Send in the clones

LD,

thanks for posting this. I love what you are doing with basic ingredients, plus the thought process, not to mention the experience, that goes into how you use them. You've changed and simplified my whole approach to growing. If I ever scale up my cloning and go to solid media I will remember this. For now I use this little aero cloner I built, and use water only. Works well, but is limited in the number of cuts I can handle.



By the way, I am REAL excited by those Sour Diesel and Alien Dawg cuts in there at the moment

 

For me, SD, I have not taken vows and so don't consider myself a practicing Buddhist. I am not in a sangha. There are communities of practicing Buddhists around me, though I expect nothing like the rich spiritual culture of the Pac Northwe(s)t. Or for that matter the Hawaiian Islands where I think you are.

I do believe the theologian Thomas Berry was right in his book The Great Work when he said that the biggest challenge facing our species is getting our religious traditions and beliefs better aligned with what science has shown us about the relationship between humans and the rest of nature in the past couple hundred years. Especially the science of ecology. I do think the Buddhists already are the most open and ready to embrace all that science offers. Still I personally have trouble committing to worship services where everyone intones liturgies, does ritual prostrating and other mystical practices, etc. It's probably just the stubborn "raised as a protestant" skeptic in me.

I do appreciate the honor of having, as LD mentioned, His Holiness the Dalai Lama visiting one's area and getting to be around him. I haven't been so fortunate. I have a little shrine of sorts to him right across from where I sit and type this, complete with photos and ritual objects. I just don't use the ritual objects. I have seen the "10 Questions" documentary and have even visited the Potala and the Jokhang. By way of reading, another book of his that I recommend is "Kindness, Compassion and Insight." The clarity of his thoughts is amazing.

 

Stankie, coming from you that really makes me happy. When I first got on here a year or so ago, you posted some nature shots that helped me get excited about this place, and ever since then I have admired your eye and your skills with a camera.

So as a little tribute to all that and your home state, here's a couple pics of Mt. Massive I tried to stitch together a few years back from the porch of one of the 10th mt division huts up in Summit County....I think it was Uncle Bud's Hut! Today I would probably have to be airlifted in there , but for a few years some of my best times each winter were skiing up into the Rockies...

 

I chopped Blue Thunder and PPP yesterday, at Day 53 of flowering. One day earlier than my first run of Blue Thunder. My first run of PPP inside, it got nearly fried, so I ignore that timing. I ran it (different pheno) outside and harvested over several weeks, so again hard to compare.

What is easy to compare is that the buds on both this time are much beefier than before. I'm looking forward to tasting both of them....but for now, they are hanging.

Here's Blue Thunder after pre-hang trimming. I trimmed pretty close because of the bud thickness. I am going to try to dry them for the first stage (3-4 days) pretty fast.



Here's PPP.



I didn;t schedule this grow as carefully as I prolly orta. I am taking a break to visit some family for a week in a few days, and had hoped to get everything down and hanging before then. I don't think it's gonna happen. SAGE, at least, looks like it wants to run for awhile. Less clear on Cheese, Smile and The Flav.

 

It's a few days to Christmas and almost the time for that ultimate buzzkill, the crosscountry flight. This year though I think my flying partners Cannabutta and CocoCannaCaps will help me handle it ok.

The muthers are trimmed and just hanging out. Some of the cuts are potted and others staying in the cloner, in hopes that one or the other approach will get them through a week without a grower.



After much mulling I chopped The Flav, leaving SAGE, Cheese, Chocolope and Smile in the flowering chamber by themselves for the next week. Get big and strong, budz! SAGE is looking really tasty at Day 56:



We shall see at Day 63, when I will next check in with them and with the City....I am wishing you all a mellow, happy, peaceful yuletide

 

Stankie, I chickened out of medicating on the way west, remembering a couple of times flying this time of year when all hell broke lose, I got stuck in crowded airports, had to quickly find plane changes, lost luggage, etc. And then of course I had a simple, nice flight. On the way back, though, Ock got me background med'd with his very nice Malberry and then I went for a double dose of Cali medible chocolate bars from a dispensary. And I mean...that was right at the limit of dealing with airports and security and shit while stoned, for me. Whew! good times! but mostly glad to be back.

I managed to peek into your thread a couple times on the road from my phone, but the drama and speed overwhelmed my limited thumb typing ability so I just stayed out of it. I hope things have settled down for you. I'll give it a harder look when I get settled back in here....

SD, I have never revegged...so does that make these "true mothers" I took them from cuttings, sometimes early in flowering, and this run proves to me that they do produce offspring, beautiful ones I'd say, so yeah to me they are true mothers....

