False start

Season 2013 seems to have taken a false start as the word of my hobby has reached some of my relatives. As a result I got two healthy looking sprouts on my birthday. This will lead to some special arrangements on my behalf as I was already conserned with the tight space on the ones I plan to grow this season and now I have two extra plants.

Chichen Itza and Trinidad Scorpion are both supposed to be really hot and they're quite far from the usual mild-medium heat ones I've grown so we'll see what I will do with the fruits. I'm going to plant the first seeds of season 2013 in 10 days.

Season's greetings

The day grows short before getting longer again. At the moment the lenght of the day is 5 hours 47 minutes and that is showing on the progress of my bonchis. Pepper has some wrinkly leaves and has nearly stopped growing any new ones. Salt is doing slightly better thanks to a daily dose of artificial light from my desktop study light. The start of grow season 2013 is getting near so my next update will propably be about ferminating the seeds. I haven't yet decided what to do with these two once I need the space and pots for my new sprouts.

Salt & Pepper

A small status update on my project. I've removed the copper wiring from "Pepper" and it seems to hold the wanted shape quite well. The wiring left some shallow marks on the stem and I fear the copper wire I bought is too thin for this purpose so I might experiment with tin solder next. The top is near the intended height of the plant so I plan to start trimming it soon to see if I can get it to grow more bushy. "Salt" has some nice growth after I cut the remaining larger leaves.

Wiring

The bigger plant I had growing in the larger pot got the axe last night and joined my bonchi experiment. It seemed like the stem wasn't getting any stronger and the plant just kept hogging all the space without producing any crop since there's so little light. I finally tried some wiring with the aim of getting the brach to bend down a little and to fill the larger gap "behind" the plant. I chose 0.6mm copper wire which is a little tough to form but holds it nicely when you get it done. 0.4mm may shape better but I'm afraid it would be too weak to hold the branch in place.

I find naming plants to be a silly thing but for future reference I shall call them Salt & Pepper based on the color of their pots.

Reading

I was reading some wiring tips from Fatalii's Growing Guide last night and decided to post an update on those small leaves branching out from my bonchi tree. There is no rules on how to do it but to my understanding the main point of wiring would be to get the branches to take a more tree like shape instead of just growing upwards. It's still a bit early for that but planning ahead never hurts and wiring will be the next stage in the project if everything continues to go as planned.

Overview

I find it a bit funny that all this time I've been talking about the growth season being over while my other plant is not showing any signs of slowing down its growth. While the other plants grew tall and reached the top of my window this one seems to be growing like a mural and slowly spreading along my window still. It might have something to do with the fact that it doesn't have to compete for the light with other plants or it will just grow differently because it's grown from the top of my bonchi project tree which is doing nicely in the middle.

Branching out

It's now been 8 days since I cut my bonchi -project tree into a "stump" and it looks to be taking it really well judging from all those new branches showing up from the base of the existing leaves. I haven't tried anything fancy with the roots since this is only a trial plant. Trimming the roots and exposing the top ones only make sense if I was planning to move it to a shallow bonzai pot. I read that placing round stones under the roots would be a good way to grow some really good looking roots on your bonchi. So far so good