Howdy y'all! Apologize for the teaser, that entire introduction and no pics! My partner and I just had to pull some evasive maneuvering which required the complete disassembly and reassembly of the entire operation. Now that we're back up and running, I can get down to business. To toss out another preface, everything I’m doing in this operation has a primary purpose of research, education, and skill practice. Personal supply is a bonus; because I never really run low on herbs anyway, I want to take all the time, patience, and consideration necessary for a both educational and rewarding growing experience. For part of each journal entry, I’ll be doing a plant-by-plant breakdown. Plants in the vegetative will have (Vx) and the ones in the bloom tent will have (Bx) where ‘x’ is the current week they are in.
Here's a few pics of the equipment: basically a shelved veg/storage station that feeds a 4x4 bloom tent.
Guess I’ll go from newest to oldest, here’s a look at what’s happening in veg!
Vegetative
SFV OG Kush (V4): I pounced on this strain when I saw it in clone form at Karmaceuticals, a Denver dispensary. There is nothing like OG Kush and the San Fernando Valley cut is supposed to be one of the most highly sought after.
Of the four new starts, growth on the SFV has been the least. As pictured, it had a few sickly-looking leaves, I have no idea why. It’s not taking kindly to something I’ve given it, trick is finding out what.
Headband (V4): This strain used to flood my old neighborhood in the Chicagoland area for years, and has long been one of my all-time favorites. I see it at dispensaries all the time, but ironically can’t find one that even comes close to matching the quality of the black-market Chicagoland Headband! With a smell profile of OG Kush with a slight twist, I think it is a stellar hybrid. This is the “Karma Headband”, as in it is a dispensary-specific (Karmaceuticals) cut. Therefore, I’m not sure if its (OG Kush x Sour Diesel) or (OG Kush x Master Kush x Sour Diesel), both of which I’ve seen listed as Headband’s lineage.
Similar to the SFV OG, this clone has been a lot slower than the Blueberry and Cinderella 99. It also had some unhealthy leaves spotted with necrosis. Both the SFV OG and Headband have been taking up water at approximately half the rate of the other two…
Blueberry (V4): Classic DJ short strain; I had to run it. Also, Last time I bought clones (Chocolope and Mendocino County Diesel) I picked up a Blueberry, and while trying to plan some LST, I snapped the whole damn thing clean in half. I needed a Blueberry success to redeem myself, and this is it.
I knew this beauty was going to be a champion. It took the transplant exceptionally well, and even though it was given the same exact start as both the SFV and Headband, it has shown no signs of any deficiency, burning, or slowed growth rate. This vigorous clone already had two strong shoots and, considering the growth rate, I decided to add on a screen. I’m trying to keep the new starts’ canopies even to maximize space and light penetration efficiency, but also because I can’t have them get too big or tall since they still have another month before the tent is open, and they are around a month old already.
Cinderella 99 (V4): My favorite breeder today is Subcool. TGA has never failed me, (Querkle, Jack the Ripper, Agent Orange, Pink Lady, Vortex, Chernobyl…
and the degree to which they understand breeding and phenotype selection is simply masterful. One of the parents I notice used in a lot of the TGA line is Space Queen (Romulan x Cinderella 99). This strain has always interested me. As I’ve had experience with Romulan as a finished product, I thought I’d investigate Cinderella 99. I wanted to grow out some strains for these first few rounds which have more established lineages, and as the C99 is a key ingredient in so many things, I had to select it as my last clone for this round.
This particular Cindy clone is…rigorous. As soon as I saw the size of some of the leaves coming off such a young indoor plant, I wondered whether it might be one of those strains that’s a great outdoor selection but not necessarily suited for indoor…I mean the thing has a stem (more like a trunk) twice the diameter of the Headband. It’s also got a unique color, more of a lime-green. I can’t wait to see where it goes; I’ve been using LST to tame it like the others, but its rigidity makes it much more difficult to manage.
Bloom
I know most plants don’t veg too much longer than a month when you’re trying to get the quickest harvest rotation for overall yield, however the flow of plants is still being adjusted as our setup continues to evolve and improve. Here’s a look at what’s in the bloom tent; it’s going to be awhile before we can move in the four mentioned above.
Mendocino County Diesel (B4): This is the youngest of the bunch, and is also an irregular strain. I’d never heard of it, but decided to give something new a try. I sure love classic NYC Diesel; I figured if the west coast can do it as well as the east coast, it’d be a knockout.
This wildcard has been the most difficult plant I’ve worked with thus far. Purchased at the same time as the Chocolope, as a clone from a Denver dispensary (LaContes), it is a full two weeks behind them. After being transplanted, it did not grow. It seemed to just be stagnant for a full week until slowly picking up speed, and even after transplantation remained weak and slow. After a lot of research, and the constructive advice of a few RollItUp members, I concluded that what appeared to be a phosphorus deficiency indeed was, however it was due to the fact of a low soil pH causing a lockout of nutrient uptake, rather than depleted phosphorus reserves. After a heavy flush with distilled water, it crept back to life! It is now very strong and all new growth shows no signs of necrosis. I am somewhat worried because it was in the spot where the Chocolope got seeded up pretty bad for a few days (prior to fixing the light leak). I hope it does not seed up!
Chocolope (B7): Chocolope is another strain I’ve always heard about but never tried. As many great hybrids as there are out there, strains that lean extremely sativa
or indica are interesting to grow because you get the real feel for the differences between growing a wild sativa vine (at least it seems like a vine sometimes!) versus a stout indica bush. Weighing in at 95% sativa, with reportedly high yields, I chose Chocolope as the sativa guinea pig for this growing experiment.
