I decided to journal this grow, but a little different from the past. I just want a place to keep occasional pics and possibly a rant or two. I am not going to try to be regular or detailed about what I am doing, unless someone asks. Which anyone is free to do. Brief background: I am on a two or so year mission to run a lot of strains through my cabinet and settle on a half dozen or so to keep and grow, hopefully forever. With this grow, my fifth, I am headed into year two. I have a healthy batch of moms, and the strain competition will become a fight to take slots away from my almost full shelf of mothers. I had planned, with Sterces, a run of God Bud, but the seeds failed both of us. So I decided to fill in this space in my grow schedule with clones off my mothers. Hence the name: send in the clones. I had grown out a clone or two to run outdoors, but until this round I had not tried flowering cuts off my moms in my flower cabinet. That is what this grow is about. Kind of a proof of concept for me of my long-range plan, to get mostly past seeds and just run my own clones. I use recycled organic super soil, smart pots, tropf blumats, water only added for "nutes" with occasional top dress of organic soil constituents and teas, if and only if I feel they are needed. More details on my extremely LVTFA grow style and environment are in my first grow thread and then scattered throughout my other journals. Let the pics begin! I have kind of gone crazy with the joy of photographing the herb...
My favorite strain from my first grow, Sagarmatha's Blue Thunder (Matanuska Tundra x Blueberry). I was hooked right away by the sturdy, consistent indica structure and the heavy crystals. Now I get to see how my chosen mother will do making clones. So far, so good. By the way, all the days I list will be from the flip to 12/12.
My favorite from my second grow, TGA/Subcool's The Flav (Romulan x Space Queen). Actually this was the only strain that emerged from my second grow; I couldn't get Reeferman's Harmony to pop ($$$). Maybe next time. Meanwhile, the Flav has become a fav. My cured buds have a kind of ripe banana smell, and an excellent, balanced stone. We shall see how this particular mom/clone turns out. Again, so far, so good.
I have seven plants, seven strains running, but for now I'll just stop documenting with this,Nirvana's PPP, from my third grow. It has been overall my strongest plant in terms of growth habit and resilience. However, neither the inside run I did this summer, which I FU'd by nearly frying when gone for a week, nor the outdoor plant I successfully pulled in October, have given me the buds and buzz I would like. Their aroma is great, almost perfumy, and I got some purple on the outside plant...and a lot of bud. But the buzz just isn't there. And I never felt things were getting as frosty as I would have liked. This clone is from a different plant than either my past inside or outside grow. And so far, it looks very promising for frostiness....maybe I got lucky and got the right PPP mom after all.
From my last run of haze hybrids (which went really well), my favorite was DNA Genetics' Chocolope (O.G. Chocolate Thai x Cannalope Haze = D-Line aka Chocolope). So I've included a cut in this grow. I had topped this clone once or twice, thinking it would become the mum. But another one took its place there, so this plant started flowering as a small plant with small leaves and a lot of bud sites. A main grow question for me will be how the bud turns out with that kind of start. In contrast, in my previous grow, I let Chocolope develop a single main cola, which was big and delicious.
SAGE is one of the two plants in this grow that I previously started with great anticipation, but didn't get to finish fully. Despite its reputation for resilience, I managed to dry it out and burn it up last run in a period of mis-set waterers. I still have high hopes for it. My main nostalgic bud quest is to reconstruct the bright green, very fresh (and as I recall, piney, but maybe not) sensi that we got in my area in 1979 for the first time. And, for me, those couple of bags were the ONLY time for that strain, whatever it was. Was it a mexican sativa from the east coast mexican cartel? Some hybrid grown in Hawaii? or a Cal sensi strain? I don't know, but 30+ years later I'm still in the hunt, and SAGE is one of my contendas to recreate that "snow of yesteryear."
I have grown out the Big Buddha Cheese, but I mishandled the one plant I grew before. The buds had their distinctive cheese taste, but they weren't perfectly finished. So I am trying again, from the mom I kept. But I have had more problems with this plant than any of the other six. The lower foilage yellowed very early. The buds themselves are barely showing crystals at what should be half-way through. So I am starting to think I need to rerun a bunch of seeds and find a different mom. This strain is so highly regarded worldwide that I feel certain I just didn't look hard enough for that mom. We'll see....
