It's been a little while since I did a diary so I thought I'd give it another go as it does help with keeping a record on these pheno hunts.
I had my soil tested after the last cycle and for the 3rd time in a row now I don't need to amend anything the soil is in good balance with maybe a touch too much N towards the end of the last cycle. I did feel that my last run wasn't as good and I noticed a small loss in my hash return % as I only grow for hash. I did notice that being a fair few cycles in with my soil now that the top 8" was basically just castings so I took all of the top layer of soil and mulch off the bed and to the side. Tilled the lower soil layer and mixed in 5% pumice back into the bottom layer to get some more aeration. I then added some peat and pumice mix into the top layer of soil to applied the mulch and am hoping to get things back to where they should be.
As I grow for hash only, Initially I had a long period of searching for a washer and now I have a washer I am able to worry less about my yield so im going to try some of these mini hunts to try and find something with a different terp profile. The goal is to have a few flavours I love that also do well for hash.
This time around I'm mainly hunting for Orange Candy terps in the Satzumas Revenge from Grateful seeds. It's a Mimosa cross with some good hash genetics. In the bed they are the 3 plants in the middle row of the tent (horizontally) and the top left and middle at the back of the bed. The first row are two phenos of Blue Fur Coat from Terp Wizard that I grew on my last cycle but they maybe got swamped a bit by bigger phenos. I wanted to give them another go as there was some interesting smells coming from them. The plant at the back right hand side is Arroz con leche. This was the first pheno I hunted from seed over 2 years ago now and has been a regular for me but I'm loosing a bit of love with it so I'm deciding on this run if its time to say goodbye.
The Satzuma did will on vigour out of the gate and took to the bed well after transplanting. I have since topped them and today I've cleaned up the lowers and taken two clones from each pheno as I hope to flip to flower at the end of the week after I see them recover and get the vigour back.
I saw some canoeing on my Arroz leaves earlier so I'm hoping its just heat or light stress as it was the tallest plant in there and its been hot over the weekend. I dimmed the lights a bit and turned up the oscillating fan a bit. Hopefully that does the trick as the others seem ok at the moment.
4x4 Tent
Invisible Sun F Bars
One application of Soil Food Top Dress from Eco Thrive also use some Trace Minerals from Eco Thrive to.
Day 8 of Flower:
I decided to flip about 4 days after my last post. I've seen some stress on one of the phenos with some leaf canoeing. So I dimmed my lights and adjusted the position of the circulation fans a bit. It hasn't really done much and it does feel a little stunted compared to the other plants. I decided yesterday to not trust my blumat moisture sensor and to just give a big soil drench. My thinking was that as I added some new peat mix into my soil along with the aeration perhaps its still a little hydrophobic and the soil isnt holding moisture like it usually has been. So I've given about 20ltrs of water to the bed and for the next couple of days I will still water but only enough to keep the mulch moist and not really get down into the soil. Hopefully that does something but if not maybe this pheno I just one thats not a keeper anyway.
Nothing to really report at the moment I've setup my auto watering system as Im going away for a few days soon. Its a combination of blumat drip tape that goes around the perimeter of the bed and then i have 360 degree spray emitters spaced evenly around the bed to try to mimic how I water with a pump sprayer.
The first week of the stretch has been reasonably slow but I'm hoping everything will take off over the next week.
Damn Yoshi 10th cycle!? They look like they are about to explode. Nice work.
Had a really busy couple of weeks so sorry about the lack of updates but I managed to get some pictures to fill in the gaps.
Day 15 of Flower:
So I thought before that growth was a bit slow but the surface or the soil was moist. I also had some canoeing on some leaves.
I did a big soil drench and I used some Yucca extract as a wetting agent and that really helped get some moisture to the lower root zone.
I was going away for a week when I took this picture so I setup my auto watering setup on my wifi timer (I like the flexibility of a wifi plug socket when I’m away).
Day 21 of Flower:
This was when I came back. I’ve picked a few leaves off the Blue fur coat at the front but it still feels like the rest of the tent is stretching a bit. I’m gonna wait a few days before I defoliate as I’m usually pretty brutal but as these are mostly new phenos I’m not sure how they will respond with a heavy defoliation so I’m gonna take it easier than normal.
