I think I am going to flip the females to flower tomorrow or Saturday (as soon as I get the males out of there).
I was planning on giving them a little longer after I had to cut the tops and strip them down, just to try and get them as healthy as I could before flower. But I feel like I’m just wasting time, and since they are already so overgrown (and probably root bound) in those tiny pots (with soil as the medium) I figure the sooner the better.
This probably won’t be the prettiest run anyway, with the high heat/humidity I know I will battle (which can cause heat stress issues in my room, like buds growing more fox-tailed and airy).
I’m confident I’ll be able to keep them healthy enough to produce a healthy seed crop though.
I mean, it’s not like they are that unhealthy… especially considering how long they’ve been in those tiny pots, and that I’ve stayed all organic up to this point.
(The dark green plant on the bottom left of the 1st pic is the ‘92 Kush. The SSDD look pale next to it, but in person they don’t look as pale as in the pics)
I hit them with my all-purpose organic feed a couple days ago, just to be sure.
Into 5 gallons of water:
3/4 cup alfalfa meal
1/2 cup malted barley (ground to flour)
1/4 cup kelp meal
humic acid
LAB
Then water with it and pour the leftovers into your compost pile!
I find this is a good general cure-all that you can fine-tune if needed. Like sometimes I add TM-7 instead of plain humic acid if I think I need more micros. Or I’ll add rock dust or azomite. and I’ll also sometimes add some fish hydrolysate too. Usually a more well-rounded one instead of a N heavy one (like if I think they need more P).
I did top dress with some worm castings too.
I think I might just switch over to synthetic nutrients for flower though, to make things easier (especially with how overgrown they already were). I do love growing organically but I’m not sure I see much point this run.
We’ll see how it goes. I’ll post up my next photos of growth logging for most of the plants so you can have my findings. Then we’ll see what makes sense, I’m guessing a second thread will be in order since this one is already busy.
Let’s keep talking in DM, but before I forget, do you want more than the F1 SSDD to run when you pop them? If you’re looking for something let me know, I have acquired more things to run with SSDD than I’ll ever get to
I can relate to so much of this. I keep taking the abuse and stress testing a step further. They are such strong plants and they keep surprising me with how good they look considering what they’ve been through.
I’ve done a little with bottom feeding/watering in the past sporadically, but randomly decided to do it with all of these about a month ago. I’ve got them in a tray and I’m just dumping whatever water I have made up in the bottom of the tray, then using tap water randomly, and they’re growing like rockets.
Yeah I just started way too much stuff at once back at the start of the year. I went way overboard starting new seeds then Tykal posted about the SSDD clones and I just couldn’t pass it up. So they were stuck in tiny solo cups for months, waiting for space to open up.
Then I transplanted from the solo cups into the 1+2 gallon pots with the plan to just get them healthy and move them into flower. But then my last sensi plants in flower took longer to finish than I thought, and a bunch of stuff happened in life that had me super busy so I didn’t have much time to take care of the garden. I also had to wait for some work to be completed in dude’s basement before I could use my flower room again.
And then when the work was done and the flower room empty I got a spider mite infestation that I wanted to eradicate before flowering them.
So it all added up to a longer timeline than originally planned. I wish I would have taken pics before I chopped them down to a more manageable size.
Some were probably almost twice as tall as they are now.
That was just a solution I watered with after letting all that stuff sit+steep in the water for 24 hours. I probably should have been more clear about that. lol
Most of the alfalfa + kelp gets dumped into the compost pile afterwards. Some of it makes it into the pots but nowhere near enough to sustain them through flower.
I’m not going to switch to synthetics unless/until necessary though!
Saw I was tagged in this thread a few times - haven’t had a ton of free time so I wanted to make sure I read the first post before commenting. Hope everything goes smooth for you on this run and that you have fun doing it! Speaking with you on here a bit in the past it’s clear how passionate you are about SSDD, so I’m happy you got a chance to explore her again.
I’m sure my opinion would be the least popular, but to me finding special and worthwhile females first would be the most interesting route to go. I’d save the pollination for later when you go through your next pack of SSDD, and pull the males from that pack. To me that seems like it would produce more desirable seeds to germinate and grow out, and hopefully would help avoid becoming yet another project that results in the seeds becoming trading cards.
However you go about doing the project I appreciate the effort you’re putting into it, very cool of you!
I have been thinking about your situation and options, and how I can learn from you, and I have been up racking my brains about how I should do the next season because I have a few different strains I want to F2 with my limited budget for enclosing them. I would like to share a thought of another option that worked for me a few times already. It is so similar to what has been suggested here already, but maybe it inspires and gives you some new ideas.
When it was time to cull all the males to ensure sensi in one room: I chopped and thoroughly stem rubbed all of males, and I threw the most smelly and vigorous ones in a separate pile. I took clones of the ‘best males’ pile, and it allowed me to enclose them in a very small propagator box. after a couple of weeks, the best ones started rooting, and they continue to develop their flowers, and drop pollen inside the propagator. That allows you to keep very many of them in a very small space, and you get to see which ones root fastest.
I’ve seen lots of people have been talking about this strain; I think I speak for everybody when I say we all wish you great fortune and success, and want to see some pretty beans on our screens.
Good luck, have fun!
I do that on occasion, along with top dressing other organic inputs. Alfalfa can get a bit hot when it first starts composting so you have to be careful not to top dress too much. I usually like to pre-mix it into the soil and let it “cook” a bit first.
With this run, they have already been stuck in tiny pots in soil for so long that it’s going to be a battle trying to stay ahead of them with only organic inputs. I could probably do it if I really wanted, but as I said I’m not really seeing much point. I know some people (like the Rev) claim you get “better” seeds if you stay 100% organic but I can’t say I’ve ever noticed a difference myself. I’ve done it both ways many times. I think the main thing is keeping the plants healthy and allowing the seeds enough time to mature.
I do mostly agree with your opinion but at this point I am committed to doing this seed run. I am flipping to flower today.
If I wanted to delay, I’d have to chop down all these plants (because I’d have no room for them in veg if I want to get the SSDD seeds started, + they’re already so overgrown as is) and that seems like a waste at this point.
My next run (this fall) will be all sensi. My plan is to flower out all of the current SSDD females sensi + the female seedlings from the pack of SSDD seeds (I feel like it would be a waste to do an open pollination with the seedling plants. I want to flower those sensi).
Then to do the bigger open pollination after that (with clones).
I do agree that the bigger open pollination is more desirable. Like I said though, I’m too committed to this run already.
Plus, I feel like I’ve already made Tykal wait long enough! lol
I need to get that pack of seeds sprouted ASAP too for horsebadorites.
How did you collect the pollen while they were rooting? I feel like it would all just fall into the clone tray and get wet, no?
I could see taking clones, rooting them then flipping to flower right away to collect pollen from them in a small space (I have done that before)
These open pollination runs I don’t really want to do any selection. For me I am trying to use the most plants possible, to get the best representation of the gene pool.
I did exclude one male because it was flowering and dropping pollen in veg. But I even debated including that male too.
Pulling up a chair to watch this one too. I’ve always wanted to try this strain. I actually just bought some beans from sunshine dream genetics hoping to get a sense of the original strain. Would love some seeds if there’s enough.
My opinion also doesn’t matter but I would second this, selecting unique and interesting emails and becoming familiar and stabilizing them to create original and unique SSDD seeds actually feels like what Bodhi would want? Especially if there’s an open pollination to preserve the broad expanse of the strain anyways
agreed. lol
