There is a difference between a system that root prunes via air/light exposure or chemical means (Cu) and aeration. The latter just causing you a lot of watering headaches.
If your plant has a lot of root and leaf mass (and it should) then there is little danger of overwatering it as long as the potting soil is a light to medium texture. The wicking of excess moisture in the soil will take care of itself as mentioned.
Thank you Roms! I’m looking forward to seeing how they do in a southern New England environment, we get a lot of moisture every morning and then strong sun we have a south facing yard of a few cleared acres on a hillside sloping down into a swamp on one side and a lake in front, so solar exposure should be great. I am excited to put this one and the FDM with a different Malawi in it next to it each other, and grow some African hybrids outside! I love Nigerians, Ethiopians, and Durban/Transkei/Kwazulu but have never tried much Malawi or other sub-Saharan strains. I’m hoping that the crosses with sturdy indicas help them out in my 43N area, with our high wind gusts and occasional heavy thunderstorms.
I would think that genetics from rainy areas of India would be a good bet based on your area’s weather patterns. A Cu fungicide I would not hesitate to use to build up some systemic resistance is Magnabon CS2005. Need to find a distributor though.
One Malawi (the Equilibrium that FDM used) is an acclimatized heirloom from the mountains around Santa Cruz:
“These are F1 hybrids of an Heirloom Sativa from the Santa Cruz Mountains. This Malawi has been stabilized for a number of traits including tall height, hollow stems, light green leaves, chunky + medium dense buds, sweet aroma, high THC and mold resistance.”
The other (in @Roms AfroBubble) is Afropips Power Malawi, which is Jim’s Malawi Gold x Pure Power Plant. I found this from him about his Malawi Gold in a good ICMag thread about it:
Great Read Guys!
Sativas definately Rock my World!
I have travelled around Africa & the most delicious
Buds I tasted was the Mozambique Black which
matches the description of the African Black
(A bag of the worst looking blk leafy bud)
& the Malawi Black scored in the Malawi Cob,
The buds were dark brown to black with tons
of blk sticky resin, compact & wet
& needed to be cut with the scissors.
I grew up in Durban & spent a good 10 years smoking
the original Durban Poison sticks wrapped in Bookie Papers.
Later they halved the size & used brown paper & were
known as Pietermaritzburg slugs. They come in a roll of 20 sticks,
resemble & are named after the revolver bullets.
I just popped a few of the PMBurg Slug seeds on the week end.
Eventually I got tired of the DP & went to the Transkei
for a couple of months. Here I stayed on several grower / Herbalist
plantations & sampled The Pondo Fever.
It was here in 1985 when I learnt how to take cuttings from
Julius the Best Grower in the Coffee Bay Area at the time.
Swaziland was the next destination as we ocasionally used to get the
Swazi Brick shipments in SA. It had a very fruity pepper taste
& was known as Royal Swazi.
We scored the Best heads from the Piggs Peak Area.
Swazi Grease was something special - A black hash with the resemblace of grease.
You had to wrap a matchstick dipped in grease & spread into the herb to smoke it.
In the early 80’s a good friend of mine visited with a Malawi Gold Cob
his friend brought back with him from a holiday in Malawi.
We smoked a bottleneck amongst a few spa & puffed a few joints,
needless to say I was hooked.
The next ganja hunt was off to Zimbabwe in 86.
The Best we scored was the Batonka weed which was comparable to the
Mz & Mal Blks. The buds were the size & shape of Goons & Golf Balls.
The Mutoka weed had some interesting buds but were not
really Hard enough when the staple was Malawi Cobs which are readily available in Harare.
In 1992 I took my first trip to the Lake Malawi to
visit the place where the number one smoke was
coming from & stayed a couple of months.
Later I would spend half my time there & the other half in Zim
until I came to UK in 1999.
The First Grade Malawi Gold is definately my no1
choice of landrace sativas.
The Gold takes you to where you wish to be
with the unique Malawi Gold Taste, Aroma & Effect.
It is very similar to Thai weed in taste & aroma
but has the spicy gum numbing, vision distorting effect.
Its extremely Mellow & smooth to taste &
a warm glow comes over the whole body when
you come to the end of the Joint.
Here is Chizzle Pic of an opened Malawi Gold Cob
for those who have never seen the Malawi
traditional way of packaging & curing.
Notice the light green to gold colour.
My plan for fungicide this season is some copper sulfate in veg once or twice if it’s a moist summer, but definitely just before flowering, along with horticultural glycerin soap, lactobaccillus serum, potassium silicate, and Regalia foliars. We get the mold and mildew where I am pretty bad but the yard stays decent because of the open clearing and the trees around the edge catching the wind even if it’s higher up. Not too worried overall but I’m not taking any chances!
