Flower tent Day 10 is getting crazy, I’m going to have to bend and tie these tops down a second time before stretch is over, I think. The lights are going to be on the ceiling this time around, hopefully that means buds all the way down to the pots too. Day 21 defoliation is going to be very necessary, I already started plucking a few fans here and there, especially on the Icy Grape.
It’s time to find out how big I can get five trees each in 15g of soil and Promix. I’ve got the light cranked to the full 500w, UV ramping up weekly (at 2x30min daily now), going to add the LED Buddies back in once I attach them to some sort of bars, they kept falling off the walls of the tent despite the good adhesive, so I’m going to make intracanopy or wall bars with them. That’ll add another 30w, and I think I’m gonna put in a few clip lights on the four corners with 15w or 36w LED floodlights to up the brightness in the four corners that my quantum panels need help with. Those would bring me up to around 600w or more in a 4x4 or 37.5 watts per square foot, about as bright as I can probably go without C02. I like this light, but I will definitely be going to a bar grid style next for the evenness and ability to run it lower.
I’ve been missing out this whole time on a source of reclaim much nicer than pipe resin or even dab downstem goo, which is the shit that comes out of my hardworking grinders when I wash them in ISO. This time I soaked them for 24 hours, one 1.5" aluminum Mendo Mulcher and a 2" Storz and Bickel Tritan, and then evaporated off the alcohol in a silicone egg poaching cup over a mug of boiling water. Afterwards I flipped the disc and left it in a cabinet downstairs for a day or two and this is what I’m left with:
It left a waxy white residue on the plastic grinder but only across the parts of it that were under alcohol maybe? I think it must be the plant waxes extracted? Though there seem to be fats and waxes on the chip I have here. My question is: what do I do with a third of a gram of ISO shatter? How long do I have to let this thing purge before I can smoke it? Or should I just drop it into a topical?
in my experience ISO extracts have little need for purging - the iso draws water in from the air, evaporates faster than the water, and is undetectable at the later stages of evaporation (you can smell it well below dangerous levels)
maybe you could melt it a double boiler and whiff it if you were still worried
Checked on the seedlings before I left the house this morning, got four above ground and dropping helmets, and two more uncurling/figuring out which way is up. Looks like it’ll be 6/6 this time around, which means I can flower two tents, the 4x4 with four and the new 2x4 with two more, and get Vortex popping in the 3x4. I’m thinking the three Hoku and the Tonygreen in the big tent under the 500w, and the two from Useful and @iamyou_youareme in the 2x4 under two QB96 light engines at 160w apiece. I’ve got another fluorescent fixture and more Solacure tubes to put in the 2x4, so they’ll be under pretty similar conditions, the QB96s have boosted red spectrum but not as much as the R-Spec QB288s. Between the harvest I’m trimming and bagging now, the one in flower, and those tents, that should set me for the year until summer outdoor comes in, especially since I might pop a few autoflowers just for fun houseplants with all the light we get, thanks to everyone here who taught me that they have their place and utility and are actually pretty cool plants! I think I was a snob about feminized and autoflower seeds when I got started here, but I can see the advantages of them now as part of a larger program of growing, and people have been very generous with their seeds, especially @BasementBeans who is helping me get some friends growing with auto seeds this spring.
@ChongoBongo thanks man! That’s a question I had about ISO vs ethanol, I’m not planning on making a ton of QWISO (yet?) but I do grind up a lot of weed and like to clean my grinders, so this is a cool treat to dab or smoke!
Day 11 in the flower tent, I plucked a few dozen fan leaves off the top six inches of most main branches, except the ones at the edges for now until I rotate them tomorrow and I’ll get the rest. With four plants I can let them bush out until Day 21 but with five they need a light intermediate defoliation to develop well all the way down, I staked things straight up the bamboo this time instead of 45° perpendicular.
Seedlings are all doing great, five thriving and one (Chem D x BOO) I had to rescue from some too-tight peat holding the shell helmet on and the cotyledon bent stuck down, but it’s fine now. I’ve been bottom watering the plugs mostly and misting them with alternating water, PureCrop1, and once with SEA-90. Heat and dome are done and away, and the last two days instead of sloshing a bit of water in the bottom of the pan and then tilting it all to one side, I dipped the plugs into a weak Biothrive Grow solution and let them soak halfway up, about five seconds each. Tonight or tomorrow morning I’ll peel the fabric off and drop them into two gallon fabric transplanter pots with the new soil,Promix HP-CC, and pumice blend.
I’m counting the days until 21 in the flower tent, going to do the defoliation on the gentler side at Day 20, wait a few for the plants to get over the stress, then hit them with some pollen on the lower branches on Day 23 or 24. The plan is to try the bag method for paintbrush pollination, probably one or two branches on each of the five plants, I might not pollinate the smaller LDSC since I don’t love its structure and growth compared to its sister.
The hardest part will be choosing matchups of pollen and plant since I don’t want to commit to too much work, I have six pollens and five plants, even leaving out the LDSC that’s 24 bagged branches and that sounds like hell to me! More likely it will be two branches per plant for eight total chucks, that should be plenty for a first attempt.
Much thanks to everyone in the seed making threads here on OG, I found this thread especially helpful for tips and tricks and experience from other users who have been at this for a while, special recognition for @Budderton@JohnnyPotseed@GrouchyOldMan@SamwellBB@ReikoX@vernal@Cormoran and many others for their posts and responses on this post or the others that helped me figure out a plan.
