Six Ace Monsters Outdoors

[CowboyTed]

If the weather at your location starts to get cold in late August and September, then i would recommend you to force their flowering in late May/first half of June to make sure they will receive warm temps and strong light intensity throughout all their flowering stage. That's what we did last season: start to force the flowering of the sativa light deps in late May so the long flowering sativas like yours were ready to harvest in early August.

Revegged clones can easily start to flower or get frozen during an unexpected bad weather if you bring them too early outdoors in early spring, so i would recommend you to bring them from an indoor 18/6 growing photoperiod and plant them outdoors in May, in that way you will avoid undesired flowerings in spring and there will be lesser chances that the plants suffer bad weather.

Hope it helps and good luck for the outdoor season!

Thanks for your advice, Dubi!


I'm thankful that August and September are typically our warmest months, and temperatures start dropping in late September and October. I'm also thankful that we don't get rains in the fall. My plan was to force flowering beginning in mid June, so that the plants would enjoy flowering through the warms days of July, August and September. If they finish in October, that's fine as well, since the weather is usually nice in October here too, but for the occasional early snow. With a simple portable greenhouse for cold nights, I suspect I could maintain healthy plants outdoors well into November most years.


Thanks for your advice regarding revegged clones. I'll plan to plant them a week or more later than the seedlings.


Not only did I choose Ace genetics for my outdoor season: those Ace plants will also be used on 4/20 to christen my new garden. They will be the first plants to take root in the new garden site, and I will be joined by at least one other ICMag user for the occasion, as I've invited our local growers to join me for the christening, if they aren't doing something more exciting on 4/20. In my garden, we'll be smoking and relaxing for the afternoon, enjoying the view.

 

[Sunshineinabag]

I wanna grow some big plants outdoors this summer, and I originally wrote a long-winded and scattered bunch of stoned thoughts about my plans.


This is the much-edited version, written with only a mild high, and much simpler to follow!


I plan to grow several long-flowering Ace sativas: Zamaldelica, Malawi, Golden Tiger, Bangi Haze x Ethiopian.

My plan for the long-flowering strains is to force-flower them in some manner, so that they start flowering in mid July, making it much more likely that they will flower and mature before the weather turns too hatefully cold.

This is what my garden looked like on October 14 last year, so the Malawi, Zam and GT might enjoy a similar fate to the girl under that snow, if I get a long-finishing pheno!


View Image


By an odd coincidence, I'm enjoying a pleasant buzz at the moment, compliments of that very plant. Right after I took that photo, I cut the stem, shook off the snow, and took her inside to dry and cure. Besides cutting her earlier than I'd like (she could have used at least another week) that snow didn't deprive me of much.



But had she been a Malawi or GT, I would have been rushing to build a structure to cover her that night, because she would be nowhere near ready to harvest yet.


AT this point, I have a couple questions for the hive-mind to ponder: First, given the strains I'm hoping to grow, is there any reason to think that Zam, GT, Malawi or BHxE would not excel with longer, warmer days during flowering? They would then enjoy full twelve-hour days of sunlight in late July for their stretch, rather than the much shorter, cooler days of late August. (daytime temperatures in the summer rarely get over ninety degrees here.) Second, having grown these strains, do any of you have suggestions for training the plants during veg so that they have a good structure to carry the weight of the ginormous harvest I'm envisioning?







(could there be a more perfect smiley to accompany that notion?)

I always start some in Jan-feb that I know are beasts like ace has! Your plan is sound! I will follow along and maybe share mine as well.......I've already harvested once since December lmao!

 

[CowboyTed]

It's long past time for an update to this thread. And today, you can enjoy laughing at a big dumb cowboy who isn't smart enough to wait until June to plant his girls outside, like Dubi recommended. I'm well known for needing to learn lessons the hard way.



In my defense, I was raised in a family of Wyoming gardener/farmer/ranchers who thought it was simply routine to plant the garden early and then cover the plants as needed to protect from late frosts. You simply cannot garden in Wyoming without using that procedure, because the growing season is so short.



The weather was gorgeous on 4/20, so I actually planted three girls outdoors that day (with supplemental light to avoid early flowering.) I've had to cover them several times to avoid frost damage, but they haven't complained much. They all look healthy, though they haven't grown much.


