thanks for the info AzSea, that’s very good to know. i haven’t been very careful with collecting pollen and spraying everything down, so some mystery plant jizz is definitely floating around in the air.
i’m gonna do my best to pollinate just isolated branches when the time comes, but random mystery beans are fine by me as well. i’ll throw them into the mystery giveaway pile.
this is one of the growing moments i’ve been looking forward to… pollen chucking. i can’t believe it’s already here!
Def best to just have one stud around during breeding projects if possible, people tend to like a sure thing knowing what they are gonna get
I killed a lot of males this year in banana varieties, toughest was the triangle kush x chiquita and the banana kush ibl but it’s cuz I already got a plan with pollen in the freezer just waiting of banana cream pie, so any seeds I find in the smoke I will know was from getting creampied and can label em that way, stud was double colas naturally and purple as hell with some of the biggest leaves I’ve seen on that size plant so will be happy hunting in the lower branch babies, gonna be real fun being out there late night on a full moon with fans off and a paintbrush lol
yea, that makes sense. and i do have my best male, so it’s a clear choice of who i would keep. i’ll keep this in mind going forward.
lololol… i can already see it now. you’re out there in the dwindling heat of the desert night, twinkling stars overhead, lit only by the electric glow of the full moon, sweaty brows furrowed over your palette of pollen. what are you, howling as you’re painting your pollen on your plants? oh my god. the mad AzSeain, with his overgrown greenhouse of the devil’s lettuce. that guy’s up to no good! only badddd.
If u just can’t kill one, send it to a friend’s at another location to do the collections, when I did the jack and rhino run I just sent the jacks to a friends to open pollenate till we killed the males and hosed down the plants, might be an option 🤷
I may not be howling but my 4 wolves/huskies just might hahah
On the real though I’m gonna have some serious work ahead of me in the morning, plants are hitting the top of my greenhouse already so gonna bust out some garden string and see what I can do about bending these bitches over, I’m dreading the next month and a half and then I’m prob gonna be pulling my hair out once they hit flower stretch when they are already maxing out for height 🤦🤷 I knew I was going bananas this year but I think I did it to good lol these plants wanna be full outdoor monsters
If I don’t see half lb to a lb a plant I’d be shocked
How are the plants doing?
thanks for asking @LivingBlackSoil . my plants are doing really well. it’s just been sort of a shit week at work and i haven’t had the wherewithal to post any updates all week. fortunately i’ve taken pics of things and the weekend is right around the corner. so i’m gonna get through this work day, hopefully toss a few dollars around on the overgrow auction fundraiser, and slide into a chill blissful weekend with some sweet updates and pics for y’all soon.
le sigh.
i know you can do it mate power through the shit 
~lime~
Taco Bell is indeed a grind…
Looking forward to your updates.
Peace
Hope you had a better Friday! The weekend is here!
good morning /night min hope ya week ended ok 
hey hey DR give us a toot
@Dr.VitaminGreen ya DBHP beans are flyin to ya 
speak soon min (rubbing hands waiting for mins pics)
~lime~
“not another clogged toilet!!” lololol… misterbee’s trade-off sure was a fun one!
thanks for the well wishes y’all, that means a lot. 
i’ve had to do some soul searching about my job these past few weeks, and some friends have lost loved ones recently as well, so it’s been a bit stressful. but i told @Limeflavouredheadbut that i would make like a plant and just keep on growing. we’re all still here on this earth and we’re doing the best that we can given the circumstances. and coming onto overgrow and seeing you guys growing this awesome plant and sharing amongst one another and supporting each other, it gives me hope for the future. like that stevie wonder song, or something.
and you know what, we made it to the weekend and that’s plenty of reason to celebrate, so lemme pack something good and lets get the chill started. i’m gonna bust out my classic durban poison sprinkled with a little dream queen smoke mix.
anywhooo… oh boy… what’s been going on since my last update?
the last week and a half had been very focused on my males and pollen collection. i learned some good lessons, and i’m currently undertaking experiments to determine viability of pollen which may have gone bad. lets take a look.
this is all pollen from my main male, durban 1 (tao). i started collecting his pollen on 6/12 and just kept it in a small glass vial (that used to contain hash or kief), which i placed inside a ziplock baggie with a small bag of dessicant, keeping the glass vial open and not capped. nothing too fancy and no additional measures to dry the pollen out any further. this seemed to work well, although i did notice some small clumps of pollen forming, but nothing that worried me to action. i think they were small specks of plant matter that i hadn’t totally removed.
