Hi there, Me and my friend have been discussing growing some weed, as the price of bud here in Wales is pretty steep compared to growing it yourself! We can't grow our Cannabis indoors, because we both still live at home with our parents, so we decided on an outdoor grow. After some research on the internet, I have found a strain which apparently grows well outdoors in the UK; The strain is called Lowryder, and it seems perfect for us to use. It grows 30-50cm, which is nice as this means it's not tall enough to be noticed by other stoners (or police...) Here's a link to it, it's the last strain, at the bottom of the page: Best Outdoor Cannabis Seed Strains for UK and Ireland However, I have never grown Cannabis before and I am wondering how difficult an outdoor grow in the UK would be. (I live in North Wales, btw.) On the website listed above, it is stated that Lowryder doesn't need much maintenance - has anyone had experience with this particular (or a similar) strain? What I'm really getting at here is how often I would need to check up on the plant. Would I need to water it, or would the rain be sufficient? The area we intend to grow in is a wooded area, where nobody goes. There are however, trees everywhere, which could effect the amount of light/rain the plant can access. We'll obviously try and plant the seed in a place where there is as much sky above as possible, but will water-trips be required? Any other tips are appreciated, as it's my first grow I'm not quite sure how I should go about this. I have researched it a lot online but I still have many questions, hopefully which some of you can answer! Thanks in advance!
I used to have an outdoor grow back when i lived in Jamaica when i was 16, took hardly any maintenance. I tryed an outdoor in England but it took forever, plus where were you thinking of putting an outdoor grow, surely your parents would see?
the problem we have in the uk is that the autumn gets really cold really early and really screws up the last few weeks of budding. its can be ok if your lucky and early finishers are a must auto plants are gods gift to uk outside growers. i have never grown lowryder, it has many bad reviews, but lowryder#2 (a lowryder X santa maria) is a great breed, i have grown this outside many times. start them any time in the year and they will finish 70 days later, not quite what the breeder reckons, 60 days is never enough as for picking your spot, select an area that is south facing, on a hill, well drained soil and amongst brambles or other thorny plants. if nettles are growing you know you have great soil, they have very similar requirements. once planting out the seeds you will need to return to pull out the males at 3 weeks but checking up on them as often as you can is worth doing anyway in case any adjustments need to be done. adding raw fertiliser is often a good idea but not always necessary, depending how good the soil is you may be at risk of deer, sheep and rabbits, so that is worth looking in to. thorny and stinging plants will help here
Thanks for the replies, very informative! There are many nettles around where we plan to grow, but the earth is quite hard, so would using my own soil be better? I'll be sure to grow in a south-facing area. So should rain water be enough to water the plant or should me and my mate water the plant manually?
lowryder sux, lowryder #2 is slightly better but also sux. ifyou want an auto, go with a newer strain like dutch passion's automazar and think different or paradise seeds' pandora. there are others that are good, too, but you always gotta google for grower feedback from different sources. Im not sure about your weather, never been to the UK, but if your growing season is as long as the first or second week of october, then regular photoperiod strains would work, too. I loved the only one Ive tried so far, which is dutch passion's frisian dew. the biggest issue with outdoor growing in bad climate is mold towards harvest, so its best to get a fast flowering strain to avoid as much shitty weather as possible. if you want photoperiod strains to stay small, you just gotta plant them late so they dont have much time to grow before flowering. please check out all the stickies in the outdoor, organics, training and otherwise related forum sections, theyre super informative.
I like the Ryder strains from World Of Seeds, Afghan Kush Ryder does well outdoor UK. Purple Maroc from Femaleseeds is also a great choice, its not an auto but it finishes fast (can get big)
lowryder#2 certainly does not "sux". if if its giving you poor bud then your growing it wrong. I grow it pretty often and the quality is great. using your own soil is probably going to give you an advantage. dig out a hole and mix in some compost with the original soil. I always recommend adding perlite to help with drainage when growing indoors but it really stands out when used outdoors so your better off using pea gravel instead but you can certainly get away without it . you will most likely not need to water, especially if there are nettles around. but on hot spells its worth checking up on them. I mix in water crystals with mine. these absorb water when the soil is wet and slowly release it when the soil dries out
Thanks for the information - I appreciate it! When do you think would be the best time to plant the seeds? I think I'll use Lowryder #2, how many weeks does it take to flower enough to harvest? Generally I've heard you can harvest on the 9th week, is this true? I was thinking planting in April/May and harvesting in June/July, could this work?