Here's a photo a month later, as my girls hide out under makeshift greenhouses to avoid a chilly spring day. Remember that mid-October snow-covered cannabis plant I showed you back at the beginning of the thread? Right. May and October share the risk of warm, but heavy snowfall around here, as you can plainly see:

Starting on the right, under the plastic tub, is @OlDirtyHuman 's favorite Panama pheno. He grows indoors only, and wants to see how this pheno performs outdoors.


In the center is Malawi, and on the left, Zamaldelica. The empty planter on the far left is waiting for Golden Tiger to show sex. I have two GT "seedlings" that are three months old, and nearly three feet tall, that have not shown sex yet. I'm hoping the delay means they are both female, in which case I may grow them both, letting one finish naturally, and force-flowering the other for comparison. Or I may give the second GT to a friend to finish, while I grow @JAMMAL 's Angry Jamaican strain (Ace Malawi x CBG Caribe). I'd like to do that in order to have four different Ace Malawi crosses to compare. I have several Angry Jamaican seeds germinating. Hopefully I'll get a female. She'll have a late start, compared to the others, but that should be fine. She should get at least as large as the snow-covered plant back at the start of this thread, and she produced a good six ounces or so. I planted her as a little six-inch-high clone, and she went outdoors in mid June last year. A seedling the same size should get a bit larger.



Just two days ago, I took a rather large Bangi Haze x Ethiopian out to it's summer planter. She's under the largest of my makeshift "greenhouse" structures, in the upper right in this photo:

I plan to grow a few autoflowering strains outdoors in the early summer, so that they will finish just as I start the others into forced-flowering. The staged seasons are needed to comply with my legal plant limit in Colorado. I can grow twelve plants, but only six can be in flower at once. In truth, I suspect that there is no practical way to enforce that limit, just as there was no practical way to enforce a prohibition. But I'm glad to live in a legal state, so I'll try to stay in compliance.

 

[CowboyTed]

And a new morning dawns with even more snow. (Compare this photo to the one in the post above, taken the evening before.)

Anybody want to place bets one which Ace strain is most likely to survive this cold? Maybe Dubi and the gang at Ace can learn a bit more about the cold hardiness of Panama, Zamaldelica, Malawi and Bangi Haze x Ethiopian. I doubt any of them would have seen this sort of weather in their natural habitats!


Myself, I'm encouraged by the warmth of the thermal mass of the soil in the planters below the plants. The heat rising from that thermal mass goes a long way toward protecting plants from freezing. The simplest covers typically hold in enough heat to keep most garden plants alive. This is my first time testing cannabis in the snow, though.


I'll post an update when the snow melts and I remove the "greenhouses" from the plants again.



The "greenhouse I made to cover the Bangi Haze x Ethiopian is not strong enough to hold much snow on the top, so I brushed the snow off a couple times before I went to bed. Another eight to twelve inches collected on top overnight, and thankfully my structure held up under the weight. When I trudged out there through 12 inches of heavy, wet snow, I expected to find my big Bangi Haze x Ethiopian plant crushed under a collapsed greenhouse. I think I got lucky.

 

[CowboyTed]

Time for another update, and I'm happy to report that all the plants survived the heavy snow shown in the posts above. Most of them are happy and healthy.



Only the Bangi Haze x. Ethiopian took the cold hard, probably because it was still dealing with transplant shock when the snow came. Oddly, the growth tips at the end of each branch seem to be stunted and weak, while the foliage underneath is thriving. I may just top each branch, and let the healthy growth take over. Here she is, two weeks after the snow:

Meanwhile, the rest of the plants are happy.


Here's Zamaldelica:

Malawi:

And Panama:

 

[CowboyTed]

I'm still finalizing plans on how to deal with the various long-flowering strains. I've decided to use a small, portable greenhouse to cover the Golden Tiger (once they show sex) and the Zamaldelica. Because the Angry Jamaican is getting a slow start, having just germinated in the past week, I suspect it may get to live under the greenhouse as well. It won't get nearly as large as the other strains that germinated months ago.


