Well, my first OG grow report and my very first ‘legal’ grow! This is gonna be an outta-season grow, just 'cause I can! Gov may decide to change their minds on the whole idea at any time, so can’t afford to miss the opportunity to finally be able to put the girls out in full sun instead of guerilla jungle patches w/3 hrs of full-sun a day!
Started things off w/ 10x ‘Apricot’, 10x ‘Karel Haze’, 10x ‘Moby Dick’ and 5x ‘Ghost Dog’. 10x ‘Chocolope’, 10x ‘Durban Poison’ and 4x ‘Royal Thai’ will go in as soon as they arrive.
These will all be started under lights and then move out to full sun as soon as they need the space. I’m a Living Soils guy and have been screening out a couple almost 20 year-old leaf compost piles around the property. Main mix; worm castings (20%), peat (20%), pumice stone (20%), rice hulls (20%), leaf compost (20%). Amending with all the usual; kelp, azomite, sea shell lime, alfalfa, shrimp shell, Bio-char, rhizobacteria, rock Phos. and Fishbone meal. Making up various compost teas mostly for bottom-feeding of seedlings.
We’re unfortunately heading back towards the monsoon season (IF there even are such things as ‘regular’ seasons any more?). So these girls will likely get tested by Nature in the coming months. I’m just looking at it as a trial run for the next more appropriately-timed season. Expecting to mount a timered light above them so I can hold off on flowering for a month or two…maybe just let a couple of each in another area to go off young, just to see and try some crosses if anything looks good enough.
12-day olds; Apricots on the left, Karel Haze on the right.
Hey @Tlander , I’m Budderton. Nice to meet you.
I love me an outdoor tropics grow. This sounds like a sweet adventure/experiment and I’m gonna sub in an come along for the show! All the best to you!
Thanks to all you guys (@Gizmo@Budderton@Foreigner@Banquo ) chiming in, fun to see such great camaraderie around here! I’ll try to keep you posted as things move along. Anybody that’s grown any of these please feel free to speak up with hints (the Apricots and Karel Haze are all femmed)! It’s a steamy 82 degrees F here at 6 pm with big, black storm clouds rolling in from over the sea. A couple days into soil mixing and what before seemed like a mountain of composted leaf litter is dwindling down already! More bulk worm castings and peat arrived today, another load of pumice was delivered the day before. I see a lot of mixing in my future! Hope to have everything batched out and time to let it sit for a couple weeks before transplanting…will see if the weather cooperates. Enjoying having company along for the ride!
That stuff never lasts long! lol. Have a compost pile for “Autumn Leaves” here, gets pretty big with the large Ash, Maple, Birch and Oak I have here. Like 10x20ft x 5ft tall (uncompacted leaves). By spring that’s 6" tall. Dig down a few inches and its black gold. Been using the same leaf pile for the yard here since 1979!!!
ps. its the ONLY consolation I get for the work ya gotta do to rake em all off the yard. At least I get free super charged leaf mulch.
Love the opening photos. So uniform in their sizes. Should be a good grow!
@Nagel420 I grew up as a little kid in the Mid-West USA…can remember that seemingly endless raking! In the tropics I’m blessed with avoiding the ‘Autumn Bomb’ but it means there’s always something dropping leaves throughout the year. Almost 20 years ago I ‘cleaned up’ this land at the start of my nursery business, throwing all the rotting branches, tree trunks and a deep layer of leaf litter into an out-of-the-way pile. Dumped a few loads of horse, cow & chicken shit over the years. Managed to bypass stealing from that pile all this time. Guess in the back of my head I knew this day was coming! As much as I love Nature, peace and quiet, I gotta say I bought one of those gas-powered leaf blowers and I’ll never go back! 80% of my land slopes, so I can blow about 2-3 acres downhill in a couple hours! Of course it means lugging the finished compost back uphill later! The more I study fungi and fungal networks the more willing I am to happily gather up all the leaves I can. Hey, is that a variegated Ganja leaf on your icon? If so, is it one of yours?
Its funny, but non tropical people think that trees dont shed leaves in the tropics. Lived for 6 months in Cozumel, and learned it. Not only did the big tree in the front drop tons of tiny leaves, it flowered like 2-3 different times during the year, dropping leaves in between flowering. Cleaning up the few palm fronds that fall didn’t account for much. Kinda makes sense now why Cozumel has such crappy soil (also, its mostly less than 30ft above sea level on a limestone slab)
Yes it is, and yes, she was . She was a special plant, wish it was a photo, (woulda cloned the hell out of it) but it was an auto Blueberry Jack Herer I got from @Rabeats2093 . SPECTACULAR display of variegation, including an all yellow bud. Didnt taste much different from her non variegated sisters. Was interesting to see how the variegation unfolded. Some leaves were split down the middle (profile pic), some had each leaf split, or one finger yellow, one green. No real regular pattern. And the yellow was clearly variegation, and not a nute deficiency. Truly a beautiful plant! I did pollenate and make some seeds, maybe it will show up again. Mom has to pass on the gene for variegation, AND THEN there has to be just the right circumstances for it to present. (its not like breeding for most other traits, ie auto, where you can eliminate the non conforming ones, variegation needs the gene AND a cellular trigger). So it may show up in those seeds, and it may not, no guarantees
That’s a lot of plants!..good for you.
They don’t have a limit on how many you can grow?
Up here in Maine, I think the latest is we can have 8 plants per adult, but only 3 in flower, which totally rules out a truly legal outdoor grow of 8 plants, cuz they’ll all start buds at about the same time, and that’s coming right up in a week or two.
Haa, haa, haa… I can already see we’ll have a lot of DM discussions on this variegation topic in the coming years! Quite a rabbit hole to go down! I’ve worked/played with it a bit particularly w/various rare tropical species of plants in Asia. Tend, over the years, to have come to the conclusion that despite all the best plans & practices it’s still like the odds of catching ‘one of those nights’ at a Grateful Dead show…The “Magic” just happens when it wants to happen! Haa, haa, haa! But having progeny to work with is the essential first step! Hope it happens for you!
@Lobstah No, funny enough absolutely NOTHING is clear! Talk was that it was going to be 6 plants/household. But then the government decided to give away 1M plants to anybody that wanted them! From that point on, everything has been up in the air! It may not last, that’s why I want to jump in now, even out of season. Would have been better to put in a bunch of auto-flowers but sometimes you just gotta go with what you got!
Thailand, I take it?? If so, you’re on the “ground floor” of Legalization…CONGRATS!! I foresee nothing but positive things for you and your fellow lucky growers. Good Luck in ALL your endeavors, will certainly stick around and enjoy this. Continued success, take care, stay safe, and be well…mister
Thanks @misterbee ! Yeah, wild time to be here. Of course I waited almost 30 years! Fingers crossed the politicians don’t screw things up…wait…I didn’t say that!
Bro, you’ve got SO MANY genetics in your area, neighboring Countries being so close. “Kaycha” has a rich history in Asia, dating back THOUSANDS of years!! You are truly in an enviable situation, indeed. Again, CONGRATS, enjoy the ride. SS/BW…mister
. She was a special plant, wish it was a photo, (woulda cloned the hell out of it) but it was an auto Blueberry Jack Herer I got from 
