Create a jungle of chiles from a single bonchi -motherplant!
The ideal way to multiply your plants is to have one plant from each of your favorite variety for over the winter.
To have access to the best varieties available,
take a look at this page: fatalii.net/seeds
I prefer creating Bonchi's from the harvested plants in the autumn.
To put it simple, this means cutting your large favorite plants way down and repot them into tiny pots for easy overwintering and decorating purposes.
This also allows you to have some nice urban gardening to do during the winter, or any other time of the year! Very fun stuff!
Here's how the results may look after just 5-10 months from a seed or a cutting!
The plant on the left is started from a cutting same way explained below.
You can still see the basic shape the cutting looked like.
This is how you can affect the looks of your plant by selecting the cuttings you choose.
The plant on the right is unique as I germinated 2 seeds and attached them to each which caused them to fuse together.
This took just 10 months, from a seed!
Bonchi's are ideal also because it doesn't matter which time of the year you will start your season!
They will be very easy to keep alive just under cheap fluorescent tubes for example when there's no sun available.
Small plants can be easily placed to a shelf, windowsill etc.
Instructions for creating your own Bonchi plants here: fatalii.net/bonchi
You can also use a large plant as a mother plant,
but that will be much more difficult to overwinter as a mother plant because of the watering and fertilizing can cause problems with low light conditions.
Large plants need way more artificial light unlike Bonchi's.
It's very hard to keep large plants looking beautiful during overwintering.
So I highly recommend bonchis for mother plants for every possible reason!
You can have a windowsill of your favorite varieties and then take cuttings from them at the spring
to grow jungle from every favorite variety.
Keep in mind that taking cuttings from a mature plants allows you to grow plants much faster than from a seed!
Here's how to proceed:
First, let's take a Bonchi that needs to be pruned.
Then, cut the long branches to make the plant look better, these branches will be your new plants for the sunny season, just a little later!
Okay, I got 13 nice branches to make cuttings from.
13 huge plants in the autumn (lets say 10 if some of them won't root) will produce a huge amount of yield! All started from your Bonchi plant (preferably).
The bonchi plant looks much better now.
after a week or two I can take approximately same amount of cuttings from it again!
To encourage the growth on the motherplant, use nitrogen-based fertilizer (I prefer BioBizz Gro or Biosevia Gro).
This ensures you will have a nice amount of foliage for cuttings.
This is how one individual branch looks like, I will trim it just a little to have better changes of rooting.
After trimming it looks like this:
I simply removed the lowest leaves and cutted the largest leaves in half, as you can see on the picture.
I did this because the changes of rooting are much better when the plant has only smaller leaves to support while trying to create some roots.
Large leaves will most likely just dropp off unless cut in half.
Something roughly around 4-6 total leaves is just fine for rooting purposes.
You have many available methods for rooting your cuttings, perhaps the easiest way is to leave them to a glass of water and have some light for them. Eventually, they will start to form some roots.
Some varieties root very easily after few days, and some take a very long time or won't root at all.
Most often, chile cuttings root just fine.
Here are alternative methods for rooting:
https://fatalii.net/growing/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=32
What I did in this example, was that I used a rockwool cubes. I actually used cubes that had nongerminated seeds in them, I simply threw away the old seeds. New ones will do just as fine! :)
I poked a hole inside the rockwool cube, just make it tight for the cutting.
At this point, you can use rooting hormone if you have any, in most cases thhe cuttings will root just fine without it. They might just take a little more time.
Here's the cutting in a rockwool cube.
Repeat the method above for all the seedlings you took, this actually happens very quickly after taking few cuttings at first.
If you used the rockwool method, place the cuttings inside a germinating tray or similar container with a lid. Make sure the air will circulate even when the the tray will hold the most of the humidity inside.
It's ideal for the leaves to have access to very humid air when there are no roots.
Here's how the open tray looks like with the cuttings:
They will most likely root just fine in a water cup in a room conditions without a tray. It's just if you want to maximize the amount of rooted cuttings, you can do as I do. I also like that the cuttings root before the bonchi/motherplant has produced more stems for the cuttings.
After a week or two the plants look like this:
The good side with the rockwool / water cup is that they can be directly planted into a soil, hydro or passive hydro without any problems.
Good luck with the jungle of your favorite varieties.
If you don't have your favorite varieties just yet, you can find them here:
https://fatalii.net/seeds
if you need help with the selections, just drop me an email to fatalii at sci.fi and I will help you!