they have been pretty much spot on 70 days for me. you could theoretically harvest whenever you want but the earlier you harvest the less bud you will get. 70 days works for me if the temperature never gets above 15'c they won't grow. they can withstand a drop in temps at night as long as it gets at least 15'c in the day. the hotter the better, north wales will never get too hot for them lol. April/may should be great. what about starting them indoors to give them a week or so head start in the warm? if I were you I would make seeds with your first harvest, get yourself a few hundred seeds and then you can plant out shit loads of them. you will need to because they don't give up a lot of bud per plant when grown in the UK
I can't start my plant indoors because my parents won't allow me to grow weed. I was thinking I could use the paper-towel method then plant the seed? Or would just planting the seed straight into soil work too? What would be a decent estimation of how many grams of bud you can harvest per plant when grown in the UK? I've heard of people getting 300 grams from one Lowryder plant in the US, but I'm not expecting anywhere near that as the UK has a shitty climate
you ahould definitly find a spot where you can plant your seeds in pots and keep an eye on them for 2 weeks at least. if you plant seeds straight into the ground, the success rate would be down from about 95% to probably about 20% depending on the spot. seeds bought in small numbers at high prices should always be cared for during their seedling stage. also I recommend you soak the seeds in water for 24 hours, then plant them in soil or even better a peat pellet ( less nutrients, higher germination rate) and then soil, rather than the paper towel method. 300g from a lowryder is bullshit, Ive heard of a mutant automazar yielding that with overkill lighting in hydro though. with early (seriously, they suck) auto strains like lowryder #2 you can expect 5-25g per plant (or less, but that counts as a vomplete failure to me) in your conditions, better auto strains would yield 15-50g and photoperiod strains grown larger would yield 50-150g.
leave the paper towel method to school children's science class. it's completely unnecessary to germinate seeds and its just extra dicking about. I simply drop a seed about an inch deep in light compost, peat or coco fibre and water thoroughly if you don't have anywhere to keep seedlings then I think your best to dig an area of about 1foot cube and fill it in with a mix of the original soil and some decent compost. then make a hole of about 4inches and fill that with peat or coco fibre, then put the seed in that. indoors lowryder #2 can easily give you over an oz each. growing outside there are far more variables to its really hard to give an estimate. get it all right and you could be looking at 2 oz per plant however getting 1oz would be a win. so many things can go wrong that will cause you to get less bud. sometimes we can have 4 weeks straight of rain. if that happens when the plants are say 4 weeks old then that's it, no bud for you. UK weather is notoriously unpredictable 10 oz from one lowryder? that just didn't happen, I don't believe them at all. where did you hear that?
Yeah, UK weather sucks dick... Thanks for the info though, I'll bear that in mind when it comes to planting I read that people often get 100-300g per plant on multiple seed-selling websites, in the description for Lowryder. I thought it seemed a lot but as I've never grown Cannabis before I don't really have any idea of how much to expect per plant haha.
generally you shouldnt believe anything you read on the breeder's or seebank's websites. there are some exceptions like the breeder mr. nice that actually write a tiny little bit of negative stuff about their seeds as well, but even with those I would never rely on the seller's information. always use google to find grower feedback on unaffiliated sites.
Yeah, I guess the sellers tend to be pretty biased huh.. Would be nice to see some real feedback here, apart from Lowryder #2, has anyone had personal experience with a strain that grows well outdoors in the UK? I guess it's down to the weather more than anything, but having a strain which is adapted to grow in high temperature conditions certainly isn't going to help
I've read about Purple Maroc, was originally going to choose this strain to grow, however I've come to the conclusion that auto-flowering would probably be a better option, as in the UK the "hot" part of summer only seems to be pretty short, so not much time to waste waiting for it to flower (I know you can force a plant to flower straight away, however that's impractical for me because the area where I'm growing is a ballache to get to and from all the time)
go check out the outdoor growing section, theres a thread of strain reviews and I also remember a huge thread for UK outdoor growers which I believe contains a lot of grow journals and reviews to which you should be able to relate. if youre gonna go with autos, choose one that has several reviews marking it as a good yielder. most autos are gonna do ok outdoors especially if you time them so that flowering is entirely in summer. besides an auto strain that doesnt work outdoors is pretty much pointless because growing autos indoors is, so its not very likely to get good rep. dont just go with one strain because one source said it was good outdoors, especially since autos are getting better every year so what was the best strain five years ago could well be significantly surpassed by several newer strains now. again, what Ive read about lowryder #2 is that its notably better than lowryder #1, but by now there are much better strains.
autos can't be cloned (due to it being impossible to keep in a veg state) so all auto strains are likely to get better and better as the years pass. I breed autos and always pick the best plants for breeding so every generation the breed gets better and better. as for non autos, early misty, northern lights and ak47 seem to do well in the uk
inability to clone is not the reason for new auto strains being better than old ones, although I imagine is does considerably hinder the breeding process. the thing is that breeders are managing to retain the autoflowering characteristic while breeding in more and more of the good photoperiod lines. back when autos were first released (I believe lowryder was the first auto strain), they were like half wild autoflowering cannabis ruderalis. newer strains have a much lower percentage of genes from C. ruderalis, which makes for much better yields of much more potent bud and in a few years the percentage of ruderalis genes in new strains will be even lower and the yield even better. so you breed autos, huh? do you only cross autos with autos or do you cross autos with photos? does the offspring autoflower reliably?
I don't get your point, those two facts are not mutually exclusive I have bred many generations of lowryder#2. and are currently locking down the auto trait with two separate crosses but they are a long way from being finished