I’ve been growing a number of different strains for my family for a while now and I love how amazingly responsive (and different) all the plants are! A couple years ago I cloned plants we enjoyed and made feminized seeds which have worked out well. I grow outside in 30-gallon fabric bags. I made rolling platforms for the plants with 24" exterior plywood discs, painted white with deck paint. Each disc has 4 castering wheels so the plants are easy to move around on our deck. We got a mystery seed in a package sent by old growers in CA 3-years ago and I had fun growing that. I called it Mrs Droopy because overnight it would droop much more than any of the other plants and when the sun came up all the droop disappeared. Early on it was taller than all the other plants. Now so far I had only been growing feminized seeds so I wasn’t looking out for male characteristics but when it got to be about 7’ tall it all of a sudden became completely obvious it was actually Mr Droopy! I moved it as far away as I could and let it keep growing. I crossed it with a smaller female Gelato I had cloned earlier in the summer and got many seeds. Next year I called the strain DroopyGelato (DG for short). Next spring the seeds germinated VERY quickly and were amazingly robust! I gave away a bunch of seedlings to friends. The two I grew turned out to be males and one of them had the most lovely dark red, almost burgundy stems. A friend who was growing some of the seedlings (that turned out to be female) and one of the females also had the dark red/burgundy stem coloring. I cloned my red-stemmed male and her red-stemmed female and then in the fall bred the clones to create DroopyGelatoRed (DGR). Most of the DGR plants now have the dark red/burgundy stem coloring. I’ll be picking the darkest red male and female plants again this year to cross. I have no idea what the mystery seed was. The plants appear to have a strong sativa influence. The only plant I can find that they look like is Congo Red Stem … but who knows? Since this is just my intro post I don’t know if I can add photos yet. If people are interested maybe I can in replies or a new post. I’ve also crossed DGR with Jack Herer, Chocolope, and Harlequin. All of them grow well also but don’t have the red stems.
Updated: here’s a link to my 2023 Grow Journal