stay alive-- organic medical grow

indoor update:
photos from the beginning of this week
full flowering tent shot
the lanky plant in the back left corner is a black cherry soda mother. not looking great, but starting to develop bud sites and flowers rapidly.

The front left and back center are ethiopian afghani pheno 4. Less vigorous this time, but it still has very sticky spear shaped buds and an amazing sweet citrus smell.

pheno 5 vine pheno
aka spiderplant

Its mutant leaves have evolved from a conical 'martini glass' shape into a perfect circle

better node spacing and much more frosty this round

pheno 3

Pheno 3 is stable so far this round, it is already a full week past the point when it hermed in the previous cycle. This seems to confirm my theory that the herm was caused by stress from light burn. The node spacing is pretty good for a sativa hybrid, and the buds have a much more afghani kush-like appearance this time. This time the cologne smell is more prominent than the fuel, and the density and resin coverage on the leaves seem to be vastly improved. However, if you look closely you can see that it is still getting just a tiny bit of light burn at the very top of the main cola. The plant is small and as low to the ground as possible, and my light is hung as high as possible, directly on the frame of the tent. In my opinion, this means that this plant is really too sensitive to light burn for standard indoor cultivation. Given the light sensitivity, I'm glad I didn't keep another clone of this pheno. Still, it will be very nice to have another ounce or two of this flower because it really is top shelf in its flavor and high. This bud will definitely be for special occasions only, I'm going to make this stuff last.

pheno 2 'geiger bud'
this is the really crazy looking ultra sativa looking pheno that looked like a face grabber from alien on the first round. It formed a giant hand shaped bud that literally grabbed hold of the light hood, and started to envelop it. me and a friend have started calling this one 'geiger bud' after alien concept artist hr gieger.
This time it's not looking quite so wild, but the alien is continuing it's evolution.

as you can see, it has buds all the way down to the soil line. It is considerably denser this time, and it loves the vertical lighting. Whereas pheno 5 is almost finished, this one probably has at least a month to go.

 

I have a lot of photos to post, but I'm having problems with my internet connection. In the meantime, here's a quick update with harvest information before I forget the details:

Pheno 5 harvested days 57-59
Pheno 3 harvested days 60-61
Pheno 4(a) harvested day 61

Phenos 3 and 5 are early finishers. I let them go as long as possible this time.

Pheno 2 (Geiger bud) will be harvested tomorrow, and pheno 4(b) will be harvested the day after.

 

Still having problems with my internet. When I have this fixed I'll post harvest photos and more smoke reports, and I'll post a copy of my final report to bodhi on the Ethiopian x omg Afghani.

Pheno 2 Geiger bud harvested day 62.
Pheno 4(b) harvested today day 64.

 

ethiopian afghani pheno 1 smoke report
I want to smoke this every day.

yield: 3.16 ounces, 89.7 grams. this was the highest yielding pheno.

smell: cream, rose, mint, peach, apricot, toasty sugar cookie, raisin, toast, sweet oily desert wine, vanilla bean, with hints of yogurt, slight earthy soil and clay

flavor: incredible, and 100 percent smooth. pleasant mild flavor. sweet, creamy, and toasty, with indistinct notes of sweet wine and peach/stone fruit flavors. It also reminds me of rose water rice pudding from a middle eastern restaurant.

potency: medium-high. you feel it with the first hit, but it's not overwhelming. each subsequent hit is very noticeable, and there is really no limit to how high you can get.

Effect: really really pleasant, and kind of hard to describe. the effect is very comfortable. Excellent for mood, relaxation, and contemplation. This is definitely a no ceiling high. Each hit is mild but definite, increasing and subtly changing the high from an overall stoney well-being, relaxation, and comfort that spreads through your entire body on the first hit, into a very heady almost psychedelic sativa experience after you've been hitting it for several hours. I like to pack small bowls of this, get a nice full, hit and hold it in forever. This pheno has a really pleasant psychedelic headrush if you hold it in. The exhale tastes like buttery cream and rose with a hint of toast.
This is my current favorite for my daily meds, although I need something heavier indica if I have anything serious going on like a dislocation.

growth: This one grows a lot at the beginning of flowering, but the nodes stay densely stacked so it doesn't stretch like some of the others. It has the same aggressive root growth as the other phenos, but it doesn't root lock as easily making it a bit more stable and easy to cultivate. gets hints of red on leaves and buds that look awesome during growth. This one forms large, knobbly rounded buds covered in tiny resin glands that stack up in layers as the buds mature. This is one of the slow finishers, and like almost all of these, it threw some bananas at the end of the cycle, but it didn't affect bud quality.

