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@afghan_kush_black_honey is who you want to talk to for those. If he doesn’t have them he can tell you when he will be going and getting more. He lives there.
Sprouted a few of these already seeing interesting stuff. Some are slow, not showing much vigor, but one is coming along nicely. It's a weird one, the first set of true leaves after the cotyledons is 3 fingered. Here's a picture.
The lower Indica fat leaves is the first true set. It's twice the size of it's siblings. We'll see how it goes but regardless of sex she's marked 'keeper'.
Now that it's warmer and dryer the plants are going through growth spurts. There's one that's runty, doesn't want to snap out of it despite getting transplanted to better soil. It looks like it's a wild plant growing on the side of the road to Srinagar. I can tell it won't amount to much, probably a male, but I won't cull it because of it's odd looks. Maybe it'll autoflower, I should get a picture.
Here's a pic of the one that had 3 fingers on it's first set of true leaves. Only plant in the garden to do that this year. I'm liking how it's looking, growing a bit differently for a mountain Indica type.
It's stretching more then the others, putting out more sets of smaller leaves. There's another plant that's really caught my eye. Loved getting transplanted, has taken off.
Boy oh boy. Look how close the cotyledons are to the ground! The spacing between leaf sets is crazy. When you look at it, it doesn't seem short because the leaves are so big. High hopes for this one! There's a couple others, not quite as vigorous but looking healthy and happy. The next step is sexing, I'd be happy if they're all females but a strong male wouldn't be a bad thing.
I expected these plants to be a bit slow growing, slower then the hybrid type stuff. The two biggest ones have proven me wrong.
May not be tall but they're wide and bushy. I'm hoping they don't get sun-blocked by the taller plants. Wider then they are tall! I wonder how long they can keep that up. Very distinct serrations, I can pick them out of a group at a glance. There are smaller ones, one is looking very landrace, almost feral.
Wow it's been a while, got them sexed and tucked in. The top one turned out to be male, was culled. He was a bit to stringy for me. I ended up with two females plus one little runty landrace looking plant I'm not sure about. Probably male, I've kept it around because it looks like a feral ditch plant from the Himalayas.
Here's the big bushy one, same as in the bottom picture in my last post. She's grown a bit. I thought her sun could get blocked out by her neighbors. I was worried she'd get close to 2 meters and stop growing, like some hashplants do, end up getting buried by her neighbors. A couple times I almost dug her up and moved her to the front of the garden. She's held her own, hasn't slowed down or gotten blocked out. She's showing a lot of vertical branching. She keeps getting bigger, up to 2 meters and growing.
She's a superstar, love the spikey leaves. Very similar to Afghani wide leaf varieties but a couple differences. She has a unique smell, a sour pickle smell like a lot of Himalayan strains but with some hashiness. It's hard to pin down exactly, almost chemically. Maybe it'll come to me what she smells like. I used up my pictures for this post, I'll have to start another to show off her little sister.
A bit about Kashmiri hashish. Before westerners began showing up in large volumes, most of the hashish in Kashmir was hand rubbed. The best hash would be hand rubbed, then when the plants were mature, finished and depleted of resin they'd be harvested and sieved. These trailings were called 'gurdah' and they'd wrap the low quality resin in corn husks, steam the husks, and then heat them beside the fire until it turned into a piece of hashish. The gurdah wasn't pressed hard and crumbled easily.
While a lot of this stuff was low quality commercial there were great batches of sieved made, the really nice stuff would be blonde and crumbly. Kashmir is near the road from Afghanistan and Pakistan to India so a lot of commercial hashish would be transported through the region. Sometimes it would stop in Kashmir and be blended with the local stuff. This 'kashmiri' was low quality and probably responsible for many of the reports of low quality hashish from the area.
The original Kashmiri landrace was a tall plant with narrow leaves and long sparse inflorescence. The same stuff that grows across the Himalayan foothils from Pakistan into India and Nepal. In the late 1970s Afghani varieties were imported to the area to be cultivated for sieved production. This is when the hand rubbing really declined and by 1980 the predominate type of feral and cultivated cannabis in southern Kashmir was broad leaf. The feral stuff grows along streams and ditches. The native narrow leaf Cannabis grows in the northern part of Kashmir, along the foothills and is still used for hand rubbing and sieved production. No doubt this report is old, from the 1980s, and things have changed even more.
The part I wonder about, if ALL the hash plants in southern Kashmir were wide leaf by 1980, what happened to the local feral stuff? I can't imagine so much broad leaf getting cultivated in a few years it completely overtook the local wild stuff. My thinking is that the 'reporters' didn't see everything. Maybe the introduction of the sieved Afghani plants was a long process, going back many years. The narrow leaf Kashmiri strain wasn't very good, I'm guessing the best stuff came from a different strain. Maybe a fine narrow leaf strain. Maybe I'll think about it and try to find better sources..
The Asad Kashmir strain I'm growing is broad leaf, definitely not the old landrace. If I had to guess I'd say it's a bit of a hybrid. It doesn't have the same Afghani smell and one of the plants turned out 'primitive', like a runty feral strain. The wide leaves, bushy growth pattern and stockiness are very Hindu Kush.
Here's some pictures of the smaller plant. It always looked good even though it grew slowly, always lagged far behind big brother and sister. I didn't cull her because she still had the smell and look. Now that she's in the ground she's really bushed out and grown quite a bit. I'll be surprised if she gets more then 2 meters tall but she's grown very fast. The first picture is from a few days ago, the second is from today. You can see how much she's grown.
You can see some of the same leaves but she's really picked it up. Not surprising as she's been fertilized and the weather's been warm and mostly sunny. What's impressive is how much bushier she's gotten, lots of new shoots poking out between the leaves in the second picture. This is what the wide leaf strains are doing right now, for every 6 inches up they grow 4 inches out.
Calling the addicts 'junkies' is unnecessary but benzo addiction is shitty. The side effects, 'brain stroke' for instance, don't sound like benzodiazipans, as is the talk about them needing to be kept under control by the dealers. Hard to tell how much is real and how much is to sell newspapers but regardless it's a terrible situation. Kashmir should be producing wonderful ganja and hashish instead of garbage ganja loaded in tranquilizers.
I have dr greenthumbold Kashmiri hash plant, to date, it is one of the finest indicas I've ever smoked. I made a lot of seed at the time but as they are now really old I haven't been able to germinate them. I'm reading up on the use of seed crackers and worm castings. The success rate seems to be good
I have an old article from the High Times 1975 about hashish in Kashmir, but it doesn't contain much more information than what has already been said...
some information on cannabis in Kashmir, I seem to remember having found them in the text: "PAPERS RELATING TO THE CONSUMPTION OF GANJA AND OTHER DRUGS IN INDIA"
the bibliography of the old unodc bulletins could also be useful