Diary Bodhi Seeds - Silver Lotus

[Biosystem]

Howdy, y'all.

I'm Biosystem, and this is my first ever forum grow log. I've been looking forward to this for more than a decade. This is my first "real" grow, so things may get a little bumpy, but if you want to lend a hand with advice or just grab some popcorn to possibly enjoy a burning dumpster fire, pull up a chair and have a seat.

In this thread we'll be looking at a strain called Silver Lotus bred by Bodhi Seeds back in 2019. It's a sativa-dom hybrid. I'm going to be working with another strain as soon as funding is available but this is what I had seeds of on hand, so let's find out what the fuss is surrounding Bodhi.

I'm getting to posting late in this grow (by about 7 weeks) so there'll be a few catch-up posts, but those will have dates added so that folks can get an idea of what happened when, why they happened and what said happenings in turn caused. As always, I'm just here to learn and help others learn, so let's cut to the chase. Pics with dates and details coming soon.

 

[StevenHXF]

Looking forward to it.

 

[Biosystem]

WEEK 1 OF VEG

These photos are from week 1. They got a hard start. As I said before, these seeds were planted after sitting in a tiny ziplock baggie in a room temperature lock box since mid 2019.

I planted 11 of them directly into crappy moistened soil (likely bagged home Depot genera top soil) in plastic wrap covered solo cups. They popped the surface somewhere around the 6-8 day mark. I was out of town, so unsure of the exact day. At first, they sat underneath an old T5HO ballast (108W I believe) on a cycle of 24/7. They were about 3-5 inches underneath the bulb. Looks like they got a little toasted from this, so that's when I learned that even old indoor lights can burn sensitive seedlings which was a first for me since I've never had that happen before.

Shortly after they popped the surface of the soil I got a 430W LED panel set - 430W pull from the wall. They went under this at full blast 24/7 until I realized this was stupid (week 2-3'ish) and I was light-burning my seedlings. Turns out the yellowing wasn't from too little light or this or that or blah blah, I was just roasting the suckers. Anyway they got better as you will see in coming posts.

 

[Biosystem]

WEEK 2 OF VEG

At this point it bears mentioning that
1) This is week 2 of being above soil. I didn't count the germination period as week 1
2) Two of the eleven of the seeds failed to sprout entirely, and one of them failed to thrive during this time. A photo is attached of the failed seedling.

By now they're still burning under the full power of the 430W panel, and I'm wondering why they're all yellow and pitiful looking. . . Hindsight 20/20. . . I also apologize for the photo quality. Having to redownload them and move them around seems to be making them worse. The photos get better moving forward.

 

[Biosystem]

WEEK 3 OF VEG

This week was the first that I chilled the hell out on having Venusaur use solar beam on the seedlings. I also had repotted them into 1 gallon containers filled with soil comprised of 1/3 sphagnum peat, 1/3 pumice, 1/3 aged manure with amendments like kelp meal, crustacean meal, basalt, lime, neem meal and gypsum. They start to take off, but the yellowing of the leaves was so troubling. I never really did figure out what exactly was causing that - nutrient deficiency or light burn.

Anyway, progress is progress and I still had 8/8 of the viable seedlings.

 

[Biosystem]

WEEK 4 OF VEG

This week they got their first taste of extra food - pond filter squeezin's. It's thick brown opaque fish poop and microbe paste in water. They also got topped this week because I'll need to keep them short. Photos illustrate before and after topping.

Also, I keep seeing that my posts are invisible until approved by a moderator. I'm guessing this is 'cause my account's new so y'all have to make sure I'm not on here just posting to spam ads or whatever. That's fine, but does anyone know when that stops? When do I get to be a real person?

 

[Biosystem]

WEEK 5 OF VEG

Here they have gotten more fish filter fertilizer, and they're starting to erupt. The yellowing of the leaves is still a mystery. Unsure if it's too much or too little light, nitrogen or otherwise, but they grew like crazy after the topping the week prior.

If anyone with a lot of good experience doing organic soil grows wants to chime in on this yellowing, hit me up. I don't want this to continue, but I also don't want to assume deficiency and burn the hell out of them with fish poop. Thanks!

 

[Jellyfish]

Looking good! I have grown this strain, and it's among my keepers! Lovely taste and high. Not a high yielder, at least in my garden. But worth keeping, IMO.

 

[Biosystem]

WEEK 6 OF VEG --> WEEK 1 OF FLOWER (DAY 1)

This week is pretty much caught up to where I am now. They've been in flower for 3 days after they got clones cut off of them (to preserve for mothers moving forward), and I got them moved into an 8x8 tent with a big-ass carbon air filter/fan set up. They were smelling up the house before. Photos are from a few days ago. Some are pre-cloning and pre-moving, and the others are after they got snipped and moved to their new home. OH! And they also got repotted to 5 gallon pots. The roots on them were crazy. They were definitely mad about being in those 1gals.