I will be working with pollen from @Radicle_Reefer ’s outdoor grow last year, we did a nice swap and he sent me some tasty magic dust for the ladies here to be seeded with, I received all of these to work with except Garlic Dog since that one didn’t give much pollen.
I saw him say in another thread that the 88G13HP was an OP of three males onto a female so I believe that one is a mix of males, and the others are single male pollens but RR feel free to correct me here.
The receiving female plants are:
Any suggestions on combinations? I’m open to ideas from my readers here on the thread, what pollen/plant hybrids sound good or is maybe like a strain you know and love or miss and want to try growing chucks of something like it?
Blue Tara x NL1 - Should keep with the dreamy/nighttime type effects, might increase pain relief
Icy Grape x NL1 might be good too if she leans to the black domina.
Anything x NL5 would likely be good to look at
Sowah Grapefruit x 88G13HP sounds bomb. I’ve heard the sowah grapefruit is nighttime meds too
I don’t really know anything about the atf/mtf/maui/lazy dog to really say anything on those.
@Radicle_Reefer said the NL5 was the standout to him so I’ll definitely be using that one, and the NL1 has always been mostly elusive and super interesting to me. I like the idea of Blue Tara x NL1, my Icy Grape was a Skittles leaner this time vs Domina last grow. Sowah G x 88G13HP was also on my mind, glad to hear another vote for that. I’m thinking both NLs on the Blue Tara, the 88 and Hawaiian Cat Piss on the Sowah G, NL5 and 88 onto the Icy Grape, then HCP and NL1 on the LDSC. That way I don’t open every pack of pollen hahaha!
Hawaiian Cat Piss is an NL1 worked against a Hawaiian to at least F3. I’m hoping for pissy ammonia citrus diesel flavors from the crosses with it, along with a heavy indica head.
Interesting on the HCP tho! I always thought it was a straight sativa but I never actually looked into it. I’ve had a bag of catpiss back in the day that was definitely sativa and borderline trippy but flavor not my jam
I mean, some 88 on that blue Tara might be really fire as well 🤷🏻
That being said BTxNL is probably gonna be amazing as well, it sounds like you could just throw fistfuls of pollen in there and you’d probably get something amazing back
Glad to see you bust into the pollen!!! I collected pollen from as many stable males as possible from each variety.
NL#1 - 3-4 males
NL#5 - Just one stand out male
Cluster fuck - 2 males
Hawaiian Cat Piss - 4 males
Kine bud - 2 males
Garlic dog - 1 male and I had a hard time getting much pollen at all.
'88 G13/HP - 3-4 males
Hawaiian Cat Piss can have some NL#1 leaners and some serious sativa phenos. Big long buds that are dense and finish relatively early. Staking needed during flower on the sativa phenos. Terps are very uniform in this line with a pissy, piney, lemon thing going on.
Got a new phone, went from a potato Motorola camera to this IPhone 11 it’s real good! No editing on these, I haven’t learned that yet and I wanted to see how the camera did on its own, pretty damn good at balancing color!
Seedlings chugging along towards their first leaves:
I smoked some of this ISO shatter from cleaning my grinders and it’s no bueno- got a plastic/vinyl taste to it besides the fresh hot terps I was hoping for. Don’t know if it was the ziploc I washed them in (probably, I heat up the bag with the ISO and grinders in hot water) but I think I got some plasticizers into it. I can taste chemicals at pretty low levels and this was not so bad that I didn’t smoke half the bowl but I didn’t finish it. I’ll use the rest of this for topicals or toss it and make sure to only wash in glass from now on, and maybe without salt. I don’t think it was my plastic grinder because that’s Tritan, which is as inert of a lab grade plastic as it gets, alcohol shouldn’t touch it.
One tip that makes sense to me and that I’ll be doing (thanks @Tonygreen and whoever else does this) is to keep the seeds in the buds for a full month or two of dry and cure before I shuck them. My plan is to hang and dry the whole plants like usual for three weeks, at 50% RH the first 24 hours then up to 64% and work it down to 60% a percent at a time on the Inkbird every five days or so. Then the whole plants go into a big sanitized storage container with latches and a little thermo/hygrometer taped to the side where I can read it. I open those once or twice a day and flap the lid at the plants 5-10 times then close back up. After three weeks of that I’m going to take the seed branches, put them in another bin with a mini dehumidifier, and dry them down to 50% for a few days then crush the weed, shuck the seeds, and make some mixed dry sift. Hoping for around a hundred or so seeds of each chuck but we’ll see, I know that’s always unpredictable.
Hi @Roms hope you are well, I was just reading back in my grow log to find some information and I realized that I posted a link (probably quite a few actually) to your discussion of some strains on ICMag. Now that you are here on OG, can I ask you to talk a little about the Erdbeer or Erdpurt and other Alpine strains that you know about? I have always been very interested in these for their hardiness and adaptability to a cold wet northern climate like mine, as well as the beauty of many Alpine BLD or hemp genetics. They live on it seems, since they are good options for outdoor above 42N, especially in coastal or northern rainforest climates where moisture is always a problem.
Pissy piney lemon sounds great to me, I just had an OG Mix from Fleur Du Mal that cured up into a sort of ammonia Sprite flavor with some stinky basement funk in it, great flavor and effects. B told me that it was likely, based on when I bought my mix pack, True OG x Janis, which is the NCGA Blue Widow x Sensi Silver Pearl.
The AKBB NL#1 x ACC NL#1 seemed to be overall smaller in height, later flowering, with more sweet berry terps, and some more variation in bud structure. High narcotic stone with amazing terps!
This is in comparison to the pure AKBB NL#1 offering
