got one in a glass of plain water.

Carefully dug up one that was in coir to see if it was ready for real soil yet, and nadda.  The leaves and stems up top still look perfectly fine and happy, but there is no rooting occuring at all.  I did some with rooting hormone, some without, doesn't seem to have made any difference.

Are these things really just that hard to root?

Everything I've seen about making bonchi (pretty much just from here) has talked about cutting the pepper back both above ground and below at the same time.  Prune the branches back into a trunk, and prune the roots to fit the bowl at the same time.

Assuming one has the space and time for it, would it not be a better idea to cut the plant back above ground while leaving the entire developed root system in place until the plant recovers?  As in, wait until you get new growth, THEN cut back the roots?

Seems to me that it would be better to spread the damage and the shock out over time rather than hitting the plant with it all at once.  Or is there something to it that I'm missing?

Was reading up on "real" bonsai and got into the whole akadama thing and how inorganic soils are used, yadda yadda yadda.  Anyway, read that one good (and cheap) way to do this was to buy a bag of the oil absorbant you can get at any auto store.  Looked it up on the bonsai wikibooks, and it does indeed montmorillonite clay particles as a good growing medium.  Checked the fine print on the bag, yup, its the right stuff.

Just got home with it and did a test pour to see how much water it held (quite a bit, actually, I was impressed), but something more immediate hit me.  This stuff fizzed like a soda bottle the instant water hit it.  It produced vapors.  And sticking my finger in it proved the mix to be warm (an exothermic reaction must have occurred).  My immediate first response was "What the blankity blank blank is going on here?  I'm supposed to put a plant in THAT?"

Whatever it was seemed to go away after that initial pour, so I'm guessing it'll be safe if I give it a good washing first, but I still wonder.  The fact it warmed up a little told me it was an actual reaction going on, not just nucleation, but what exactly is in this stuff?

Its a bag of Moltan's oil absorber I bought at Auto Zone, only ingredients listed were the monmorillonite clay and silicates (sand), so I'm stumped.

Pretty sure that wire is wire, long as we're talking single strand of the same gauge and material.  Is there any real reason to pay the premium on bonsai wiring as opposed to just hitting the local hardware store and getting a spool of single thread copper?

With all the fun I've been having getting my Halloween bhut jolokia setup ready, I've ordered some numex halloween ornamental peppers from NMSU.  They're fairly normal ornamental chilis (I presume), except that the fruit is black to bright orange.

I want to make a bonchi out of these, but ornamentals tend to be spindly and bushy by nature, not exactly the best thing for trying to make a nice tree out of.  Right now I've got one seedling and another I just planted at it's base to try and get two stems to fuse with, maybe that will help solve the thickness problem.  Also, when it comes to fusing stems, I've seen that some stems really don't like to fuse, and some just refuse to do it.  Can fusing be encouraged by distressing the stems (rough them up, scar them with a razor blade, etc) so that they will have a better chance at fusing together as they heal?

Anyway, on to my question!
These things like to be short and bushy, I want tall and tree-like.  How can I encourage the growth patterns I want?  I'm assuming the most obvious way would be to simply prune off any low branches that try to grow in order to force the plant upwards.  But with ornamentals being a determinate (again, I presume, never grown ornamentals before, but if they stop growing in height, they must be determinate, right?) would that be doing more harm than good?

On a related note, I also plan on making this one grow over some ornamentation (I have a nice looking aquarium decoration I plan on using).  I know the basics of burying the decoration directly under the young plant so that the roots will be forced to grow around it, but is there a better way to make sure the roots grow down far enough to cover it nicely?  My first thought was to dig away the soil from the base of the plant a little at a time, forcing roots to move down to keep finding better soil.  Seems a little risky though.  While searching for something else, I found a bonsai site showing how to make an actual tree hug a rock by putting the base where you wanted it, and a little soil wrapped in cellophane to force the roots down out of the bottom.  After they had roots coming out the bottom, they simply planted it normally so that the rock was still above the soil line.  Later, chop it down, peel off the cellophane, and bam, good to go.  Would that be a viable tactic to use on peppers as well, or should I stick to just planting them over what I want and cross my fingers?

Its not quite time to cut my big bhut jolokia back into a bonchi yet, but its getting very close.  I'm really hoping for some massive roots once I dig it up, but the ones on the surface now aren't bad.  It was a late start getting planted (weather destroyed my first batch), so its just now ripening pods.  But, it should be ready to cut back in time for Halloween, and considering how deathly hot these things are, I'm going to make a themed bonsai out of it.


Thats my rough mockup with a handy stick from the woods.  Skeleton is cut apart to only be surface decoration (I've been painting and preparing a better looking one than I used in this test run), should hopefully come out looking quite nice.

I do have a question for those more experienced at this than I (this will be my first bonchi):
As you can see in the first picture, the trunk of my pepper rather quickly splits apart into a mass of stems.  I'm thinking it won't make for a particularly impressive bonchi if I let it stay that way, so I'm planning on pruning a good portion of them off when I cut the rest back.  Thing is, I can't decide at the moment which ones to keep, and which ones should go (probably at least attempt to root the biggest ones I break off, so as not to totally waste them).

On one hand, I'm thinking it would be cool to prune all of them except the back two or three.  Its already growing in a curved shape with the main trunk, I could just follow that curve with the branches I leave and try to go for a gnarly old haunted tree look.  Then wire the new growth over in a windswept look following that same curve.  Problem there is that would require cutting back at least 2/3s of the branches, leaving a thick fat trunk and then some spindly (by comparison) fingers poking up.  I could use the ledge created by all those missing branches for some more decorations though.

On the other hand, I could leave all the outside branches and prune away the inside branches and go for a kind of clawed hand look.  Riskier that way, both in terms of how the final bonchi would look and with getting the middle branches out without damaging the outside ones though.

Anyone have any thoughts and/or suggestions?