So this is where I am currently. Thanks for checking out my log thus far. Any input is welcome. This is one hell of a journey, but I've been waiting so long to start I'm just happy to be growing.

 

[Biosystem]

Looking good! I have grown this strain, and it's among my keepers! Lovely taste and high. Not a high yielder, at least in my garden. But worth keeping, IMO.

That's awesome to hear, man! These were freebies I got when I ordered Sunshine Daydream back in 2019. The project fell apart for various reasons, but I saved these seeds just in case I could try again. Shame about the yield news on this one. There's hardly any info at all about this strain online that's useful. At least now I know. So far, it seems like a gorgeous, aromatic plant that's been quite hardy overall. Looking forward to culling the males and picking a good mother to hang onto.

 

[Biosystem]

Hey, @Jellyfish I was thinkin' - if you have the time and inclination to post up some more details about your experience with this strain, it would be useful for the thread in case anyone googles this in the future trying to look up info about it. Maybe the strain is "dead" and out of production so it won't matter to most folks except us. But I'm curious how it went for you as well. Do you have any photos of yours?

 

[swampthing]

Hey BioSystem, I really enjoyed the Silver Lotus. I’ve found Snow Lotus crosses really let the mother’s traits run the show while adding some extra fruity/berry funk sticky sweetness to the lines. The Silver Lotus was a favorite of mine. The haze really shines through in the best way.

 

[Biosystem]

Hey BioSystem, I really enjoyed the Silver Lotus. I’ve found Snow Lotus crosses really let the mother’s traits run the show while adding some extra fruity/berry funk sticky sweetness to the lines. The Silver Lotus was a favorite of mine. The haze really shines through in the best way.
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That's exactly the kind of stuff I've been looking for on this strain. I can't tell you how exciting it is to know there are other folks out there who grew this stuff and have records of it, and that it wasn't some "flash in the pan" freebie. Those buds look real frosty, but you can definitely see that they aren't fat chonks like on a squatter indica dom plant. I'm looking forward to posting up plenty of photos as my grow progresses. Already I've identified 5/8 of my plants are female. The other 3 are likely male but I can't  clearly see any flowering parts on those. We'll just have to see what minimal organic nutes and a 430 watt LED will do for these suckers if they're kept low to the ground.

Thanks for the post, Swampthing. Anything and everything helps when compiling info about this strain in one place.

 

[Biosystem]

WEEK 2 OF FLOWER (DAY 8)

Howdy, y'all! I've decided I'm going to have Saturdays be my update days. If I don't post on Saturday I'll post on Sunday, but let's be honest - I look forward to measuring the progress all week so I probably won't miss many Saturdays ever.

I'm excited to post these pictures. I didn't think they grew very much since last week,
but after looking back and comparing them with today's photos I can tell they've boomed. Just WOW. I don't know how to post on this site to put text under specific photos rather than just having a dump of pics after my text post so bear with me.

I'm going to post photos of the whole lot of the plants (8 total).
Then there'll be photos of the plants I have confirmed as females.
Then finally I'll post pics of the plants that I am 95% certain are males and are going to be chopped up for worm food before next Saturday if I don't start seeing some pistils or if those nubs start looking any more like pollen sacs. I don't want to miss-ID a male and then kill a female who was just a slow-shower. But then again I need to trust my eyes and knowledge. I hate to say it, but I know deep down those 3 are males. . . I just want more proof before I kill them. Plus I want the experience of seeing the various stages of their early growth. At this point there shouldn't be any risk of them pollinating anything since the females are just hardly even starting to throw calyxes and pistils. As always I appreciate any and all input from you fellow gardeners. Enjoy the progress pics!

Ps - I have to make another post to post all the photos. Also ignore my dirty nails. I was checking soil moisture, I swear. Haha

 

[Biosystem]

WEEK 2 OF FLOWER (DAY 8)

So these are the extra photos from the above post. These are all pics of the plants I have more or less IDd as males. They're gonna die soon unless pistils appear magically.

 

[Biosystem]

WEEK 3 OF FLOWER (DAY 15)

Hey, everyone! Hope y'all's week has been good. I'm excited for this post, and I'd like y'all's advice on the best ways to proceed at this pivotal point in the grow.

Those male plants I posted last week were indeed male unfortunately. The pollen sacs continued to develop, and so I murdered them a few days after those photos were taken. Worm food. I now have 5/8 original viable plants as females so I ended up coming out on top with the F:M ratio.

The females are doing quite well. I've been hitting them with LST by bending the climbing branches down so that they don't get too tall as the light I have isn't too strong. Hopefully I'll be getting a Spiderfarmer SE7000 soon(ish) and possibly planting these gals into a 5x5 raised bed for the rest of the flowering (no stressing of the roots, just pulling the pots when they're a little dry like wine corks and then plugging them into spots in the soil.