I'll post more photos of this pheno as I go through the jars, I tend to save the really big nugs for last. These buds hit incredibly smoothly. Burns quickly with very milky smoke, but it feels light and incredibly smooth.The smell and flavor varies with some being more toasty and others being more fruity, but all the buds have the same sweet creamy flavor as a base. They are incredibly resinous, with a mix of clear and amber resin glands and very few cloudy. I really like the colors on these buds

 

outdoor-
lebanese seedlings growing wild in early spring

a seeded lower branch of the lebanese pheno 1 was buried here last fall. the seedlings began to sprout without any kind of intervention in early march.
the seedlings and surrounding soil were transplanted into a better pot and soil in mid march. digging it up revealed that the branch itself was still intact, but that all the flower and leaf had decayed completely. there were many more starts that were buried with it.

several days later...

several days later...

I'll post a current photo soon. All of those seedlings made it, and many many more sprouted in the following 2 months.

 

I'm very excited to be test growing a new cross from professor paul:

enigma x lemon alien
I'll be growing these outdoor, with plants spaced out across very large pots of compost rich organic soil. These pots will be used for no till growing for years.
The seeds were started on the 4th. they were soaked in spring water for 24 hours and then planted in a mild coir based organic soil. All the seeds sprouted within 4 days. The seedlings are looking very healthy, and growing fast.
here are some detailed notes:
There is one mutant with narrow pointed cotyledons. These seeds have a very thick inner membrane, most of the seedlings needed assistance removing the inner membrane and seed casing. 3 opened without assistance (the mutant included). 3 needed assistance shedding their seed casings and inner membranes. 4 sprouted without their seed casings, but still needed assistance removing the inner membrane. I waited a day before intervening, so the closed seedlings stretched a little bit, but looked very healthy.

Here's an example of one of those seedlings with a thick membrane right after sprouting:


I find that seedlings often need a little help getting out of their shells. I usually don't wait more than a day so that there is no serious stretch before the leaves can open up.

I'm a still a little behind on my photos, but I'll be continuing to catch up with belated updates like this, and I'll be posting current photos as well. The seedlings are looking very good, some are slightly stretchy but quite healthy, and the mutant is slowly becoming normal.

 

ethiopian x afghani round 2 harvest photos (in order of harvest)

Pheno 5 spiderplant/vine pheno
much larger and denser nugs this round
here's a wide shot of that same cola, you can see how crazy the structure is, and how it likes to branch and intertwine into the other plants.
Inner growth, this does a pretty good job showing the extensive branching structure.
at the bottom you can see some of the lateral shoots

pheno 3 'cactus cooler'

amazing resin coverage and dense knobbly buds. Looks like the wild cousin of a platinum og cut I used to grow.

pheno 4
This is probably the least impressive pheno to me, it looks nice but it's low yielding, and definitely harsh in comparison to the others.

pheno 2 alien pheno/ giger bud
buds all the way down to the soil line.
definitely denser this time

unfortunately, the line is not stable. Round 2 had no problems or stress, no light burn or shading, and phenos 2, 3, and 5 all popped bananas. Pheno 4 doesn't herm, but it does have the undesirable trait of growing a tiny unpollinated seed start in each calyx, which is why this pheno is harsh in comparison to the others.

I'll continue to post smoke reports and bud shots, despite the bananas most of these are top notch flowers with very unique highs.

 

all 10 of the enigma x lemon alien seedlings were transplanted yesterday after 2 weeks of acclamation to the outdoors. They're still pretty small. Even with a decent acclamation period, they are still sensitive to the heat and intense sun. here are a few photos right after transplant:

when I watered them today they were looking hot, and a little pale. they are definitely stressed with this heat, but I think they'll take off as soon as they recover from the transplant and acclimatize to the summer weather. I'm going to spray them with neem tonight to make sure they don't get picked off by any pests while they're weak from the transplant.

 

I recently harvested an outdoor black cherry soda that I was able to flower off season under a patio awning. The buds had more resin than they do indoor, but it was very leafy in comparison so I made the entire plant into a large batch of hash.