The greenhouse also gives me a simple method of black-boxing the plants under it, so that they get started flowering early. My plan is to force-flower the Zamaldelica and Golden Tiger in the greenhouse, while letting the (slightly) faster finishing Malawi finish naturally. I expect to harvest the Zam and GT early, and then I can move the greenhouse over the Malawi, to keep her safe if she takes all of October to finish. I may grow the Angry Jamaican in a pot, since it will not be as large, so that I can let it flower naturally, and I can move it in with the Malawi under the greenhouse to finish in October/November.



I'm still debating how to deal with the Panama and Bangi Haze x Ethiope.



Here's a photo from inside the greenhouse, looking out toward Malawi and Panama just outside.

In the foreground are the two GTs and a Malawi, still in pots. The still empty planter in the foreground (with the pruning shear laying on it) will hold a Golden Tiger once they show sex. The large planter just inside the greenhouse door is the Zamaldelica. Just outside the greenhouse door is the Malawi in a planter, and the Panama is in the farthest planter.


It will be interesting to see whether the Zam and GT outgrow their greenhouse. I suspect they may well fit inside, since they will start flowering earlier, so they won't grow as large as they would with an extra month to grow before the stretch. Time will tell. I can raise the greenhouse if needed, or remove it altogether when they outgrow it. Monsters that grow too big for their greenhouse? I HOPE I have that problem!

 

[Ibechillin]

Only the Bangi Haze x. Ethiopian took the cold hard, probably because it was still dealing with transplant shock when the snow came. Oddly, the growth tips at the end of each branch seem to be stunted and weak, while the foliage underneath is thriving. I may just top each branch, and let the healthy growth take over.

Its common with hard frosts the active growing tips can die on the plant. Should be able to tell live tips from dead ones since they get woody and hard compared to soft new growth, plant branches react the same way as being topped typically since the main tip dies.

 

[CowboyTed]

Its common with hard frosts the active growing tips can die on the plant. Should be able to tell live tips from dead ones since they get woody and hard compared to soft new growth, plant branches react the same way as being topped typically since the main tip dies.

Thanks! This plant is a re-vegged clone, already decidedly branchy. I't gonna look like a porcupine when every node starts sending up a new branch!

 

[dubi]

Hi CowboyTed,

Glad all the plants survived the strong snows in May
Very happy to see our friends here exchanging clones of your selections and seeds of your own hybrids.

Best wishes!

 

[CowboyTed]

It's long past time for an update!


After May Snows, my girls had to endure June hailstorms as well. Most were insignificant, but one big storm did some damage. Small 1/2 inch hailstones started tearing at the leaves one afternoon, as I ran around the garden and desperately tried to get everything covered.



Thankfully, I got all the cannabis covered quickly, and then raced out to the pasture to help guide an aging horse indoors. By the time I got back to the garden, the hailstones had grown to an inch, and they beat up my green beans pretty badly, but the sorry-looking mess of a beanpatch now looks healthy and happy again, and I've now plucked off all the worst of the shredded leaves, as new ones grow in to hide the damage.


Evidence of shredded leaves on the cannabis has now faded, and everything looks healthy again. Of course, you all want pictures, right?


Let's start with the hailstorm. As you can see, the plastic tubs I quickly threw over the cannabis plants didn't cover them completely, so some of the leaves got chewed up pretty badly. Thankfully, zamaldelica was in the greenhouse, and she escaped any damage.

Avoiding the hail damage helped Zamaldelica become the biggest, healthiest plant in the garden. I just started black-boxing her to force flowering early. I fear she may outgrow my greenhouse as she stretches, since I only have about a foot of clearance to the greenhouse roof. (not much space on the sides either!)

Just outside the greenhouse door is Malawi, going strong:

And just a couple yards farther west is a Panama pheno that OlDirtyHuman shared with me. He's grown the cutting indoors many times, and he was curious to see how it performs outdoors, so I made a space in the garden for her.


While she started a bit smaller than the others, she has easily caught up. She's bushy, with shorter internodes than the Zam and Malawi, creating a much leafier, denser plant.

More photos of the other three tomorrow!

 

[YukonKronic]

Fucking. Love. It.
Looks so fun... the snowy May looks intense! Worse than we had up here!
Cut that Zam back bro... it’s gonna triple in size easy. Just saying...
Going back to read whole thread.
Subbing this one

 

[CowboyTed]

Cut that Zam back bro... it’s gonna triple in size easy.

