Hey folks, I figure today is as good as any to spend some time doing a writeup about my garden and get a grow journal running. I’m absolute trash at documenting my garden but we’ll see how this goes, maybe I’ll take the occasional photo that doesn’t suck, too! I’m a little long-winded so I don’t blame you if you just scroll past the rambling.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask 'em, but I’m just fucking around and whatnot. I know my plants don’t look great sometimes but that’s alright.
About me as a grower
I started growing in a 2x2.5 tent in 2017, using a blurple light and bottled nutrients, throwing away my soil every run and losing genetics that I really enjoyed because I didn’t have a cloner or anything. So I ended up expanding to using a 2x4 tent as a flower tent, and I ended up meeting a super cool guy via instagram who grew organically in 2019-ish, and his methods just seemed interesting and fun and easy, and I’m honestly a longtime hippy at heart, so natural stuff is more up my alley anyway.
So now I have a 4x4 bed in a 4x4 tent, and I use my 2x4 as a veg tent. It’s pretty cool but I feel like we could all use more room for this shit, right?
I have the tendency to torture my plants without intending to, but at least I usually know what I’m doing wrong. I keep them in smaller pots than I should for too dang long, and put clones in my cloner without a humidity dome, so my veg tent kind of looks like hell a lot of the time. I overcrowd my tents a lot, so what’re ya gonna do.
I’ve been illegally growing for so long that it’s still just a good practice to keep it to myself, but I believe homegrowing will be legal in my state this year…? I don’t know, I don’t pay too much attention to what’s legal and what’s not when it comes to shit that I’m used to keeping quiet about.
I’m a hobbyist grower, I don’t make anything off of it, I just supply myself and someone else, so it makes it weird to be online and people are always just trying to sell you something. I’m not trying to break records or win cups or anything, I just wanna grow cool pot. I like a good stoney pot that puts my anxiety to bed. I don’t really love getting all spun up and having a shitty time getting scared, but I do kind of dig longer flowering stuff and find them neat. Landrace preservation is a big ol’ interest/plan for the future. I have some seeds to go through and make more of.
The Garden
I have my 2x4 and my 4x4 tents, and a tote that I call my soil bin, and even mistakenly refer to it as my worm bin sometimes because I feed it scraps occasionally to keep the worms happy. Sometimes it’s overfilled, and sometimes it’s empty, it just ebbs and flows. I realized the other day that the bottom like 6 inches of it was just worm castings, so I mixed it up and threw in some dead clones that didn’t root.
My soil is native forest soil from a friend’s land, and some bagged soil(I like roots organics but have no reason for the preference, I’ve just used it most and my biggest complaint is that sometimes I get fungus gnats). Honestly I put all the dirt I could round up into my 4x4 bed when I set it up, and I added supersoil concentrate to it. Since then I’ve added the occasional bit of fruit or topdressing, and I added some crushed up oyster or clam shells or something, I don’t even remember.
I use rice hulls for aeration and they tend to compress over time so I have seedlings drown if I try to use my soil, and I found a bag of vermiculite in my garage recently so I’ll start mixing that in and that should help.
I’ve recently started actually using the KNF ferments that I’ve been hearing so much about. I’ve notice nothing different, but I’ve been enjoying the busy work. Last year I made some comfrey FPJ, and just recently I made LAB and WCA(water soluble calcium) and am going to strain out some melon FFJ I’m making sometime this week.
The larger plants, starting on the left, are Spirit Rider 2, Tiger King 1, Tiger King 3, and Ancient Aliens. The small pots all over the place are just clones of those 4 plants and Spirit Rider 3 which is in the flower tent.
I’m also popping various seeds lately. I’m working on starting some bag seeds from when I mishandled some males and got pollen contamination while I was growing Blackberry Hashplant and Ghana Hashplant (both from Dragon’s Flame Genetics) and they were really weird and funky smelling plants and I decided to try to check out the bag seeds to try to find a couple of cool plants. I’d like to smoke it again but I’ve also decided to start looking for a male to start putzing around with intentionally making seeds. A few of them seem to be sprouting, but we’ll see what happens. Also sprouting some quinoa and peanuts to use as cover crop because I can’t seem to find my damn alfalfa seeds anywhere.
Front left is Spirit Rider 3(only transplanted in there a week or so ago), front right is Tiger King 3, and the back two plants are Tiger King 1.
The Genetics
Spirit Rider is my friend’s cross, and it’s: Magdalene(White Widow x Holodeck Jesus) x Dragon’s Hashplant F2
I don’t have pictures of her in flower, unfortunately (more of a record keeping issue than a lack of photos tbh)
Honestly I think even if my friend hadn’t bred this, I’d love this plant. I’ve grown Magdalene (he bred it as well) and it’s great, and the Dragon’s Hashplant F2 from Dragon’s Flame Genetics is obviously gonna be a ripper, because DFG brings the heat consistently. It’s a stable strain, and I’ve been growing out two plants because I haven’t been able to decide what to keep. I also suck at describing plant smell profiles unless it’s super fresh in my mind. Hopefully I can come in and edit this with a proper description after I’ve ground some up again.
Ancient Aliens is from Magick Beans: Alien Marmalade #6 x Starkiller
I don’t have pictures of her in flower, unfortunately (more of a record keeping issue than a lack of photos tbh)
You ever have a plant that you don’t really love but you don’t have a great replacement for it yet? I don’t love this but I also really do. The bud has a nice orange zest and tire rubber smell but also sometimes there’s some pine maybe, and it’s a pretty solid asskicker, but it ALWAYS grows like one male part in the lowers that I just never find, so I’m picking seeds out of a limb every harvest. Once I find another stoney, funky plant on par with this one (won’t be too terribly difficult because this one leaves some boxes unchecked) I’ll be replacing her.
Tiger King is from Sunoma Seeds, and it’s: 9lb Hammer x Oaxacan Thai
I have two distinctly different phenos. This one’s bud structure looks like the Oaxacan I grew, and the stem rub has the same odd smell, almost lemony maybe? She started throwing nanners about halfway through flower. Just been plucking them off and letting her rock. We’ll see if she has seeds. Probably not gonna keep her around in general if she’s sprouting nanners and misbehaving like that, she’s taking up valuable space on the roster for no good reason, but imagine if I got rid of all her clones and the bud is like the best I’ve ever had? BEEN THERE, BROTHER.
This one has a more compact bud structure but still a long node spacing so the colas aren’t really filling in, but she’s pretty as hell. I think the temps just got too low (around 62*F) for a stretch and turned her purple, but we’ll see. She seems pretty stable and I think I like her. The bud has an astringent smell when it’s ground up. It’s another one of those profiles that I can’t really nail down yet, but as I get used to her I’ll be able to put it to words.
Coming back after smoking some: it smells like licorice when I grind it up.