I’m still just using water only with some trace minerals mix that I use on every watering. I also just inoculated the bed with some GOOP from soil smiths. I’ve used this a few times and it’s a great product.
No real smells to report yet but the blue fur coat is definitely developing the quickest. The Satzumas are all quite uniform in structure and height but some flowers devolving faster than others. One is a little slower than the others but I fim’d that one so think it just took longer to recover.
Day 39:
Well its been two weeks since the last update. Some lovely smells have started to come, originally finding some really bright Orange Sherbert on pheno 1 last week but it seems like the brightness is starting to get more earthy now.
This grow has been a confusing one for me. In the last weeks I've had some more leaves curling inwards (canoeing) but all leaves still praying hard towards the light. There have been some hot days but RH never went below 45%. The soil is tested and should be fine apart from I added more aeration and one 40l bag of soil mix back into the bed as it needed some more aeration as the top 8" of soil in the bed was just castings.
The plants aren't taking a massive turn but something has defiantly slowed them down but growing in a large volume of soil makes things like this hard to work out. At the moment all I could think was its something wrong with watering and I have done too many large waterings without using the spray nozzle on my pump sprayer so the water has ended up creating an area thats too moist in the lower layers of soil.
I decided to invest and get some Ecowitt soil moisture sensors I got one for the top soil (top 5") and one that you bury deeper for the lower soil. The data from the sensors do show things are more moist than they should be and particularly in the lower soil (8-10" and lower down). I did stick my hand down in the soil in a few places and where the soil was the most moist lower down was nearest the plants with the canoeing at its worst.
My plan now is to not water but maybe spray the mulch and top soil if it starts to feel too dry but do it slowly in hopes that the lower soil will start to dry out. But over the last 2 days the numbers haven't changed at all which doesn't give me much hope.
If anyone else has any other ideas I'd love to hear unless its the standard Google search results for leaves canoeing as trust me I've looked at every result on there haha.
Either way these are for hash so its not like all is lost but I defiantly think my yield will be impacted significantly.
Day 47:
Well the canoeing hasn’t gone away but it hasn’t gotten any worse. All I can think is it’s potentially some watering issues combined with a bit of environmental stress or maybe defoliation stress.
I did think that there could be a small possibility that maybe I had an abundance of springtails that might be disturbing some feeder roots or something. It didn’t seem too likely but regardless I ordered some Rove Beatles and Mighty Mites.
I have been trying to get used to my soil moisture sensors and now in the bed I have one Blumat digital meter that goes 9” into the bed. X1 Ecowitt deep sensor that’s about the same level as the Blumat. Then I have two other Ecowitt top sensors at two different sides of the bed.
At first I was finding odd readings so I recalibrated all the sensors together and it was showing that my lower soil layers were a bit wet so I really backed off the watering and only did the occasional light watering on the top of the bed. Over a week or so the bottom of the bed has come back to where I wanted it. Now the sensors look like they are giving me decent data and I can see when the plants are drinking more from the top sensor reading. I’m still not watering lots but I am doing it when it’s needed and the surface of the soil looks much more full of life than it has over the last weeks.
I’m going to take a soil sample later this week to send off for testing to see if anything needs amending after this cycle.
I think my Arroz plant in the far corner has suffered greatly from the issues but the rest of the tent is ok and I should get an ok harvest just not what I was hoping for.
Now onto the positives.
A lot of the plants have started to fade with some also showing some lovely purple to.
Most of the Satzumas revenge phenos have a similar terp profile it’s sort of a medicinal candy Sherb and with a hint of orange but they each have a different sort of funk to them.
But there is one pheno that just stands out on the terp profile. Pheno 1 is just the purist bright Florida orange. It’s exactly the kind of orange I was looking for as I’m not a fan of the funky marmalade ones I’ve tried before but I once had some bho years ago that had a profile just like this and it was the best daytime smoke. Now I just have to hope it washes reasonably well but I think regardless I’m not going to keep the other phenos and just try to grow some more of this one again.
