Most of the active roots are re-buried, leaving what you see here up top to lignify. I also made sure to fan the rest of the roots out across the face of the mountain, hopefully they'll thicken up nicely in the next couple of months and really look nice for my next pulldown.

Its just a Masquerade ornamental pepper I picked up a couple months ago at the hardware store. Grew it out some, shaped it up, tossed it in a spare pot with whatever random decoration I could find (a cow skull aquarium decoration, in this case). I'll try and find something a little more suited next time I go out.

Anyway, point is this pepper can't be more than 6 months old, and I got it 90% grown to this size for a couple bucks at a hardware store nursery. Bonchi (bonsai chile) is a nice cheap way to practice, without the need to risk hurting expensive/time intensive trees. And the results aren't half bad, considering ultimately how little effort you have to put into them.

Just pulled down the soil level and repositioned the roots again last night.

Before:

After:

And the best part is, its darned near impossible to actually kill an adult pepper from chopping it back. Pretty sure you could cut it down practically to the ground and it would just grow right back.

Very forgiving plants, they make yummy fruit for you to eat, and they'll live upwards of 10 years if you don't let them freeze. So its not like you're wasting effort, once you get an impressive looking bonchi, you can keep it around for as long as most people manage to keep a regular bonsai alive.

My bonsai soil tends to contain more organics than normal, usually a .66/.33 of fired clay and orchid mix.

Not quite sure how I'll fill the inside of the mountain on this one yet though.

Hopefully they'll leaf out in a week or 2. I still have about 6 more to chop & experiment with so the fun is just beginning -_-

Antoinette

As you can see, its leafing back out nicely, especially given the overall cooler temperatures we have here right now.

Laura