a few days later, i decided to store some of d1’s pollen in a plastic lacon container (you can see it on the left in the above photo). again, nothing fancy in terms of drying out the pollen before putting it in the vial. i did end up closing this vial with the pollen in it. i don’t know whether it was that or whether it was the plastic container or just humid conditions when i was collecting that pollen, but it ended up being a bad thing. a day or two (or three?) after using the lacon vial for pollen storage, i opened it up and noticed a good portion of it was darker and had caked up. it looked moist and worrying. the other part was light in color like good, fresh pollen looks, but when i sifted through it, it was also caked like the darker pollen.
this concerned me, so i emptied the lacon container of pollen out onto a piece of paper. i then took a razor and did my best to de-cake the pollen and spread it out. i was hoping that spreading the pollen onto the paper would help dry it out. this is probably what i should have done from the beginning, but i hadn’t thought it necessary.
fast forward six hours and hopefully you can see that the pollen is looking decently dry again. i wasn’t sure whether the pollen had been de-activated or not from its time being moist, so i ended up separating the darker pollen and labelling it D1-- (D1 minus minus), while the slightly lighter pollen that had caked up i labeled D1- (D1 minus). i’m still going to try using this pollen, but i’ll specifically label the branches that i dust with D1- and D1-- pollen to see if there is any noticeable degradation in viability.
here you can see tropical 3 with her pollen bags on. i only dusted my females on this one day, since i didn’t have a lot of pollen and it was already a pain to separate everything, turn off all the fans, isolate the plants, gently dust the pollen, etc etc. the silly thing is i didn’t really put the pollen bags on until after i had already dusted the branches. it didn’t seem that important until i was pollinating my cindy 2 outside the tent and noticed little streams of pollen floating off into the distance whenever i would knock or tap the qtip applicator i was using (i think it was the lighting that accentuated things). i didn’t realize pollen was that light and airy! i suppose i’ll have some accidental pollinations which will go into the mix mystery pile.
after that though, i started throwing ziplock bags over the pollinated branches, which i might’ve should’ve done before i dusted them in order to help contain the pollen. lessons learned. i was a little concerned that the ziplock bags seemed a little heavy and they were smooshing the top most stigmas. is that a problem? i’m not sure.
if you look closely, you can see the pink-taped tags near the bottom of the branches which i use to label which pollen is used on which branch. you can also see the duban 1 male on the left hand side. he’s been de-ballsacked and has been hanging out in the flower tent for the last few days now. i’m gonna see how he regrows again.
here’s durban 1 from before he started dropping pollen and before he was clipped in half (6/12) and after i had harvested his pollen, de-sacked him and placed him back in the flowering tent (6/23). you can already see new growth on him. what a journey he’s going through!
so what’s been the outcome of all that pollination work, because it did take a surprising amount of work. was it worth it?
i’ll have to wait and see whether my attempts will give me dozens of seeds or hundreds of seeds. but i’m already happy with what i’m seeing so far.
watch that male you returned to ya flower tent mate he will be shooting his load again before you can say big bollox 
here ya go buddy rolled ya one too
good word of caution, lime. i was definitely gonna keep eyes on him and chop off any future balls. i sorta like eating them. i actually like eating the leaves as well, except sometimes the older leaves are a little too strong and bitter.
lets rewind two weeks or so, to the last photos we’ll take of cindy 3 and durban 2, our secondary males. i actually remember liking the stem rub from these two, more so than some of my other durbans, many of which i noted smell acrid or rubbery, plastic-y (not my favorite smells). instead, c3 and d2 leaned more fruity and sweet to me, although a lot of these scents i’m not really accustomed to or familiar with so my accuracy may be off.
i liked cindy 3 because he was short and bushy but had those thin sativa leaves. for his scents, i noted “weird, fruit rot, rubber? cheese”.
i wasn’t a huge fan of durban 2 for awhile, but i did end up liking his stem rub near the end. for his scents, i noted “acrid, cheese, sticky”. he must have been noticeably resinous.
i got the most pollen from my main durban 1 male, with cindy 3 second and durban 4 yielding very little pollen. next time if i wanted more pollen from males like c3 and d4, i would have vegged them for maybe another week before flipping. although that would require a separate veg area for me to continue them in.
tropical 1 and tropical 3, the tropical mixes from mt zion collective.