If I’d just gotten the Mendocino County Diesel, I’d have had a hard time gauging whether it was the strain itself that had issues, or the dispensary from which it came. Thanks to the Chocolope, it is undoubtedly the former. The only problem I had with the Chocolope after transplanting it as a clone was containing it! I ended up going for a screen on it as well, and it just exploded. Today marks both the Chocolope and Pink Lady’s start of bloom 7. The past couple weeks have been frustrating as I could not figure out why seeds were turning up all over the Chocolope, but not really over the Pink Lady. I believe I figured it out (see “Problems/Solutions” section). I have a feeling we’ll end up running it for about 10 weeks; hopefully it’ll pack on a significantly more mass, because it is really slacking with all that damned seed production…I suppose if I ever want to run it again, I won’t be short on a seed supply.
Pink Lady (B7): The genetics (Space Queen x Black Cherry Soda) of this strain from the one and only TGA Subcool lean toward indica. Pink Lady is the name of a specific phenotype of the classic TGA strain “Plushberry”.
This is the only plant we have currently that was not grown from a cutting, it was found as a dispensary bagseed. It germinated quickly and turned out to be quite a hearty plant. At one point, it was dropped completely which snapped the top two shoots’ main branches nearly all the way off; I actually thought I killed the thing. Wrong. Those two branches grew back stronger and the whole plant looks vigorous. Again, just in the past week or so, some seeds have started showing up which I find equally disappointing and motivating (to fix). It sure has been a pleasure watching this from germination. Starting off with rooted clones is a nice shortcut, but you don’t get the seedling experience.
Problems/Solutions
Fighting that seeding is depressing but also forces you to problem solve. My great love of plants and soil comes out of the sort of infinite realm of possibility in terms of how plants react with their environment; there are so many factors that can contribute positively or negatively to the health of the plants, trying to solve a problem or just improve your current environment is like a grand organic puzzle game with an undefined high score.
The predecessor of the three currently in bloom was a hybrid created by a friend and I: a cross between TGA Subcool Querkle male, and a vigorous Trainwreck bagseed found in the Chicagoland area (This cross was harvested over the weekend! See below). The Querkle x Trainwreck, Q-T or “Qutie” as I’ve named her grew some male parts about 4 weeks in which were promptly and carefully (full shear cleaning, no touching of unaffected areas) removed them. I never saw any new ones.
This is to say that I’ve been worried about pollen in the tent, however a recent observation has lead me to believe the seeding has been a light leak issue…This is just a problem you could never see coming; light leak is a common issue so we tested the tent when it was new. I zipped myself inside, there was
absolutely no light even when lights were bright just outside of it.
It took the problem some time to slowly manifest, one of the reasons I didn’t think of it right away; we don’t have a light-proof intake, so when the inline fan is running during the dark period to mitigate moisture buildup, it is creating excessive negative pressure inside the tent. The walls, floor, and ceiling all get sucked in, and it creates stress over time on the seams of the tent. Eventually they got stretched enough to let in a bit of light through thread holes, right in the corner where the Chocolope had been sitting—and that is the one with the most seeds by far.
I’ve duct/electrical taped all the spots I could find both inside and out in hopes that the increased level of darkness will halt seed production in the future.
Harvest/Cure
This is the area in which I have the least amount of experience; what I can say for sure is that I am taking the stance that it’s just as critical to harvest properly as it is to grow properly. I can tell this often goes by the wayside, as here in Colorado so many dispensaries have incredible genetics, however their final products come up well short of their inherent potential. Seeing as we are not dealing with anywhere near commercial amounts here, with patient demand, and/or harvest deadlines and quotas, there is no reason every nugget cured out of this tent should be anything less than grade AA.
As this is now a continual setup, I’m hoping to have something in the drying/curing phase just about all the time; the first lady to break the ice was the Qutie, we chopped her down on 11/7 and noted a
picked weight of 131.4 grams. I had my expectations low for this plant, around an ounce. It spent the majority of its life without the myriad of benefits which this much more complete setup has now. She went from a window Dixie cup to a window smart pot, and did more than half of her bloom cycle solely under the LED panel (which produced impressive results considering a very limited power draw relative to HID, as well as the fact it did not even veg very hard before it went into the tent).
Looks like we are going to surpass that ounce, and from what I can tell at this juncture, I could not have expected much more out of this fighting female. It looks potent, and the fresh bud smell was divine like heavy citrus (of course now it just smells like chlorophyll for the time being). The close, high-quality trimmings have been sitting in a baggie part open and the bag smells literally of grapefruit. It’s not sort of like grapefruit…it’s straight grapefruit. Amazing!
I’ve ordered a Caliber III Hygrometer that’s supposed to arrive tomorrow; I’m going to try out X’s method as posted here on RollItUp. I like the idea of not guessing, especially when this is such a limited harvest of a never-been-grown (far as I know!) strain. I will keep y’all posted on how my first Colorado crop turns out when it’s finally complete!
Seedbank
Figured after going this in-depth, I’d add a little seed inventory log! Back in the day, I bought seeds from Attitude Seedbank. I still would, I love Attitude. However, the widespread clone and seed availability in my new(ish) CO habitat has kept me stocked up just fine. So far, all of these seeds were obtained from standard dispensary flowers, and should be feminized. Germination rates would be questionable due to varying degrees of seed quality, since these were obviously not grown with the intention of seed harvest.
G6 (Aspen OG x ECSD) – Medicine Man, Denver - 6
Girl Scout Cookies (OG Kush x Cherry Pie (Durban Poison x GDP) – Medicine Man, Denver - 1
Grand Doggy Purps (GDP x Chemdawg) – Medicine Man, Denver - 5
Church (Swiss Sativa x Northern Lights x Skunk x Super Skunk) – Terrapin Care Station, Boulder - 1
Unknown - 6
dre