SP, yeah, but the curve can last as long and go as slow as you want it to, so just take one little learning step at a time, and pretty soon, I mean relatively soon, shazaam! as Gomer Pyle used to say by way of confirming everyone's retarded stereotype of where I live. Soon you are up there high on the curve, where it's much more fun.

Thanks, Vox, and this grow is coming to a close very soon....

 

...back from the holidaze, hadn't killed any plants so I consulted one of my favorite grow guides, and here is what it said:



Ready or not, I wanted to get things cleared and cleaned for the next/New Year's grow. So a few pics for posterity...

Chocolope at Day 64:


SAGE, same:


My holiday Cheese tray:


The budlets were hung all snug in their bed, in hopes that the New Year would be natty dread:

 

Vox, this was my second recycling of the soil from my first run. It started as a basic Vic's Super Soil recipe. I think I posted the recipe at or near the very start of my first grow thread. There is an index of my grows in one of my blog entries.

I have added good local earthworm castings with each recycling, and for this run I also used outer pots (doubled smart pots) with some additional fish bone meal. The only other things in there are top dressings of kelp meal, alfalfa pellets, comfrey, a little bit of neem cake, and an expanded slate product called "permatill" that I use in place of perlite.

 

Vox, Permatill is a registered trademark for an expanded slate product that is mined in my general area. I assume they distribute nationally but dunno, here's the website. I originally went with it because I wanted a substitute for perlite that would not float up and that wasn't white--I was working on a guerilla grow and was worried about my holes being visible. In retrospect, not a big worry, but I like the product. It's a lot heavier than perlite, though. But has good surface area and, I think, diversity of pore size. My current theory is that you need diversity of soil pores, macropores and micropores, to help store water a long time while also (in the macropores) allowing good aeration, all in the interest of habitat for the herd.

I used one aact on the soil when I opened it up from the four week anaerobic recycling phase, in order to introduce a lot of aerobes quickly and let them gorge themselves. I might have also added a nonaerated tea when I flipped to 12/12, I can't recall. In general, I am very dubious about adding large quantities of water ("flush") or teas to a soil pot while the plant is growing. I fear it mostly just disrupts the habitat and micro-herd living conditions that are already set up.

My only problem with this soil run, I believe, is that I tried to use it too quickly while I was still in the middle of a soil mite explosion...I should have let it sit another week before trying to germinate seeds in it. In fact I am going back to germinating seeds in paper towels just so I can see the radicle emerge (or not).

The second layer pots had the same soil in them, but with more fish bone meal.

I am unsure whether I will repeat the multi pot method next time. I think what it saves in transplant time, it ends up costing more in making watering more complicated with my drippers.....

 

Vox, I started watering with the drippers cause I was bouncing back and forth between indoor and outdoor grows last summer, so was away from my IG a lot. Now I have come to like the steady slow dosing that you get with the drippers, instead of the periodic flooding that I used to do handwatering. I try to hold down a job in addition to this grow, so I do everything I can to minimize my time with grow tasks, and even then it seems like there's usually a backlog of things to be done.

And you're right, I wouldn't worry about the perlite floating so much now that I am using drippers, although I still hand water on occasion (like transplanting), but I do it rarely enough that I can take my time instead of rushing and flushing. I doubt I'll go outdoors this year so all my original reasons for switching to permatill have gone away. But I'm left with a product that's more local to me than perlite so in that sense it's mo betta. Sounds like you have good solid thinking behind your methods....

 

It's all jarred. I'm very happy. Lotsa reasons for that, here are three:

1. despite a lo-veg, no-nutes, LAZ-E grow, I get plenty of stash, more than enough for personal needs.



2. Despite a longer and deeper drying period than I've used in the past, the buds seem to retain plenty of good aroma even going into the jars, I think because I kept temps down in the drying and have learned to handle the buds carefully (or else dry sift them right away, which I haven't done with these) to preserve maximum intact gland heads.

3. Despite the many fucked up things about this world, there is much to celebrate about life, and among those things to celebrate is the joy of mixing some of your primo strains together into a custom blend. At the moment for me it is Chocolope + Super Lemon Haze. Woot!

"But let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious." Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958) p 182.

 

I will occasionally post some pics of the dried flowers from this run. Here's PPP. This one interests me a lot since it's the only strain I've run indoors previously, run outdoors, and now repeated indoors. But this plant is a different pheno from the previous ones. Either because of that or just better grow conditions, the buds look much better to me than either previous grow (neither of which impressed me much). I haven't smoked any yet.

The perfumy aroma is still there, a little different in this pheno, but it also has much denser capitate trichs. They just fall off the buds even without shaking, as you can see a bit on the black plate this budlet is on. 2012 = year of the kief?