Ok guys, I had to put off pollination until I get home on Tuesday which will be Day 28, should be fine and I’ll be able to do everything at once, including the last one that @Radicle_Reefer has on the way to me already, which I’ll now reveal since there’s not gonna be much of any grow news here until I get home. He was reading the thread and went poking around in the freezer and came across some pollen from AK Bean Brains 1995 Black Domina BX!
AKBB description:
“The original genetics are from Mr. Bob Hemphill. They are Black Domina crossed to Pacific North West Hashplant NL1 (PNWHP NL1). This was bred to f3 and then back crossed to the F1 males.”
That’s right, we’re backcrossing the Purple Skittles pheno of Icy Grape F2 to a different line of Black Domina! Gonna be really exciting to hand those out and see what comes from them, I’ll probably send Copa back some beans too so he can play with those. I will probably commit two branches to this one, I think it’s a great opportunity he’s handed me, and I’ll definitely be using the other pollens, but this BD BX is going on the IG and Blue Tara for sure! Everything is going to get run 70 days or more so plenty of time for lots of big fat mature seeds yay
I’ve had such bad botrytis the last few years after never having an issue my previous 3 years of outdoor growing and have been thinking about just not even messing with it this season. Although I am in California, I am along the coast and we have really mild summers with a lot of wet fog, the temperature basically stays in the botrytis growing range for most of the day.
As far as Regalia, do you typically use it throughout the growing cycle or do you stop once you hit early flower? Stuff is pretty expensive so curious to hear how it has worked for you. I am on the fence and might just say screw it and start a few plants for outdoors as that is usually what happens to me.
I have a pack of Purple Pakistani Chitral Kush from Bodhi and have always heard that the strain is supposed to be very resistant to botrytis, does great in cold and wet climates etc., figure if they get hit with botrytis as well, will just stick to indoors until something else gives.
please keep us posted with that project I would love to see how everything turns out and possibly get a chance to grow out the progeny if you’d be willing to part with some!
@ElGalloBlanco I haven’t used Regalia yet so I have some research to do myself before I could say
@CamTheCannaman just got back from my trip this afternoon and took a nap then managed to get back up in time to pollinate two branches of Icy Grape and one each of Blue Tara and Sowah Grapefruit with the AKBB ‘95 Black Domina BX pollen from @Radicle_Reefer
P.S. a reminder to everyone including myself, @LouDog420 is going to have some fresh crosses coming up soon on the Beans for St Jude fundraiser so get those donations ready, I’m thinking sativa AK-47 x Violeta (or just both!) and the Violeta F3(?)s and probably the Bubblehead and OG Chem/NYCO #3
We’re gonna see! I did my best to dust it around with a brush on all the flowers in the bag, then sealed them and bellowed the bag around a bit to shake it in there. Left them for half an hour then sprayed everything down
But it seems like the science says that Trichoderma Harzianum is really the way to go with botrytis, from what I’ve read, maybe worth trying both as foliars? You can get TH powder cheaply on the internet, I also see a lot of science about using food grade citric acid, that’s another inexpensive one. And bacillus amol… I don’t know how to spell it but that one, Arbico has a good page of products:
In my tents I depend on PureCrop1, which is honestly not terribly expensive at the solution rate, and there’s a DIY recipe on OpenSalts, but I haven’t tried it yet.
Finally got the cryovials and storage boxes I ordered a month or two ago, dunno what happened there (EDIT turns out I ordered them from China direct which is why they were like $8 each, Walmart Marketplace is where it’s at) but I can finally start making my seed storage compact and cataloged easily. I’m planning on dropping breeder Eppendorfs into these if they have them, or unpacking coin flips and baggies. I might leave Lacons the way they are and just do a card catalog of them in a food storage container since that would be pretty easy.
@ElGalloBlanco and anyone else into biocontrols and mycology generally, I found this incredible open data site for coordinating genomic research of fungi that folks would really like, take a look! It’s called Mycocosm and it’s run by the Department of Energy labs:
I like your style! I’ve been wanting do this for some time now. Great way to stay organized and more compact. Would you put any rice in the vial with the precious cargo?
That’s my plan, I’m going to gently bake half a cup of Arborio beforehand and put a few grains in each vial from an airtight container as I pack them. I was going to get silica beads but some packs have them already in the tubes or Mylars (which I plan to catalog to shout out all the breeders who go the extra mile on archival packaging). Rice should be fine, I’m extra broke right now and working with my unemployment check which ain’t much.