The other stand out in the tent is Blue Fur Coat. I did a tiny hunt of this on my last run and it got a bit swamped by the other plants in the bed so was small but it smelt amazing so I decided to not wash it and keep it in the freezer and run it again so I’ll wash it all together. If you touch a bud the smell just stays on your skin until you scrub it off and it’s the first thing you smell when you open the tent. It’s intense blueberry with watermelon and a hint of a funk but nothing cheesy more like the funk off a papaya.
Either way I can’t wait to see how these come out as hash/rosin I really hope that they do well in the wash as it’d be hard to say goodbye to them.
Ok so this diary wasn't the best sorry about that.
Over the last weeks my main tent in my loft has started to fall apart and it made me think it was the time to build a small room in my loft instead of a tent as I want to have better insulation anyway for the coming winter.
I still haven't finished but I have finished a new veg area which I think should help with the issues I've been having with canoeing.
Two weeks ago I sent off a sample of my soil for testing and It came back with slightly lower Phos and Potassium levels and a little lower on Boron but all still in the acceptable range. I will top dress a couple of times this next cycle to sort that out.
So after knowing my nutrition was ok the guys at ecothrive asked me to check my stems and roots. I harvested the tent and checked the roots and had mostly hollow stems which could be related to higher N (which is now a bit lower) and maybe Boron. But I think most of it stems from me keeping my plants in veg in smaller pots for too long. The stems went a bit woody and the roots just didnt take to the bed like they should.
So that was the main reason for me wanting to change my setup and then make a bigger veg area so I can fit in bigger pots and see whats going on properly.
Im going to wait a few extra weeks this time and reclone some phenos until they look super healthy and happy then I will transplant to the bed and see if this canoeing issue goes.
The run was not very good for me I had about a 50% loss on my normal yield so I just have to hope I have enough hash to keep me going from this cycle until my next harvest but it might be tight.
I'll try and put up some pictures on harvest day soon followed by a smoke report.
I’m still no expert in any of this there’s way too much information to digest but I have a “soil guy” so all I know is my own experience and the knowledge he points me towards and also podcasts etc. New techniques are constantly being found out to though.
I can’t find a decent place to test my soil in the UK either. I send a soil sample to the USA every cycle to Logan Labs. If you email them they will direct you on how to send the sample etc. it’s very easy you send the sample and when they have your results they send you an email invoice then you get your results.
Smoke report:
Taken a little while but as expected my flower return was very poor. One or two plants did ok but I think all of my issues are down to keeping the plants in small pots for too long so I’ve taken my time and rebuilt my grow space which in the end took me days of graft but I’m happy now to start fresh (apart from my soil of course haha).
So I washed the Satzumas Revenge as a mixed wash and the Blue Fur Coat as a mixed wash to as there were 2 phenos of that that I had saved from my hunt in the freezer to combine with this batch.
The two main phenos that made up the Satzuma batch did well in the wash and came back around 3.5% so I think I could push that higher next time. Pheno 1 the bright orange pheno really came through in the end rosin. It’s a bright fresh orange taste with a touch of candy and some earthy notes from the other phenos. I’m running just pheno 1 on its own on my next grow to see how it does on its own as a profile.
Post and Pre whip pics.
The Blue Fur Coat I feel is something special. Again this was a mixed wash so I’m growing my selected pheno again on its own next cycle. When I was microplaning the hash it smelt like Grape Laffy Taffy. When I tried the fresh press rosin it was pure Blue Jolly Rancher American candy terps like that sort of artificial taste but in a good way. Then dabbing in a banger on a hotter temp it really had this strawberry/blueberry profile and now the cold cure is finished it has more of this American candy profile again. I think the fresh press was a little more instense so I’ll see how this cured but it’s a terp monster and you need to change the water in your rig if you want to taste anything else so I’m really happy with that. It also came in around 3.5%. I think I can get this higher as the bud structure lends itself to hash so if I can pack on more size in veg I think I’ll be onto a keeper.
Post Whip/Pre Whip/Fresh Press
Im hoping I’ll have enough to last me until me next harvest but at least I’ve found some nice terps.
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