Paonia Purple & Mr T Plant A Soil Garden

[Paonia Purple]

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted here. Mr T and I decided to enlarge our grow area to 400 square feet. One of the commercial growers here in the valley found some fertile Paonia Purple seeds and grew and sold some last year. One batch that I got a hold of had some seeds in it, so I planted some. It was a pretty typical grow, soil only. The little sprouts started in 2 inch peat pots, and graduated to gallon size coffee cans. This stage was indoors under LED lights. The healthiest 6 females were transplanted outdoors mid May. Our grow area was a weed patch that was rototilled about 8 inches deep, then had 8 inches of composted tree shreddings added, then was rototilled again. The plants were spaced four feet apart and a simple watering system was run to give each plant a stream of water while keeping the main area dry to help prevent crazed weed growth. We used an inline cartridge filter to keep the holes in the hose from plugging up, and put in an automatic feeder (semi auto, technically) to fertilize the plants. There are three strains: Paonia Purple, Ice, and an unknown Nirvana seed co strain.

I'm just guessing that the monstrously tall plants are the Ice strain, my neighbor had to move back east and left me his plants. The tall ones are just starting to bloom. I'm hoping for a yield near a pound per plant.

Three healthy PP's

Overall view

Ice plant getting close to 7 feet tall.

July 20th

July 30th

 

[Lester Freeman]

re: Paonia Purple & Mr T Plant A Soil Garden

Very nice specimens and grow! I'm in for this one

 

[Aegupton]

they look awesome.some nice shade of green keep it up

 

[Paonia Purple]

It is so amazingly satisfying to go out and kneel down in the middle of that little jungle.

The girls had their first feeding with bloom food last week and are starting to show off some flowers.

I'm going on vacation for a week and I can hardly wait to see how they look next time we meet.

 

[Paonia Purple]

Here are a few new photos.

Just hitting 8 feet.

Incredibly lush. Used MiracleGro and then Fox Farms Grow Big for veg and now using another big name bloom food (can't remember brand- too much dope I guess) alternated with balanced food (about 10-10-10)

I've had great results with tying the stem tops down to get auxins to rise to secondary bud sites. Plus, these dang monsters are so tall I can't keep raising the fence to hide them.

 

[Lester Freeman]

Excellent work!

 

[Paonia Purple]

Mr. T can't reach the top of the plants any more.

Buds are filling in nicely. They should start to be really photogenic in a couple weeks.

 

[Paonia Purple]

Mr T is a professional water damage/remediation guy, so when he suggested that he help build a proper drying room in my garage, I said, "Wow, sure!" He provided the stuff and expertise, and I provided the space. My little sports car has to live under a tarp outside until drying season is done. I took a video of the room, but it's too big to upload so I'll have to describe it.

The frame is 1" sch 40 PVC pipe, lots of T's and some special containment room corner joint pieces. We cut all the parts to make a room that is 8 feet wide, 7.5 feet high, and 10 feet long. Mr T has a bunch of clippy things, some awesome tape, and spray glue to make an air tight, totally clean drying area. He's also providing a special HEPA filtered air supply. He also has humidistat stuff to maintain a constant humidity.

He also has these totally cool stick on zippers to make a door.

We had a wind broken branch from one of the PP plants, so it became the inaugural occupant of the room. I'll get a pic of the buds from the tall Sativa sisters- they are starting to pop and look really silky and cool. Well, they look odd, really. You'll see soon.

We dried and smoked a (really immature) bud from that branch- very tasty, sort of lime/pineapple, but buzz? Pfft. Nope. That's OK, I'll make olive oil extract from that branch, it should be awesomely yummy.

 

[Paonia Purple]

hang those branches

The tall sativa is budding. The pictures were taken at night- hence a little blurry. Or maybe that was me, I had a nice hit of Girl Scout Cookie before I went out to the garden.

Paonia Purple buds.

 

[Paonia Purple]

Lol, I found out out why the blossoms were odd looking. They were tiny little male flowers. Tiny, but prolific- there must have been 20,000 on the two males I had to chop. I could have sworn all four of the skinny sativas were blooming as females when I got them. Anyway, the two tallest plants in the garden are gone. It was a good test for the drying room- putting those big dudes in there brought the relative humidity from ~25% up to 60% overnight. The climate here is so dry that our main problem in curing is that the plants dry way too fast for good flavor unless you keep the moisture elevated.

Anyway, the PP plants are maturing nicely. One girl seems to be a few days or so ahead of her sisters, her pistils are mostly drying back and turning a nice warm brown color. I wish a picture could capture the sheer majesty of the fat lush buds against the sky.

