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Four-Pepper False Start Glog

While I'm (successfully) growing plenty of herbs at the moment, the important stuff is obviously the peppers... and, since I'm pretty sure I baked the first set of seeds I attempted to germinate due to underestimating the power of my seedling heat mat after moving it into the grow tent, we're calling that a swing and a miss and moving on with Batch #2.
 
Tomorrow night they'll get the coffee-filter-in-a-baggie treatment and a hopefully-more-comfortable place in a lovely fluffy towel on the mat.
 
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CaneDog said:
Man, I wish i could figure the whole thing out. One plant has issues and the one right next to it doesn't. Some season's its more; others it's none. Haven't had much luck changing it when it happens, but ultimately it seems to end up like Paul says, they go outside and it's no longer an issue.
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You are right, CD. It's too easy to obsess over
small details when we are so close to the plants
all the time at this stage. Every little spot gets
noticed.   :rofl:
 
Hard to let Nature take its course, sometimes!
 
CDNmatt said:
That is actually one thing I though aboot pages ago, was wondering how difficult translations would be for you day to day. Like I suppose once your there long enough you start to get the language thing down  better as time goes on.
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That's more true for the spoken language... written Japanese is half Chinese-style characters (but only the important half; you know, nouns, verbs, things like that). So while I can read the phonetic stuff and probably a couple hundred characters, that's not nearly enough for things like electrical appliance instructions.
 
Or, it turns out, building security systems. Had to get on company chat to figure out how to open the office this morning, since I was the first one in and the door lock system doesn't exactly speak English.  :doh:
 
A slightly more fun update. I'm getting several shipments in tonight, one of which contains these:
 
pose-skeleton-tombstone.jpg
pose-skeleton-dude.jpg

 
The tombstone set also has some other little accessories with it; very traditional Japanese-style grave stuff. This toy line has a whole bunch of different scenes, even dog skeletons. It's pretty cool if you're into, you know, ridiculous little action figures. Which I absolutely am.
 
Point being, ever since seeing this ridiculously awesome bonchi, I've been looking for something similar to do. I'd really like to do something bigger, like having a plant growing through my favorite convenience store, but that's kind of a big starting point. This little tombstone is just over 4" tall, so I figured it'd be a good, not-overly-ambitious first attempt.
 
While the linked bonchi had the whole thing buried entirely in a pot, I don't really have room for a container deep enough to do that and still have plenty of depth for the roots once the tombstone has been cleared. So I'm planning to start with it sitting on the top level of the soil, wrap it in a seedling's roots, pack that over with a wet soil+perlite mix (which is what I've been using for everything), and wrap that in netting so I can water it without the soil running off until I start cutting away the netting.
 
Feel free to tell me which parts of this are abjectly stupid. 
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At the moment, the candidates I have are:
  • One fish pepper, which is big enough for repotting and in good condition.
  • Two white devil's tongue, one of which dropped most of its leaves and the other is a card-carrying member of the Edema Club.
  • Two goronong, both of which look good, but probably have another month before I'd repot them (during which time I kind of have to assume they'll develop some horrible disease).
Of course, waiting is technically an option. I could do this to one of the Sri Lanka Red sprouts I have when those are big enough for this kind of abuse, but I don't think I can just stare at this thing for that long. :D
 
PaulG said:
That bronchi page is awesome. Thanks for sharing that.
 
I think you should go for it. Why should he have all the fun?
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Sure! I actually got in touch with the guy that did that grow a while back to see how his newer one was going; it looked really, really cool. He said it was having some issues and an update was on the way, but that was a while ago, and I haven't seen anything from him since, unfortunately.
 
Definitely looking forward to trying this. I just wish the plants I already have were doing better... hopefully the recent changes help.
 
That tombstone set is crazy - is that a skeleton suplex they posed out?  You're getting me wanting to do a bonchi setting now too, though my original plan was to prep the plants outside over the summer to build trunks and roots.  I'll just console myself that in the meantime I'll get to see all the cool stuff you're doing and hopefully that will give me more ideas when I finally get to it.
 
My $0.02 is I'd pick a plant that seems really happy under your inside conditions, because you'll want one that looks its best.
 
CaneDog said:
That tombstone set is crazy - is that a skeleton suplex they posed out?  You're getting me wanting to do a bonchi setting now too, though my original plan was to prep the plants outside over the summer to build trunks and roots.  I'll just console myself that in the meantime I'll get to see all the cool stuff you're doing and hopefully that will give me more ideas when I finally get to it.
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Haha, yep! Don't know why they chose the suplex to stick on the packaging cover, but that does make it about twice as awesome.
 
