Late July '11, buds looking big already? wth...

Okay kids, it's late July and like I had posted in the previous months blog, like it says in the High Times calendar, if you flower your plants in late spring (quite on accident while trying to det. sex outside for a coupla weeks, hey you stick em out there for ONE WEEK and they'll start to get horny!)...they will continue to flower through the summer and not stop until now, or it's lookin like mid august at the latest.  The Sativas, unfortunately, are looking real yellow (I don't know if it was crap soil, crap nutes, or what, but I definitely stayed on top of watering and didn't OVERNUTE em... maybe a little less nutes than recommended, but I don't think soooo.... so what could be the cause of all of these yellow leaves?  I know this much, I stuck a couple of plants in trash cans, drilled out the bottom, put bags of Home depot "Organic Choice" (brown bag), and they are as green as a dead president.  I was sort of expecting bigger veg and hence a bigger harvest, but as I am growing outdoors which is technically illegal here in Cali (San Diego is a fascist medi pot County in general, worse than LA even)...but if you flower plants out in april and they have any indica in em at all, THEY WILL KEEP FLOWERING ALL THROUGH THE SUMMER!!!

 I would  recommend that if you are able to sex plants in veg, (I think very few people are, even with the biggest veggies) you do so.  Otherwise, stick em out in April, but WATCH THEM EVERY DAY!!! if they show any Bud activity AT ALL, it may be too late.  I PUT  the plants under the halide light for two straight weeks at 24/7 but I'm just glad I ordered more seeds this season because the clones I took from the plants that just started to flower (!!!) are all still clone sized, and, of course, have tiny little buds and resin glands on em.  Thin is not HT  cover shot material folks.  This is a big time  fuckup.  So I ordered a few more seeds so I could get some genetics for next year, right? Well, I don't know wtf autoflowering seeds are supposed to do but they are advertised as growing large and with decent buds (at least, OMG, this was Barney's Farm Pineapple Express).... And I germinated em right and stuck em out in the middle of summer.  Most of them lived. But they turned into 6" tall palm trees with tiny buds at the top. What gives?  I'm going to have to look this shit up cause I thought an autoflower was a good way to go if you want to go outddors all year. Most of these "Plants" are gone. Hey would you want the cops busting you for going over your plant count with bs plants like these? NO! So i ordered some more seeds.  These were the real  deal Pineapple Express which is only available from G-13 labs, which, incedentally has nothing whatsoever to do with that farm full of shitty wild growing mexican brick herb down in Mississippi.  And I got a good free white widow seed from Dinafem (again, please do yourself a favor and get your seeds from Attitude s.b....   Dr. Greenthumb is the only other  co. out there that's even close and they are a boutique outfit from CA; they have strains that no one else does,  but they cost about $15-20 apiece!  Not fem either!  So here is the pic of these in early veg, they are in my kitchen plant window, you know, the kind that juts out from the side of yo hizzy BABY, BAAABY!  okay that was a little too much drama for a picture window.  The pics look like this:

This is the whole deal, about 10 small plants including the clones I saved from May when I took em.  They will likely take a month or two to revert to veg and then we'll see.  Right now they still look like dwarf plants.  And this one:

These are (admittedly a not very good view of em, but they all look about the same at this point, some bigger than others, but three real healthy looking ones, a pineapple express, another pineapple (or purple haze, I may have mislabled (lol), and a real good looking pineapple express. Don't worry, these are all  fem so if I gotta take clones in a month, it'll all be good in tha hood! 

C ya next month.

Oh, and btw, the blueberry and purple Kush plants came in from last month.  they are dried but not cured yet so we'll see if they go into the hash 0 lator.  Later!

June

the grow is going about as well as can be expectied.  I got a couple of early bloomers that got confused in first week of may and just kept goin' ones a purple kush and the others a blueberry I think. I thought it was a PK too but it's not purple at all.  The other Blueberry i've got is like this too and I read that indicas tend to do this.  So i think the third plant is a BB.  The plant looks like this

As you can see it's still got a ways to go, mostly white pistls still and not too many red hairs on it.  Only the leaves are purp cause it's real hot outside where I live.  It says on the High times calendar that I got that plants like this will hang on unitl into august then finsih up. I sure hope so.