It came out really well. It has a strong smell of rose and dank, and it's potent.

 

Thanks, I'll definitely try that. I make kelp tea and compost teas, but I've never applied them as a foliar before. Thanks for the tip!
It's also really informative to hear how your stud plant is handling these conditions.

 

I'm currently growing out a batch of my dank sinatra f x lebanese m hybrid f1's indoor. For the most part, the plants represent themselves as lebanese dominant phenos on a sinatra frame, and sinatra dominant phenos on a taller lebanese frame. There are some standout phenos with incredible resin production, and I got exactly what I was hoping for in terms of the smell. The light, sweet, oily glazed donut smell of the sinatra merged with the earthy citrus of the lebanese to form hershey's chocolate with mandarin zest in the lebanese dom phenos, and even more intense donut and pastry smells from the sinatra dom phenos with hints of fruit and chocolate. My favorite pheno has a tall slim lebanese hashplant frame with incredibly sticky sinatra buds and a smell exactly like an apple fritter from a basic neighborhood donut shop.
I'm breeding f2's with a short, slow veging, branchy male. I'll be selecting for the sintra dominant phenos, and phenos with sinatra resin on lebanese buds.
One fully lebanese dominant pheno had to be removed from the breeding project because it wasn't suitable for indoor growth. It had a landrace artificial light adaptation problem where the inner part of the flowers that don't get light stop growing after preflower. Not that surprising in a first generation cross to a landrace line that has never been cultivated indoors. It wouldn't be a problem if I was just growing it for flower, but I needed to cull it from the breeding project. One of the primary goals of this project is to adapt the lebanese landrace to indoor growing through hybridization. Hopefully the selected f2's will effectively tame the lebanese phenos for indoor growing, and bring out more sinatra dominant phenos. I'm really excited to see how the selected f2's come out, and the f2's of the lebanese dom phenos should also be interesting.
The 5 females are looking great, I'll post photos of these soon. Some are lightly seeded, and some are heavily seeded. I can't wait to see what the highs, flavors, and medical attributes are like.

 

Most of the enigma x lemon alien seedlings have completely recovered from their transplant and are starting to take off. They really benefited from the foliar seaweed tea applied once a week. Unfortunately, 2 of the seedlings never could adjust to the heat and strong sunlight, and eventually wilted away. But fortunately, the other 8 are looking excellent.
These are some very happy little plants, they have a very deep green color, their posture looks great with the leaves praying all day long, and they are starting to grow rapidly. I'll try to get some current photos tomorrow.

 

about 10 lebanese males have been culled from the outdoor, leaving about 7 preflowering females in close formation. I'm glad to see that the males and females are still sexing early, because I want quick flowering plants from this strain.
It's a little bit crowded, but I've trained them away from each other using a large tomato cage since they were seedlings. This has been a very interesting experiment, I can't wait to see what this generation can do now that it has had a chance to acclimatize. I've only seen the lebanese heavily seeded in last years open pollination, so it will be interesting to see how different they are when grown sinsemilla. I'll try and get some current photos, sorry for the lack of pictures for this season, but sometimes it can be hard for me to keep up with the garden and take photos at the same time.

 

enigma x lemon alien pictures (taken yesterday)
these are in the aggressive early stages of veg, and are growing noticeably larger each day.

 

definitely. their growth is very aggressive right now, I'm seriously impressed by these. here are some pictures taken saturday. I have them planted together in 4 30 gallon not till pots, and I plotted it out so that each plant had the footprint of a 5 or 7 gallon pot. they're actually exceeding that diameter already, and starting to grow into each other a little bit. my bad on that, looks like these actually needed more canopy space than what I'm used to. Fortunately, it's not causing any problems. In fact, they may like the 'companion planting' because the one that's by itself in a 30 gallon is the smallest. I think I can manage it by simply bending them away from each other with some low stress training when I go out to water.
their structure is amazing, with full branches starting at the second node on all phenos. often I don't see well developed branching until the 4th node or higher. I haven't spotted any pests yet, but they have a ton of little jumping spiders patrolling the stems, and some orange spiders spinning webs between them. Definitely attracting more beneficial insects than my other cannabis plants. They also have a strong sweet dank smell whenever I water them.