what a crazy sight this is! for sure t1 is in a 3gallon container whereas t3 has been in the earthbox jr for awhile now. but still, the difference in size and growth is remarkable. t1 is about 19" from soil to top, whereas t3 is 45" and that’s with training. right now tropical 3 is drinking her full reservoir of water every day.
t1’s notes read “sweet, green, resin. herbal, sage-y”. t3 smells like “bitter green”, whatever that means. i really hope i like t3’s smoke, because there’s gonna be a lot of it.
what t1 lacks in size though, she’s doing her best to make up for in frostiness…
i don’t even feel like i’m doing anything special to help bring these sugar rails on. my soil is not super organic, no worms, no insects or bugs if i can help it. but here she is, acting like it’s gonna be christmas soon. she’s the frostiest of all my ladies so far, which makes me sort of extra excited for her.
the tallest plants (tropical 3, cindy 2 and durban 3) are all relatively similar in height give or take a few inches (40"-45"). cindy 2 has grown with one main cola and a bunch of smaller branches way down below.
notes on cindy 2… “acrid, rubber, fruity, cheese”
durban 3, tall beautiful slender. she has more branches trying to fight for dominance than cindy 2 does, but still it’s mostly one tall main cola. her flowers seem to be filling in quicker, although more sparsely than c2’s.
if you’ll recall, i had 90degree bent her a week or so ago. here she is all healed and knuckled up in that spot. that joint is no joke! i believe i had juiced her watering with agsil after the bending to help rebuild and recover.
feeding and watering wise, once my females entered flower cycle, i gave them gnarly barley and build-a-bloom amendments at the top of the week (mondays) and then mango and banana fpj’s at the bottom of the week (fridays). plain water at all other times.
i got my shipment of amendments in from red bud soil earlier this week after a long wait, so i had also added a watering of sea-90, fulvic, and humic acids earlier in the week as well.
and there’s your update on my first batch of plants. i estimate another 4-6 weeks of flower, with tropical 3 perhaps trailing a week behind.
conditions in my tent are getting a little harder to keep in an optimal vpd for current flower cycle. the summer heat is turning things up, while i’m also trying to maintain a stealth grow so i can’t just blast fans in there. things still seem good, although i’m noticing i’m losing more leaves on tropical 3. i think it’s because there’s so much growth on her and i’m not keeping up with her watering enough.
also, it finally seemed time to install my carbon filter. i was noticing a “spicy” smell around my room recently. also a slight mold smell from the soil. not sure whether that’s something okay or i should worry about. i have my mulch cover on the earthbox and i think that encourages mold growth underneath. good? bad?
that is a rather frosty looking little lady, ya gonna want some bubble bags 
that looks like a hash makers dream
@JoeCrowe what do ya think , love ta get ya scope on it and have a count up 
~lime~
That’s a nice knuckle! 
Super frosty lady, that’s some good genetics to see that on a first run no dialing in. She’s loving life. 
Love the way you did the pollination on the separate bags, how long you going to leave them like that, or did you already take them off? Lesson learned for you, and for me about bagging and then applying, almost like under a lab hood or still air box, as I will probably do a similar technique. 
Hope your self-reflection turns up wonders. You are Extremely detail oriented, your prose is excellent, and you seem like the type to not balk when voluntold to do a task. I’m sure you would be a wonderful addition for any team. 
My bro says you should literally always be interviewing/applying for the next job, because then it’s your choice to take it or not rather than being stuck. He’s probably helped thousands of veterans with resumes and getting jobs through the USO and his current non-profit and my wife her job, so I tend to give his opinions on that stuff credence. 
I always scope a single bud that I cut from the main stalk below the cluster. If you can call it up on the screen then put a red dot on each one you see. I wonder if I could take someone else’s photo and use my counting software on it.
yay, i’m super impressed with the frost coming off there! on the other hand though, compared to the other plants, tropical 1 is super small so i would hope all the tlc i’ve been giving my plants would go somewhere. after all, she isn’t a huge grower nor a big stretcher. i’ve pollinated two or three of her bud sites each with durban 1 and cindy 3 pollen.
