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One of the hermies has been chopped, yes. The other will be chopped after I collect pollen. I'm making some qwiso right now from the first one, and I flash dried a few of the buds...
I am high right now! Very early sativa high this is. Yes there is plenty of body high too. And this is premature! I can't wait til the other Far Out is done now.
The rest of the plants are fine and carrying on with their normal schedule.
I just smoked some of the first batch of qwiso, and I am soaring... This is bliss...
I haven't collected the pollen yet, but I've been reading about it, and it seems all I have to do is just store it in a vial and then put that in a container of rice or done other desiccant. Then, if it won't get used right away, I believe it can be put in the freezer.
I have some reading to do...
I haven't actually intentionally made any seeds yet, so if the Far Outs pollinated any of the other girls, its possible I might have a nice feminized new strain on my hands! Let's see... Far Out crossed with White Widow... or with Sadhu, that might be nice!
But I'm going to collect the pollen from the blueberry cobbler pheno only. Its just a way of keeping something from that plant around. Hopefully I can get another delicious southern dessert smell again someday...
I just popped 5 more PNR seeds and 5 more Sadhu seeds, and this time I'm keeping the males for pollen. This will be my first time intentionally creating F2's and F1 seeds.
I have decided to keep my mother plants in mini DWC buckets. Here is the first one I've managed to finish:
That last pic is a before and after, for comparison. But basically I took plastic 1 gallon canisters, for food storage, and I painted them black. Then I cut a hole in the lid and inserted a net pot. Inside, there is a small air stone attached to a short piece of tubing, which runs up the side of the bucket and is attached to a check valve, which is inserted into a hole that was drilled into the top of the bucket. Outside, the other end of the check valve is attached to more tubing which connects to the air pump. Pretty simple stuff.
The one pictured above is the Far Out mom. There are three more to finish, as I intend to keep 4 moms. The new cabinet I'm setting up to house them all is almost complete!
I'll be trimming the roots from time to time. Ideally, too, I'll try to dial in a slow-ish growth rate on all the moms, using low light as a limiting factor. Then, before it's time to start taking cuttings, I will move a selected mom into another space with more light, give her more nutes, and let her start throwing out growth tips for me to cut.
Most of the older threads from other forums and previous user names have been deleted by now, or the associated photo bucket accounts have been long forgotten. I've been using grow forums to expand my skills, though, since Overgrow.
I started off as an outdoor guerrilla grower in the late 90s, and then as suburban development killed off all the wilderness around me, I was forced inside around 2003 or so. It was a big deal making the switch to indoor... I never knew it would be so different! Took me a while to get it all figured out, and get good at it. But I've been growing pretty much non stop, until I lost my genetics recently due to neglect, brought on by unforeseen circumstances.
This thread, this journal, is about my journey to find mother plants again. I can't wait to try out all my current plants, now, and figure out who's staying! I've got established clones of the only surviving Far Out, the short Sadhu, PNR, and Cheese. If this White Widow turns out any good I'll try revegging her, but for some reason I haven't had luck rooting any of the cuttings of her I've taken. If she's really good, and she won't reveg, I'll probably just seek out the "real" White Widow and grow seeds of that.
Hush, How much do you expect to harvest off one of those plants? Give me an average since I know each will be different. I'm really liking this style of growing but I'm used to growing larger plants for bigger buds so I want to make sure this will be efficient for my grow area.
Well, keeping in mind that these plants don't represent what an ideal selection would look like, because these were grown from seed, I can still say that the smallest plant, the Gigabud, will probably yield about a half ounce minimum.
My educated guess for each plant is as follows:
Gigabud: 1/2 ounce
Cheese: 3/4 ounce
Sadhu short: 1 ounce
Sadhu tall: won't be surprised if it's as much as 1.5 ounces!
PNR: 3/4 ounce
Far Out: 1 ounce or more
So by my tally I should bring in about 5.5 ounces from 6 plants, but that's not a fair estimate to base future grows off of. Remember, this time around I was just selecting for mothers, so I was trying to find a happy middle ground for all the various plants in there. Some ended up being ever so slightly over-ferted, while others had slight deficiencies. Some never grew as tall as they should have, while others had to be tied up and bound in order to fit in there... But altogether, it was worth it, and I now have 4 mother plants that will soon be providing me cuttings.
But really, to be honest, once this thing is in full swing, and running mono crops, I expect to yield no less than 15 grams per plant, which would equal out to 8 ounces, or 2 ounces per square foot. That is easily do-able, because the 400w has a good penetration to it. I expect to be harvesting single cola plants, with bud all the way down to the bottom. That's part of what I was selecting for in my mother selection, as well.
The best thing I can tell you is that when it comes to small spaces, things are always MORE efficient when you scale down and pack plants in there. There is a point of diminishing returns the larger you get, though, where it starts to make more sense to grow big bushes, or trees. But small like this, 2 ft by 2 ft, it just makes more sense to do multiple small plants.
That being said, understand that I don't think it's the only method that will yield large. I have frequently used the SCROG technique in order to get just as good yields, but using less plants means more veg time, plus, SCROG is a pain in the ass. It is HIGHLY effective, but DAMN!!!! It requires a lot of tending to the plant in order to do it right.
I simply dont have that kind of time anymore now that I'm married and looking to start a family. So, SOG it is. There's nothing quite like the extreme LACK of work that is involved in a sog, lol.
Thank you for your great explaination into your grow and why it works for you. This is very useful information for me and everyone else in these forums.
You got me really interested in trying an SOG next time around. Less maintanence and easier harvesting sounds awesome!