Not much to see, but everything is still going strong.



The cotys on the t.scorp are drying up, but the true leaves seem fine, and its working on a second set of them, so not particularly worried about it.

I found ghost peppers at the big nursery in town, bought a couple of those to use as my experimental shaping peppers.

One of them I trimmed all the understory out of.  Left nothing but the growing tip.

The other I topped rather mercilessly, and left nothing but the understory.

I figure the first one I'll try my best to turn into a tree, and the other I'll try to turn into... I dunno... a carpet?

All three peppers are now in place in the skull, everything is moved to a bigger, fancier pot which will most likely be their forever home, and in my ongoing efforts to make this scene creepy/cool/halloweeny, some battery operated tea lights from Walmart with appropriately gothic looking holders.







Thats a Douglah in the left eye, a Butch T in the right eye, and a Bhut in the nose.

Okay, screw the weeds.  I found something MUCH better while out shopping today...

Elfin Thyme!

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?

I'm currently growing a NuMex Halloween for a bonchi, although I'm not sure if it'll ever be one now.

The pods looked like miniature upright bell peppers (but still black and orange), and when I tasted one they had no heat.  I contacted NMSU CPI about it, they said it was unlike anything they had seen before, and it must be a mutant.

Needless to say, with a cool one of a kind sweet ornamental pepper, I'm going to pimp it for seeds and see if I can grow out a stable strain.  Who knows though, part of making a bonchi is pruning, and pruning does help keep disease at bay, increases vigor, and gives me plenty of cuttings to try and root...

Hmmm... good point.  I pulled that stuff and replaced it with some tiny little things growing in the loose powdery gravel in my driveway.  I figure if it can grow on top of asphault in dust, it can survive a pepper's watering schedule. 

Growing bonchi directly in bonsai pots is definitely not recommended, not from me anyway.  You want to grow them in real soil outside so they can get as big as they possibly can before you cut them back.  The pepper trunk will virtually stop growing completely once you cut it back and put it in the bonsai pot, and it will never get really thick being grown in one from scratch.  The reason is the trunk gets thicker to deal with having to support a lot of weight above it.  That means to get the thickest, most tree-like trunks you can, you need to let the plant grow very tall and bushy so the trunk has a lot to support.  If you keep it small and in the bonsai pot from the start, the stem will have no reason to get thicker.

Chili peppers naturally grow in Y shapes, its just the nature of the plant.  However, you can train them to be straighter trunked by pruning off the lower branches as it grows.  If it doesn't have a pair of strong leads, it'll just keep growing straight.  Usually this isn't worth doing though, as you'll only need a straight piece of trunk at most a foot (1/3 meter) high for the bigger bonchi's.  However, I have seen pictures of a guy that did this to an extreme and made an honest to god pepper tree.  He said it was about 7 years old, and he had just been wintering it each season as a single straight stem, and it looked just like a fruit tree you'd buy from a nursery, it had to be over 6 feet (2 meters) tall.

Its difficult enough to find regular bonsai for sale, I wouldn't expect anyone to carry bonchi on a regular basis.  I wouldn't expect to see them anywhere, actually, its pretty niche.  You might find someone selling some at a pepper festival, but for now its pretty much you have to make your own.

Still waiting for my superhots for this round to sprout, and its getting to me.
So, in the mean time, I decided to fix up the first container.



Skull is stuffed with soil, and I've got some plugs of shade loving moss I harvested from the forest edge in there to hopefully spread around into a nice carpet by the end of the season.  Not only will it look cool, but it should help act as natural mulching as well.  Getting a kind of "body discovered out in the woods" vibe from it now, going to run with that.  Obviously this pot is not big enough for the final full sized Frankenpepper (which will be container grown so I can keep a greater degree of control over it), but it should do for the next several months while things get started.

The plant I overwintered last year was overall much healthier in it's potting soil than the bonchi I put in kittydama, so I'm planning on keeping this one in soil when I cut it back at the end of the year as well.  I'll need to see if I can find a suitably gothic/halloween/etc style pot of about this size to make a permanent home out of for it, so if you see one around the web that I could use, give a yell please.

Another thing I could use a hand with, decorations.  Since I'm getting a body in the woods vibe out of this, and I'll hopefully have a gnarled old looking pepper tree growing out of the skull, I think I want to keep that up.  I can take a hatchet with me next time I go hiking for a piece of deadwood to be a fallen tree trunk, or possibly a limb to stick in there as small dead tree, but I'm thinking I want something to balance it out on the other side.  Maybe an artifact of some kind, like half a pair of broken glasses sticking up, or... I don't know.  What kind of human artifacts (using artifact here in it's general form, as in an item made by humans, not like spearheads or vases) would work well with the theme, but still be small enough to be a decoration as opposed to the focus?

Oh yes, I will update as there is something worth updating.

Right now I've got my three chosen pepper seeds (bhut, butch T, and a 7-pot douglah) in a self watering starter, and I've cut the skull back even farther so it lays flatter, but really nothing to report as of yet.



My current plan is to sprout the seeds indoors and intentionally let them get a little on the leggy side (but not too much) before transplanting them into the skull in a medium sized container.  Let that go for a while until they're bigger.  I doubt they could be simply pressed together to get fusion, so once they have stems a few mm thick I'll cut them and tape them together to heal and hope for the best.  I've read that for complete approach grafting success in peppers I'll need to give them upwards of 4 weeks this way.  Shouldn't be a big deal.  After that, I'll start seeing about pruning to get a nice tree trunk appearance.

My biggest concern at the moment is that the nose in the skull is somewhat small in size, and worrying about if it will end up cutting into the stem of whichever pepper gets that hole.  I'm hoping they will all be firmly fused long before that though, so hopefully it won't be a problem in the end.

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!

Oh well, moot point now.

The problem got worse, living branches started wilting and dying and I finally got a good clear look at the cut stems.  They had a mold growing in them.  Oh well, my first bonchi is officially dead, had to pull it and get rid of it.

Oh well, I have a dozen more peppers I'm growing this year to replace it!

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?

Lainaus käyttäjältä: mohsart - joulukuu 02, 2011, 17:54:37 ip
FWIW, after cutting down the plants to Bonchi and continued spraying with soap water, I think I got rid of the spider mites as well.

/Mats

Very good news.

They could come back, but if it goes mite free for 10 days, you can safely assume the problem has been dealt with.

Lainaus käyttäjältä: Räyhis - marraskuu 23, 2011, 10:34:51 ap
I'm waiting for our friend Edymnion to make a X-mas bonchi. Santa Claus sleeping under a palm tree, taking this christmas as a holiday.

Can it be Santa's bleached bones laying on the beach?

Actually, I had a setup for a desert scene with a sweet cherry pepper on a small cow's skull I was going to do, but the plant didn't make it.  Long story short it got the worst case of aphids you ever saw, and by the time I had them under control every new shoot had been crippled, the big leaves were in sorry shape, had to just put it out of it's misery before it infected everything else I'm overwintering.

Oh well, the bonmato is dead.  When the cut finally stopped bleeding, the one sprig of life dried up as well.

Was rather surprised it lived as long as it did, and I have cuttings from it (that was my OSU/P20 Blue tomato), so no real concerns.

Longest I've heard of a pepper plant living was about 7-10 years, depending on the type (as in annuum vs. chinense vs. etc).  I would expect a bonchi to reach that same general lifespan as well, as long as its properly cared for that whole time of course.

Nevermind, looked up what they are, they wouldn't work for bonsai decoration, they get too large.

Inedible but harmless, I'll just keep weeding them out.

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?