I still have about 20 or so real nice big plants in home depot buckets but the clones aren't doing too well.  I chalk this up to cloning them when the plants started to go into flower in late april.  all of the big plants are doing real well and this looks like it's gonna be my best grow ever! in fact i went outside yesterday and dumped some of the bigger ones into huge 20 gallon trash cans so they'll just get extra big.  who knows the whole grow might end up in trash cans? 

meanwhile i still have about 15 seeds out there they arent going.  could be cause of the heat but it's not all that hot maybe 80 max and i give em plenty of water cause theyre young and i don't want em to burn.

well c you next month!

Fuckups so far...

I would not be writing this to glorify myself and to not admit mistakes.  So I will make a short list of my fuckups this year:

1)  The spring plants I had out had weak, loose, buds.  They were okay, if you are not a medical marijuana shop that only sells the best weed.  They would've kept me high all summer.  But i'm not in this to get high. II attribute this to the fact that there was a big old Metal halide lamp shining out the back of my house.  it fucked up the light cycle.  So all the plants outside went into the hash-o-lator.  Which didn't produce very much hash. 

2) My poor hash I chalk down to two things:

a) the bud was wet. I looked it up and they said you can use wet dope (just harvested) or dry (hung up in a cool dark place for a week or so). I used the just harvested dope and I got crap hash.

b) I didn't agitate the bud/ water mixutre enough.  It turns out that just pressing the buttton on one of these things and standing back won't work.  You have to get in there yourself with a wooden spoon and stir things up for a good 15 minutes. this got the best hash, but not much of it.

3)  I don't have enough clones yet and it's almost June!

This is a major fuck up.  I'm trying to play catch up with the clone situation but we'll see.  it had a lot to do with what I did late last month in order to determine the sex of my plants.  I SHOULD HAVE CLONED THE FEMININE ONES RIGHT AWAY, AS SOON AS I KNEW. BUT WE'RE TALKING A MATTER OF DAYS HERE, SO i GOT LAZY. k?

4)  i did F.i. m. on all my plants befrore I knew sex. THIS WAS STUPID.  you can do fim anytime.  but I don't think it hurt the plants.  it might have caused a couple to go hermie, though but I doubt it.  I got the usual amount of good mothers from the average seed pack.  I was just being too optomistic, too early.

FAST FORWARD TO LATE APRIL!!!

So it's May now.  I put my veg plants outside in LATE APRIL so I could tell if they were Male or Female, so I could tell which ones to clone.  I waited a little to long which is okay because a plant that is a couple of weeks into flowering won't get "stuck'", that is, if you start to bring it back in after the Fem flowers start to turn white a little you can re-veg them. 

The only thing you want to worry about at this point is Male plants.  Male plants tend to (but not always) grow straight up and down, with no bushiness.  at or near the top after a week or two you'll see what look like little palm trees with tiny little bannanas hanging of of them.  YOU DO NOT WANT THESE IN YOUR GARDEN!!!

So if you see anything that looks like this at the top of a plant (hernies I won't even go into, so good luck), Carry the plant around to the side of your house where you keep your trash, get a bag, cut the plant off at the stem, pour WD-40 or charcoal lightet all over it, and dump it!

Starting this month, (May) I noticed that the plants had started flowering.  I didn't want them to get stuck, so I went back to the old lighting pgm for a couple of weeks.  Again, I live in San Diego, so your milieage may vary.  As soon as I knew for sure that the big purple Kush plant was Female, I started cloning that shit like a motherfucker.  I'm afraid, however, that the fact that it was female probably hindered the clones. 

I made about 20 clones but only got 3 so far, it's been like 2 weeks since I  started, so I'm gonna keep checking the bottom of those cubes!  It looks like I might get about 5 more.  But I started to put a new clone in there every day to replace the ones that just died, so we'll see.

