Thank you and welcome! I’m hoping to keep it interesting here, between growing and extracting I plan on staying busy. This QWET tincture thing is going to eventually progress to making shatter, since that’s the next logical step, and I wouldn’t mind having a little dab station at hand since I don’t smoke in the house. I also have a stainless screen to make a dry sift screen with, to try and make some pressed hash or rosin.
And here’s the final product, after evaporating the wash down to a sticky paste in the bottom of the Pyrex, re-dissolving it in two ounces of fresh ethanol, then using a silicone spatula to scrape the dish into this jar. Then I used another ounce to wash the dish of the remaining resin, ending up with three fluid ounces (roughly) of tincture from one ounce of mids.
Doing some real rough napkin math, assuming 7% THC input (it wasn’t great and I didn’t remove stems or trim closely), it should be somewhere around 20mg/ml dosage.
Mixed up some dirt last night with my 42 gallons of root balls from the last run after letting them sit kept moist for a month. They broke right apart at a push, so the roots are definitely breaking down nicely. I took a few days to keep watering the bins until they were nice and wet then yesterday I added:
- CoM EWC
- DtE Bone meal
- DtE Dungeness Crab meal
- Ahimsa Organics Neem and karanja cake
- AgSil 16h and Epsom salts
- Roots seabird guano powder
- Espoma kelp meal
- Espoma garden lime
- Xtreme Gardening Mykos granules
- vermiculite
- my box of dried fan leaf trim from defoliation and last harvest, crushed into flakes
Mixed it all up and I’ve been watering it down a few times a day, should be getting to saturation level soon and heating up. First watering was with Recharge and today I might add some LABS to get it really popping.
Instead of a shovel, I use a stainless steam kettle paddle that lets me cut and stir a lot better in a small bin. It’s much easier to get to the bottom of a bin and flip with the blade shape.
It’s funny the things we find and like to use…
My current fav is something called a Ho-mi, it’s a Korean hand tool (name means little ground spear)
Looks asymmetrically weird but works well.
Cheers
G
We just bought a house last summer and I just know that I’m going to be getting deep into the Japanese and Korean garden tools next, just wait
My favorite trowel right now is this cheap Fiskars take on a hori-hori:
My dad had that one of those.
He liked it for planting bulbs and cutting up root balls of his day lilies.
The Ho-mi is available in a long handle and short. I’m using the short, very handy mixing organic soils and amendments in buckets.
Cheers
G
One if my favorite tools too. Useful for taking soil samples or making small holes to transplant into the beds.
Whoa. I’m late to the part for sure but I’m glad I found it. Hitting that “watching” button and cursing back up to the top to see what I’ve missed. Killer setup from what I’ve read so far!
Aaand I’m back. This whole grow is unreal @Dirt_Wizard lots of parallels to my situation right now. Im playing around with staking vs. scrogging too, and trying to close the loop on my soil as best I can, looks like your way out ahead dude, I will have some questions haha
@Dirt_Wizard just finished reading through. Wow. The plants look great. Your set up is super clean. I’ll definitely be watching.
Out of curiosity have you run other swami gear. I have the blue orca haze and skunk cross similar to the one you ran.
Thanks for the kind words, I’m getting myself a system down as I cycle through harvests and moving/rearranging things. I think it’s going to stay basically like this with refinement for the near future, though. I did half-assed SCROG the first few grows, mostly for support and to pull them open a little more, but I decided to try stakes this time. I wanted to see how it would work to spin the plants frequently in and out of the hot spot on my light. I think I’m getting better development with the 360 exposure and changing shade. Ideally I’d have a light grid with better distribution, but this is my answer. The soil recycling is very by the seat of my pants right now, and I’ll probably go get a soil analysis this year to try and link it more to reality.
I’ve run his Chem 91 x Blue Orca/Black Kandahar, but in a grow that got very hot (95-99 degrees the last few weeks of flower) but my C99 pulled through okay. Then this time the Purple Zebra x RKS/Uruapan in a tent with two other strains that did great. Honestly, I’m not impressed, or at least I’m much more impressed with the stuff I’ve run so far besides Swami, which is Hazeman, Copa, Bodhi, and FDM. The Swami plants have all had good vigor and structure and they’re sort of just hay at the end of the day. Neither one has had significant frost or power when I smoke it, both were ugly old green bud. I’ve got some other strains from him I’ll try eventually, but not until I’m sitting on a large headstash, because those two crops being kind of bunk really fucked me when it came to what I’ve been smoking the last year or two. This PZxRKS showed three phenos out of four plants and one was notably better looking, but hasn’t smoked much better. I’m gonna say buyer beware and stay away from the guy unless you absolutely have to try something he has. I got my little collection of his stuff on the flash sales for like $25-30 a pack which is the most I’d pay for what I’ve seen so far. There are probably dank phenos in there but I’m not interested in hunting through the hemp to find them. The PZ said 63 days and I took it to 70 to see if that made them frost up and it didn’t seem to help.
Oh it’s a kettle paddle!! That makes so much sense, but I worked in restaurants and bars for over 16 years, and to me, that’s the thingy you use to smash the chunk of frozen ice that’s backing up the ice maker, so that the rest of the ice can fall down!
Soil recipe looks real solid, gonna bookmark that for future reference. (Lol, I just looked and that’s thesecond post in this thread I’ve saved)
Is the plan for this to be a water/tea only soil, or do you have some feed plans?
@HeadyBearAdventures Hah yeah it’s good for a lot of things that involve mild bashing or prying. I got it out of a restaurant dumpster when they were renovating along with some Cambros and a pizza peel. I do what I think of as “low-calorie” organic feeds, usually either General Organics Bio-Thrive Grow or Bloom, or Roots HPK once a week, with the other waterings being a rotation of plain, AgSil16h, Recharge, Fish Sh!t, Ful-Power, Cal-Mag+, LABS, and coconut water or aloe. Basically I give them something nearly every watering but it’s only a fertilizer feed once a week, maybe twice when shifting from stretch to mid-flower and they get real hungry. I figure I could probably run water only and it would come out ok the first run, but I’d have less yield and fully depleted soil. So yeah, I run feeds, but at like 1/8 strength or less. Quart bottles of my BT-G, BT-B, and HPK will get me through two grows seed to harvest with 4-6 plants.
@Dirt_Wizard thank you. I appreciate your detailed response on your experience with his genetics.
You’re welcome. I don’t want to make grand pronouncements like it’s all bad, there’s probably good shit I haven’t hit yet, because I did/do like a bunch of things about the plants I’ve grown, but they were just so old school in terms of no terps no potency it’s not for me, at least right now. I will probably try slinging some outside in the future, maybe they’ll like that more. But I have such better stuff to work through now I might not ever. I keep thinking about just posting everything for sale as a cheap package and letting someone else give them a try, but I’ll have to try at least a few seeds from each before I give up on the dream, most likely. If you want to give some a try, send me a PM and I’ll mail you the two packs I already ran a few of. I’m definitely open to the possibility that I just have no idea how to baby and pamper touchy old strains or that some sort of hippie whispering is needed.
As a comparison, these two buds are from the same grow, two plants next to each other. The left is the Swami PZ/RKS, the right is Copa’s Ancient Goji:
Huge difference there!!
I appreciate the offer, but I have a bunch of stuff I need to work through myself. I went nuts and bought a bunch of stuff. Now I need to start them before they expire. I also caught the seed making bug. All the potential crosses.
I have to really sit on my hands sometimes with getting new seeds.
I’m sure your right about some killer phenos in the genetics. Just a lot of searching