Drool! anything special you have planned in that mad scientist grow brain of yours marapa? Or anything new you plan to try such as grow techniques, amendments, fpes and such? ERMhh Prolly not since you want a chilled grow experience lol
DG, I don't have any big experiments running this time. I am using double smarties (smartie in smartie) which is nothing new in itself, but I think I have settled on the right size combo for my cabinet, and I am really trying to tweak the auto watering--kind of tricky with the double smarties. I have added a few additional blumat emitters so I can have one emitter in each ring of each plant (total of 14). The other thing I am doing is checking the temp, humidity and CO2 logs very carefully every day and making adjustments as needed. For the three plants I had (Cheese, Smile and PPP) that were showing yellow leaves too early for my tastes, I added a tiny bit of molasses and epsom salt in a hand watering. SO really nothing like mad science here, it's more just trying to get the basic environmental inputs as dialed in as possible before I start my next seed run, sometime early in the New Year I hope! thanks for asking....
Thanks, Sterces...that means a lot coming from you, up n of 49 and with your demonstrated frost fu skills. Where I am, it's nearly Dec and we still haven't had a hard frost. Here's the last plant of this run of clones, in some ways the most important to me. It's Smile, a spanish (Kannabia) strain that is billed as a re-creation of Yumboldt, famous classic Humboldt county indica. Hence my interest--could it be like that fresh green Norcal sensi of yesteryear? Well, I've been around the cannabis block long enough now to know that anyone's "re-creation" of a strain may have very few things in common with the original, especially when I have only one seed to run. But another aspect of my interest in Smile is that I grew that seed back in the spring, and put a clone outdoors...but I had to abandon that spot for security' sake. So this is the first chance I have had to see how the plant grows out. So far, I like the smell on the 4th-5th internode stalk. But the flowering structure is looser and more satty than I expected, and I don't think the blossoms are going to look at all like the picture of Yumboldt I have seen, from the first Big Book of Buds. Time will tell..
Hello Marapa, Glad to see the GB recovery grow is going so well. >>Thanks, Sterces...that means a lot coming from you, Flattery will get you nowhere. Someday we'll go toe to toe and settle this once and for all. >> Where I am, it's nearly Dec It's a small world after all. Where I am it's nearly December too! >>we still haven't had a hard frost. We still don't have any snow on the ground and it keeps raining. They are saying warmest November ever. I'm not complaining. A harsh November makes for a long winter. Good luck on the rest of the grow. Sterces.
Glad it's working for you, DG. Sorry for the dog hair in there. They are pretty much everywhere around the grow despite my attempts to keep the guard pooch at least a couple rooms away...I suppose it's a good sign of stickiness.
a lot of good chatter over in Stankie's thread about the choices that G-man has in buying a camera to take bud pics got me fired up to do some experimenting. I am absolutely convinced that most people, def including moi, can improve their photography more by learning to get more out of their existing gear than by buying new gear. With that truism in mind, I stopped dreaming of better, faster, sharper lenses (for the moment) and decided to try some standard bud shots of the type I do and hope always to take with different lenses I already have. So here's a first run at this. If you read this and have preferences, please let me know All images are Blue Thunder at day 35, ISO 100, aperture 7.1, speed 1/125. Taken under the HPS, no other lighting. Same custom color balance in camera for both shots. kit zoom lens canon 60mm macro lens (ef-s, not a pro l series lens) kit, same as first image, but cropped and zoomed for a cu 60mm macro, same as second image, cropped and zoomed obviously the macro lens is sharper in the plane of focus on the closeup, which finding matters a lot to me, but isn't necessarily the whole story.
I'd say the macro lens is a lot sharper and more clear. I still only have my kit lenses. I honestly think I have reached the best I can get out of them. It's time for new glass, but I got other bills and things demanding money now. Kit lens for the time being . . . . . I almost ordered that Blue Thunder last week.
Thanks for the feedback, Stankie. I agree with you. But I realize now I should have more carefully lined up the focal length on the kit zoom lens to match the macro lens. I don't know whether the differences in depth of field come from the lens design or the different focal length. Ah well, soon time for another experiment. I'd like a super wide angle lens to get shots in the tight space in and around my cabinet, and somehow that "Tokina" brand just sounds right for reefer glass I enjoyed the Blue Thunder when I first ran it, in grow one, started I think exactly a year ago today, but of course I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. So I'm even more interested to see this time how it turns out, when I have slightly more idea...
I only vegged one of these plants, Smile, on the far left, for any significant time. Everything else got flipped one or two weeks after being rooted. I'm still trying to figure out how crowded is "too crowded" given my grow goal, which is getting good samples of bud from each strain...not maximizing yield. So far, so good with this run...some tiny plants, but the bud development looks decent throughout (except for the laggard Cheese, which I'm about to rename "Velveeta")