QUESTION: SHOULD I RE-POLLINATE THOSE SAME BRANCHES? now i’m wondering if i should go back and re-pollinate those same bud sites (on all my plants) with whatever pollen i have left over. i feel like i’m only going to get dozens of seeds from each plant. but i’m not sure, being a first time grower. any thoughts or recommendations? do you guys need to see more photos to evaluate pollination? if i’m giving up those branches for seed, i wanna make sure i’m gonna be getting seeeeds from them. it’s been like a week since i first pollinated them.
lime, don’t you need like a whole bucket/ice thing to make hash? i dunno, i’ve already filled up half my room with grow equipment and supplies, it’s quite crowded in here right now. lol. one of these days i’ll have some time off to re-organize everything. but i don’t know if i can throw in a bucket for making hash as well. at this rate, in a few year’s time i’ll be wondering why i ordered 500 gallons of soil and raw materials for a green house. which is not a bad thing, i wouldn’t complain about it as long as i had the space and means.
i suppose the easier thing to do would be to collect the inevitable kief from it. which to me sounds like an awesome thing. i love kief and i especially love hash, and hash can be hard to come by if you’re just looking to buy it legally from a dispensary.
i think i left them on for about 4-6 hours. after that, i sprayed everything down with water and removed the bags. i probably did two or three spray-dry cycles since i didn’t have an isolated area or shower to work each plant in, so i wanted to do my best to ensure the excess pollen wasn’t floating from plant to plant.
if i had more space, i would’ve liked to let them sit and pollinate for anywhere from 8-12 hours. but the shorter time seems like it’s worked out alright.
in the future, i would put the bags on before hand and then pollinate inside the bags. this would hopefully isolate any floating pollen, but i’ll have to see how reality plays out. sometimes you think a plan will be good, but then when you go to execute it, you realize how awkward or difficult it actually is.
@AzSeainDooin420’s advice of having only one male around during pollination is good if you’re ready to work with only one male. that way, even if you do have random pollination, you’ll know who the father is. but like the dwarves, i prefer to dig too deeply and too greedily.
thanks for your other thoughts @Dr.VitaminGreen. my virgo side definitely has me reviewing details repeatedly and running cycles through my mind to evaluate situations. it’s good for doing quality work, but sometimes it makes me too cold and analytical. i find weed helps calm my mind and focus me when i need focusing, but also makes me feel more human at times. i dunno, hard to explain.
i’ve certainly got a plethora of skills and good social/people skills as well. it’s just… you know, i like where i’m working and it’s always a small pain to find my next situation. i don’t prefer to work somewhere just to make a buck. i like to find a place i’m happy with and where i like the people i’m working with. but who knows, for now i may just have to pimp my skills out until the future makes itself clearer. i just gotta float in that min-wind until i land wherever life will have me next.
i’ll be trying to take better photos of the trichs in the upcoming weeks. i have that 12x/24x clip-on macro lens which has been doing a bang up job, and which i’ve really only been using the 12x lens. i found the 24x was a bit distorted, but it may yield good results for trich viewing. we’lll see. i also have some macro camera lenses as well, but the magnification with those is not anywhere near what i’m looking for.
i was really hoping to get some sort of good, amplified photo viewing device that is a few stops back from what you’re doing with your microscopy work @JoeCrowe. my thought was to pick up an objective lens at some point, but i’ll have to see how my upcoming work situation pans out. i may have to switch from spend mode to save mode for a little while.
what’s the counting software that you’re using? is it actually able to differentiate trichs, or do you have to process your images so it’s looking for something like bright/dark contrast differences?
It uses the gold standard in counting. I click the mouse button and it makes a red dot where I click and also adds that up so you get a total in the end.
i was chatting with lime and i realized it’s about time for me to prep my next set of seeds for my second grow!
my current females are about 4 weeks into their flower cycle, and will likely have another 4-6 weeks left for a total of 8-10 weeks flowering time. so by the time they’re done and harvested, i’d like to be ready to flip my next grow into flower. ideally, i’d really like to have a second grow area where i can keep my new plants on an 18/6 light cycle, rather than sticking them into my one and only tent which is currently on 12/12. but i’m just gonna push ahead and start planning my next seeds to pop while i try to figure that out.
i already have a second set of seeds started, but that’ll be for my grower friend down in san diego who said he’d be happy to take more females from me. i’ll talk about that shortly. so i suppose really this is my third set of seeds, but the second set for me.
i’ve got some strains picked out already. i’m thinking to do 4 strains of two seeds each. i’ve already got three of the four strains selected, but i wanted to put out a poll to ask you guys what i should run for my fourth strain.
here’s my thinking so far. these are the strains that i’ve already selected and will be popped…
so with that in mind, WHAT SHOULD I SELECT FOR MY FOURTH STRAIN?
here’s what i’ve picked out as possible selections…