Thanks for the advice. This is my first Zamaldelica grow, so I needed to know roughly how much it will stretch. Is three times the size typical when you start a Zam into flower? Should I expect the same or similar from Golden Tiger?



I've approached the black-boxing scenario with stretch in mind. The black box and the greenhouse that supports it can be removed once the plants are firmly into flower. That way they can continue flowering outdoors, no longer confined by the greenhouse.


And once the greenhouse is freed up, I'll re-erect it over the Malawi, but raised up a couple feet higher, to give the plant more headroom. I'm going to let the Malawi go into flower naturally, rather than force-flowering her. With a greenhouse to protect her, she's likely to finish happily, even if she takes into November to finish.



She may, of course, outgrow my greenhouse altogether. That's the sort of problem I'd love to have.



I'm pretty good with a PVC hoop, if needed.

 

[CowboyTed]

Ok, time for part two of this update.


Here's the last of the six plants to go into the ground. I was waiting for my two Golden Tiger plants to show sex before deciding which of the two to plant outdoors. They were both very slow, but this one finally showed female and I placed her into the ground the same day, but she's a month or more behind the others in getting her roots into the planter.

You'll see in this photo how I've been training four of the six plants. When I place them into the soil outdoors, I lean the whole plant over, and plant the root ball with the stem leaned over at 45 degrees toward the north. Then I drive a bamboo stake. parallel and alongside the mainstem, as a support I can use to tie down the tip, so that the mainstem will continue growing at 45 degrees and toward the north.


I slipped small pipes over two of the bamboo stakes I use to train her, so that you can see them more easily. Basically, one long stake trains all the right side branches to reach toward the right, while a second stake holds all the left side branches out to the left. The topside branches are allowed to grow generally southward and upward. The bottomside branches are trimmed off when they appear.


The point of the training is to open up the plant structure, so that sunlight can get deep into the plant when it's small, encouraging the development of large, strong branches, connected low down, so that they are stronger, and more able to support the heavy colas we all dream about. It also allows really good visual and physical access to the underside of the plant. The mainstem and the base of all the branches, as well as the underside of the leaves, are easily visible simply standing on the north side of the plant. It makes pest inspections much easier.



Next up is Bangi Haze x Ethiopian. This plant started life as a small cutting taken while the mom was in flower. The clone re-vegged, and created a very branchy bush. Then I too her outdoors, and she got hit with a hard frost, killing all the branch tips. Remember this sad photo? She was alive after the frost, but definitely not thriving, with frozen branch tips.

At IBechillin's suggestion, I topped each branch, to remove the damaged tips. As expected, each of those branches became two, and the bush is even branchier now, and clearly much happier:

She's gonna get big, I suspect. I'm going to let her enter flowering naturally, so she's got another month to grow before flowering even starts.


Now last, and yes, also least, is this little Snow Moon. She's another re-vegged clone, with about five main branches reaching outward from the trunk. Of the six plants, she's the only Indica. I needed to grow something to help me fall asleep, right?

Snow Moon is the only one of the six whose stem is not yet an inch in diameter. I suspect she'll reach that milestone, but not until very close to harvest. Zamaldelica and Panama both have monster trunks: both are more than an inch and a half thick.


While I realize that these plants are not monstrous by NorCal standards, they are already ginormous compared to my outdoor grow last year. Neither of my plants reached the 1-inch stem milestone last year. This time most of them are well past it by the first of July!

 

[YukonKronic]

Everything but the snow moon has potential to go 3x stretch or greater. There are compact phenotypes but generally speaking they all stretch lots. Training and pruning will help reduce stretch too.
Looks good... I hope you need to build bigger greenhouses for all your buds!
Gotta love those kinds of problems...

The re vegetated BangEth May need some lollipopping to focus growth into the stronger branches or the excess foliage could lead to mould later in cycle. Reveg plants make crazy bushes... that one won’t stretch as much. I would lollipop soon though so there’s time for her to get real interested in the branches that are left and they set up good structure prior to flowering.

 

[CowboyTed]

The re vegetated BangEth May need some lollipopping to focus growth into the stronger branches or the excess foliage could lead to mould later in cycle. Reveg plants make crazy bushes... that one won’t stretch as much. I would lollipop soon though so there’s time for her to get real interested in the branches that are left and they set up good structure prior to flowering.