Right now, all my plants are Feminine, or they got pollinated (doubtful, but possible) and they'll have seeds in 'em.  I'll have to keep an eye on these because:

I did the F.I.M. (fuck i missed) technique on a bunch of plants all in one day.

What this involves is sqeezing the top of your plants when they are 1-2' tall so they will grow out sideways and become bushier, hence a biggger plant with more bud sites and more places to take clones.

What I did not realize was that some of the plants were Male,  so I may have unwittingly pollinated some of my Females. But I don't think so.  Remember how I said I had about 20 seedlings? Well they produced about 12 good female plants.  Which is the best you can hope for.  I ordered more seeds, Feminized this time. Most of them are "Pineapple Express", some autoflowering from Barney's farm.  for an explanation of what an autoflower is, look it up.  Some are regular Feminized from G-13, which isn't the most reliable seed co. in the world but they are the only ones with the real Pineapple Express. 

Maybe the Autoflowering ones (from Barney's farm, btw) will turn out better thatn the G-13 ones..  I doubt it but you never know.

anyway here is a picture of all of my adult plants. I have about 20 right now and they will only get bigger and bigger as the summer goes on.  I hope some of em get so big i gotta stick em in trash cans...

   I know it doesn't look like 20 plants but it's only May, gimme a break.  Plus I got the seedlings, but you already know what those look like.  The count looks like this:

2 Purple Kush

2 Blueberry

2 Cherry OG

1 Chem Dawg

1 Grapefruit

1 Bubblegum

1 Purple Morrocan

8 OGx Skunk (I don't know if these are really og, but there were like 5 differrent skunk crosses in the shipment and I got confused.  All of the strains were OG based, anyway (L.A. confidential, etc.).

6-7 "Pineapple Express" autoflower fem.  I really hope I get at least one good plant out of these, because then I can clone and grow year round.  Autoflower basically means a smaller plant that will grow and bud and be ready for harvest within 90 days, regardless of the light cycle, as long as you live south of Alaska.

1 Barney's Farm Tangerine Dream

1 Purple Haze.

So right now the name of the game is clone, clone clone.  Because I do not want to have just 18 plants come August. something more like twice that would be cool.

when to stick your plants out in SPRING AND SUMMER!

so mojo, what gives, you already said you got some big plants outside?

That's cause they took me about 3-4 months to grow inside AND OUTSIDE and then I put them out when the month was right:

1) If you're plants are big enough, and are long flowering Sativas, I would recommend putting them out at the end of January, latest first week of February, for a spring harvest.   This is because the days will be getting longer, from 11-13-14 hours by the time June rolls around.  What you want is 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of uninterrupted darkness, so if your neighbor likes to have raves or shines a big old 1000w mh light out his window like I do, get your plants outta the way of all that ngihtitime light. 

2) If youre plants are strong like mine you will get a harvest in mid-April at the latest.  i will show you when my plants are done what to look for.  If they are Indica dominant, then

3) put them out mid februaary if they are a foot tall.  if they aren't that big yet, the latest you have to get them big is March. If they aren't a foot tall by March (and you will probably thank yourself for this later), keep them under the 18 hour schedule until they are like 3' tall.  then turn off the HID light inside (when ever you have about 50 tall plants, which by this time you will be hopping up and down for joy about)... And just put the plants outside during the day, take them in at night. and put them in a brightly lit room.  This will keep them from going into flowering during late spring, which is NOT what you want to happen. 

4) Remember these simple rules and you will be okay.

Sativas: big and outside by late January.

Indicas: big and outside by mid February.

OTHERWISE:

keep all plants under an 18 hour a day schedule until they get big.  Then keep them under at least 18 hours/ day of light (IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW BIG THE LIGHT IS, REMEMBER YOUR PLANTS ARE ALREADY GROWN, RIGHT? until June 1st, then it's on like a time bomb. 