I expect to make plenty of mistakes for everyone to learn from, so yeah, keep an eye out. ;)
 
CaneDog said:
My $0.02 is I'd pick a plant that seems really happy under your inside conditions, because you'll want one that looks its best.
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Yeah, absolutely. This might just be a coincidence, but it seems like the only peppers that have been doing well are annuums; my one baccatum is in the worst shape, and most of the chinense are at very least unhappy, but the annuums seem fine. Hoping that bodes well for the Sri Lanka Red. Based on that, the fish pepper would probably be the best choice for this one.
 
Also, actual updates! Kinda.
 
After adding fertilizer to one of the bottle experiments, it pretty much went insta-algae. My understanding is this is probably not a big deal for the plant, but I'm still going to change out the water and get the bottle wrapped up to minimize this. The plant itself is doing OK, though, and the Zapotec jalapeno I put in the other plug is sending up sprouts, so that's also working as intended.
 
lovely-plug-algae.jpg

 
Here's the bottom shelf (apologies for the blurple glow; at night I can't get a useful picture in that room without it). In the back right, as always, the lavender is doing fine. Back left is the (now topped) fish pepper that should be getting the tombstone bonchi treatment within a week or so. To his right are the three Japanese bell peppers, which are doing well; in the lower right are the Sri Lanka Red kids. Lower left are my suffering devil's tongue seedlings, and above them, the goronongs.
 
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The most exciting plant-related thing that's happened recently, though, was finding this guy for about 9 USD.
 
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It's a plum tree, which are almost as famous as cherry blossoms here for their petal drops. My pie-in-the-sky if-I-were-rich to-do list involves a yard with one of each, so I'm kinda sorta half way there! If you ignore the rich part and the part where this tree is tiny. So hopefully I can keep him from dying long enough for him to get nice and big and hell to freeze over.
 
CaneDog said:
That's a cool little patio area.  Not a ton of space to work with, but good to see you guys taking advantage of it.  What direction is the exposure?
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I guess I can see how it looks like that, but the thing on the right is the corner of the house; there's literally just that little strip of rocks running down the side and around the back, and it narrows toward the front, so this is as big as it gets.
 
This area is slightly recessed into an alley; behind my back when I was taking the picture is the street. This area gets exposure to the south-southwest, so it should have a reasonable amount of sun, despite being tucked away a bit. Putting it out front wouldn't really have been feasible, since we get quite a lot of wind and traffic, and we already have a problem with the occasional plant falling over.
 
PaulG said:
Looks like things are coming along nicely, 'Fish!
 
That little plum tree is a beautiful specimen!
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Yeah, things seem to be looking up a bit. :) We're very happy with that tree! Hopefully it's just as happy with us.
 
The jalapenos in the plastic bottle plug have jumped out and will need to be thinned soon (THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!), and both the Japanese bell peppers and goronongs are looking really good, and the fish pepper is looking decent as well. Planning to give away one of the bells (I have three) and bag up the rest; my two white devil's tongues will have to wait a bit for the next bag shipment to arrive, which is fine, since they need recovery time anyway.
 
Speaking of which, I think getting air flow through the tent and dropping the humidity has helped everyone quite a bit. New growth is looking good all around, so that's exciting! The chocolate habs and the purple UFO are big enough that I'd expect them to be flowering by now, though they aren't. The CGN 21500's were flowering, but they had to be cut back quite a bit, so that's delayed. Still not 100% sure the lemon drops are going to be viable, but their new growth also looks OK, so maybe I'm back on track?
 
Either way, the office 21500 is doing well.
 
office-cgn-21500.jpg

 
It's had a little bit of flower drop, but only a little. Hoping it'll start setting pods within a week or two.
 
Oh! The Sri Lanka Reds are working on their first true leaves. They've moved to the top shelf with the big kids and are looking quite happy there, though it'll be a while before they're big enough for their own bags.
 
Finally, in the spirit of randomness, I've been indulging my sous vide compulsion. This week I've done pork shoulder, octopus, and chicken breast two ways (one basil and olive oil, one Creole and hot sauce).
 
sous-vide-resurgence.jpg
 
Sous Vide cooking is awesome. Our neighbor has a
sous vide unit. Great stuff comes out of it  :party:
 
that office plant really is awesome. What size pot is it in?
 
PaulG said:
that office plant really is awesome. What size pot is it in?
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Err, ahh... whatever size pot my wife left laying around and wasn't paying attention to right before I threw a pepper plant in it and ran out the door to catch the bus one morning, I guess. 
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It's something like 5" across, I think. Really not sure. It's not particularly large; didn't figure my coworkers would want an entire window obscured by peppers.
 
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