Good Point. I've been thinking about doing some cleaning and trimming inside that mess of branches, but haven't got to it yet. 'tis the time, indeed.


I think I'll wait a few days, though, so she can recover a bit from the latest weather event in the Colorado foothills: torrential rain, and winds that shook the plants until poor Bangopi (my nomme d'jardin) and Snow moon looked like someone had tried to wrestle them up out of the ground. They were hanging on, but there's no doubt that was a stressful event for a poor tropical girl!

 

[dubi]

Hi CowboyTed,

Your plants are looking healthy and happy, it's such a beautiful moment when the cold finally goes away and outdoor plants thrive with the sun and warm temps of the summer.

Zamaldelica and Golden Tiger can really stretch a lot in early flowering (easily doubling their size), Golden Tiger is usually taller than Zamaldelica. Although the early flowering stretching is usually more gradual outdoors than indoors, where the change of photoperiod to flowering stage happens instantly. Snow Moon has little stretching, being an almost pure hashplant indica.

 

[bibi40]

Hi mate ,


Well done , impressive grow , your plants are beauties ...
like them !!!

 

[CowboyTed]

This thread is developing a pattern: the next weather event leads to the next update.


Remember that wind storm I mentioned in the last update? I was delighted that my cheap $100 greenhouse survived that wind intact. The next day, I was less delighted.


The wind came back, much stronger the next day, and I've been in clean-up mode since then. Remember that cheap greenhouse? I went outside after the storm to find this lovely scene:

While the scenery is nice, (absent the skid-loader) there's something missing in that picture: the greenhouse. I found the greenhouse wadded up next to the driveway where the wind left it - well outside the garden.

I disassembled the structure to assess the damage, and I was amazed to find that the damage was fairly light. I spent a couple hours that night straightening bent poles, and got them all into passable condition for re-assembly.

And then I started re-assembling my forlorn greenhouse:


I'm still surprised that it went back together so well:

That's amazingly straight, for a greenhouse that was ripped up from it's moorings and blown up and over a couple raised beds before somehow flipping over a seven-foot fence and landing upside-down outside the garden!

 

[CowboyTed]

But the amazing condition of the greenhouse was not the end of the story.


Remember those raised beds that got used as a ramp to launch the greenhouse over a high fence? Right. Well, this poor Bangopi (Bangeth?) girl was trying to grow in one of those beds, and she didn't take so well to the crushing she received as the greenhouse rolled over her, let alone the raging wind that tried to uproot her:

It was clear that she would need some support to recover, so I fashioned a wire mesh cage, staked it into the ground firmly, and started training the branches through the wire to help steady the plant while her roots recovered from the shock:

A couple days later, she was looking happy and healthy again in her new cage, so I finished the defoliation and "lollipopping" that YukonKronic suggested, and she's looking happy and healthy again:

And from above, she's far less crowded inside, after eliminating the future larf, and choosing which branches I want to keep in the plant's structure.

While I was at it, I realized that Snow Moon was also vulnerable to wind damage, so I caged her as well, and trained her to spread out and grow wider. She's happy with the change as well, and she's putting on fast new growth:

 

[CowboyTed]

Now that everything is back in order in the garden, I've just kept to the grow plan, black-boxing the Zamaldelica and Golden Tiger inside the greenhouse each evening/morning. I started the ZAm into flower first, and as expected, she started flowering first:

I plan to continue black-boxing them both at night until both are fully flowering. At that point, I'll plan to remove the greenhouse when they've stretched outside its confines. From that point they will finish flowering unprotected, and I'll plan to re-assemble the greenhouse over the Malawi later in the fall if she needs frost protection.


Assuming that Zamaldelica's first day of 12/12 was July 15, she should finish by mid October, if she takes all 14 weeks.


It will be interesting to compare the results of the two force-flowered sativas (Zamaldelica and Golden Tiger, which both take up to 14 weeks to finish flowering) with the three naturally-flowered sativas (Malawi, Panama and Bangopi) which are likely to push up against frost damage in the late fall. If they don't even start flowering for another month, those last three will get huge! I suspect I'll find that the Malawi has completely outgrown the greenhouse by the time she needs it.