If you don't want to haul 40 or 50 plants inside at night, consider making a hoop greenhouse and adjusting the photoperiod that way using visqueen, a black plastic.  this is also time consuming and you have to be out there at the same time every day in the morning to lift the top off.

or just bring the plants next to a window where they'll get some light at night. (I hope you kind of have a big house)

Remember, I started my clones back in January and theyre barely rooted.  So if you want big plants, either take your clones early , take them from good plants, or all three. you can take a clone in April and put it out in June, (no shit, what do you think I bought the seeds for?), but make sure it is getting at least 15 hrs day of daylight or it will start to flower, resulting in a stuck plant come summertime.

2/20/11 cLONES, SEEDLINGS, AND ARTIFICIAL LIGHT

Okay, as I said before this is my light set up, 1000w mn. I have an Hps light too but i stopped fucking around with flowering indoors when I realized the lights were costing me enough to run without having to settle for small plants in a hot, unvenitlated bedroom (you have to drill a 10" hole in the side of your house to bring in fresh air, and an air conditioner if you want it under 87 degrees or so in the summer, and the whole thing represents an awful big investment if you don't know what youre doing.  so make your bones outdoors first, and then try indoors.  I KNOW IT LOOKS TEMPTING WITH ALL THOSE PICS IN HT WITH THE HUGE GROWROOMS FULL OF WALL-TO WALL BUDS.  But until you can get those kind of plants outdoors, you will never get them indoors. trust me.

Okay, now weve got some seedlings and some clones.  what are we gonna do?  give em light, and lots of it!  I think my 1000 watter is running a bit low because the bulb is old so I just put all the seedlings under there and they made it through the night without burning up so I guess they'll be okay.

Anyway, with seedlings as i said before, until they turn into real plants you want to be careful with them.  too long out on a hot spring day will burn em up and youll be out youre daddys 130 (Lol) and do you really think he wont notice a second time if the same kind of order appears on his statement?  Plus all that nail biting wondering if your seeds are coming (they are)...

So you want to give your seedlings clones about 18 hrs a day of light.  if they are clones, stick them all under the mh light as close to the light as they will fit, giving the tops of your plants at least 3-4' of clearance from the bulb, and you will want a pretty big fan to blow through the plants to keep things cool.  a 1000w light should be able to cover a circle about 5' in radius.  so mark a spot directly below your light.   Make an imaginary 5' circle around your floor.  Anything within that ciircle is good.  You can pull some of the plants out from the middle and rotate them to the outside and vice versa.

So what I do is I set the timer to go on at 7pm, and off at 7 am.  around this area of the country that gives the plants about 15 hrs or so of light, if you happen to be fortuneate enough to be facing a big window that is on the South side of your house.  Otherwise, wake up early (or don't) take the plants outside.  leave them out all day, or at least unitl 3:30.  do the math

12 at night
+ 6 daylight hours=

18 hours of light.. 

the afternoon sun after 3:30 or so really weakens so if youre planning on going out or hitting it for the day, just take your plants in at 3:30 and leave them until the timer comes on again. 

Once again you'll want to watch the seedlings closely for any kind of heat reaction or burn.  If they get too hot, they will fry.  take them to a cfl (flourescent lamp) and leave them under there for a while until they look okay agian.  then do the three hour at a time thing. only stick the seedlings under the HID lamp or the outside sun for three hours at a time, watering with the spray bottle before and after.

As far as the clones go, at this point they cannot get too much light.  You can test em the first day by setting them outside for 3 hours and then just go hell bent for leather.  there's more where those came from anyway.

where I'm sitting FEb 20th

anway this is the way it's stacking up:
in flower 3-4 WEEKS
2 unidentified sativas
1 skunk x kushberry
1 chem dog.
1 SSH
IN VEG
7 skunk x kushberry clones
2 chem dog clones
2 cherry og clones

EARLY VEG::
11 Blueberry seedlings (M/f)
5   Purple Kush seedlings (M/f)
3   Seedlings, (grapefruit, bubblegum, purple morrocan), from the "feminized" seed company or tab from attitude seeds (don't ask me, they were free)!