I ALSO did some pruning last night to make watering them easier, keeping leaves off the soil and preventing sucker nodes. I kept it minimal though since I didn't want to overstress them at this time, and frankly I'm somewhat unsure of how much is too much when it comes to pruning at this point in a grow.

And finally I watered them last night with an organic fertilizer mix I've been concocting that I think will be my go-to plant food from here on when not simply amending the soil in between grows. It is an aged combination of the following: aerated pond/aquarium filter squeezings (hereby referred to as green squeezin's or GS for short), unsulfured molasses, blended bananas, blended beans, epsom salt and lactobacillus bacteria culture.

My question is this - when and how would be the best ways to defoliate or prune these plants so that they can ride out the rest of the flowering without any more stress in order to maximize yield amount and quality? There are lots and lots of nodes on each plant, and I have concerns that they are going to be splitting up their energy into too many nodes or that the foliage is going to be choking out other spots. Any advice on this? I haven't done much in the way of pruning on cannabis, and I've never done an intentional defoliation.

Anyway thanks for checking in on the grow. Let me know what you think. As always I appreciate any and all input.

 

[OZZ_]

WEEK 3 OF FLOWER

Hey, everyone! Hope y'all's week has been good. I'm excited for this post, and I'd like y'all's advice on the best ways to proceed at this pivotal point in the grow.

Those male plants I posted last week were indeed male unfortunately. The pollen sacs continued to develop, and so I murdered them a few days after those photos were taken. Worm food. I now have 5/8 original viable plants as females so I ended up coming out on top with the F:M ratio.

The females are doing quite well. I've been hitting them with LST by bending the climbing branches down so that they don't get too tall as the light I have isn't too strong. Hopefully I'll be getting a Spiderfarmer SE7000 soon(ish) and possibly planting these gals into a 5x5 raised bed for the rest of the flowering (no stressing of the roots, just pulling the pots when they're a little dry like wine corks and then plugging them into spots in the soil.

I ALSO did some pruning last night to make watering them easier, keeping leaves off the soil and preventing sucker nodes. I kept it minimal though since I didn't want to overstress them at this time, and frankly I'm somewhat unsure of how much is too much when it comes to pruning at this point in a grow.

And finally I watered them last night with an organic fertilizer mix I've been concocting that I think will be my go-to plant food from here on when not simply amending the soil in between grows. It is an aged combination of the following: aerated pond/aquarium filter squeezings (hereby referred to as green squeezin's or GS for short), unsulfured molasses, blended bananas, blended beans, epsom salt and lactobacillus bacteria culture.

My question is this - when and how would be the best ways to defoliate or prune these plants so that they can ride out the rest of the flowering without any more stress in order to maximize yield amount and quality? There are lots and lots of nodes on each plant, and I have concerns that they are going to be splitting up their energy into too many nodes or that the foliage is going to be choking out other spots. Any advice on this? I haven't done much in the way of pruning on cannabis, and I've never done an intentional defoliation.

Anyway thanks for checking in on the grow. Let me know what you think. As always I appreciate any and all input.

Hey Bio - I don’t think there’s much you need to do from here on out. You’re already into week three of flowering. Personally I really don’t like messing with them much past this point. Your plants look happy and healthy, they also look nicely trained out wide and flat. Bud sites look nicely level for the most part.

Also I probably wouldn’t worry about transplanting them at all for this run. Those are nice sized buckets for the size pf plants that you have, they aren’t nearly big enough to need more room…. Imo. If it were me, I’d simply let them finish as is and then on your next run switch over to the raised bed or whatever new technique you might want to try

There might be one or two big fan leaves blocking a budsight or two but really overall, since you asked …. I think you should just leave them be and let them rip. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken

 

[Biosystem]

I appreciate it very much. I ended up pruning off 5 scrawny sub-canopy branches from the whole garden. I left each plant with no more than 6 main branches coming off the main stem. Two had 4 to start with and a few had one or two extra over the 6 and the extra ones were significantly smaller than the rest so I took those off so they only had to focus on 6 branches max. I won't prune off any more unless it's a tiny node coming under the canopy that's gonna be a waste.

It was good too because the clones I cut before flower didn't seem to do well with the "jar of water method" I tried this time. I think they may come through but this gives me fresh cuts to put in my humidified terrarium - they should do very well there. It was also fortunate that the ones that "needed" pruning were the ones that looked like are going to be the frontrunners for being the "winning mother pheno" of the bunch.


If anyone sees this, WHAT DO YOU DO IF YOU SEE FUNGUS GNAT LARVAE? I watered the other day and I saw little bugs coming up from the soil that looked like fungus gnats/fungus gnat larvae coming up. The plants look undisturbed but I don't want this to get out of hand. I'm going to do some additional research, but if anyone has experience with a for sure fix for these assholes, please let me know. Thanks!

 

[Cakeboy]

for fungus gnats I am trying beneficial nematodes at the moment.

 

[aliceklar]

Yep. If it is fungus gnats, get the nematodes. They work really well with soil.