The buds are medium density but are nice and large, spiraling down the stems.

I'll dig out the microscope soon and show you all what the trichs look like. It's time to start watching closely.

Yah love, brothers.

 

[Paonia Purple]

Here's a close up through my big microscope. About half of the trichomes are turning cloudy. If you look close while you sweep the focal plane of the scope, you can see that the trichs actually turn cloudy from the base (where the stalk connects) to the end. I guess I just thought they turned all at once or something.

It's a bear to hold my cellphone up to the eyepiece of the scope, find the target, and snap the shots. Plus, the camera's autofocus is stymied by looking through a 40X lens. The trichs are actually not as cloudy as the picture makes them look.

This is the most mature plant, and looks like it might be ready to harvest this week. I'll take daily samples of sugar leaves and keep an eye on the state of cloudiness. We want to stage the harvest a bit, so we'll have some trippy weed and some couch lock weed. This is the best hobby ever.

 

[Paonia Purple]

More trichomes. You can see the clarity of a couple of them, and you can also see the cloudiness growing in a couple.

My lab. Microscope, humidity/dew point meter, snips, jar of buds, etc.

A fist full of ganja.

Turning colors. If you look closely at the trichs in the upper right of the photo, you can see them turning amber. This branch will probably be harvested tonight.

 

[Paonia Purple]

Harvest is in full swing! I had to chop a couple of plants a bit early because of a thunderstorm that flattened them. The drying room has about a third of the crop hanging up right now.

Mr T has been coming over in the evenings to start trimming. I realized, to my great delight, that one of the big bushy plants is Grape Ape. I love that grape smell and the cone shaped buds from that stuff. We've trimmed about half the plant and put it in jars- two half gallon canning jars so far. We should get two gallons of buds ( four jars) from this one plant. Here's a glimpse of the buds.

And a close-up of the incredible sparkles.

A size scale.

The Grape Ape is so resinous and sticky that we had to clean our snips about every three or four buds.

Sunset on the garden. Don't worry, lil' buddies, your turn is coming very soon!

 

[Paonia Purple]

Just a quick update. We have five full half gallon jars of Grape Ape so far, a sixth nearly full, and probably another half gallon beyond that. Now they get stashed in a nice dark safe to mellow and cure.

When we get around to weighing the actual yield so we can split it, I'll let ya'all know the weight. Three or four gallons of buds from ONE plant.

I want to say thanks to all the avid growers out there on 420 magazine whose insight, experience, and encouragement have helped to make me a totally successful private grower!

 

[David Bowman]

Hope all is well in your world.

Thanks for sharing this grow with us.

Please head over to the 420 Strain Reviews forum and post your smoke report there too.

I’m moving this to Completed Journals now.

Have you started a new grow you would like to share with us?

If so, please feel free to start a new journal here: Journals in Progress

You can use the Report Post feature found at the bottom left of every post and we'll move it for you right away.

Sending you lots of love and positive energy.

 

[Paonia Purple]

Semi-final update: the two tall sativas are still growing, but are getting close to maturity. The trichs on these plants are tiny, compared to the indica and hybrid strains. The buds are full of wispy pistils, and the trichs are finally starting to get cloudy. We've had an unusual run of frost free weather here in western Colorado, so Mr. T wanted to let the sativae keep growing as long as possible. There had been a couple of sub freezing nights earlier in the month, but just down to 28* F or so, not enough to really harm the plants for a brief exposure

I've been really busy and not able to update this thread as much as it deserves. Thanks, David, for moving it to the completed journals string- I'm nearly done.

When we started trimming the last big indica, we were delighted to smell the familiar grape essence of Grape Ape, so now we know we had two big apes in the garden.

Here's a trimmed bud from that one:

The little side garden with the local hybrids is harvested now, too-

Juicy Dog

There are a group of Fat Dog/Juicy Fruit hybrids we've named Juicy Dog. Should be 'wet dog diesel' from the smell- sort of sulfurous, faintly skunky, notably dieselicious. Stronger than hell, too; you don't want to smoke a big bong of this and then expect to get anything done for the next three or four hours. Mr T and I bonged up and sat down to trim, and realized after a half hour that we'd been just sitting there, spacing.

The other hybrid is also from seed from last year's garden. It's Juicy Fruit/Pineapple Chunk, creatively re-named Juicy Pineapple. It has a diesel aroma too, but mixed with a tangy citrus. Not quite as couch lock inducing as the Dog, but a very nice, long lasting and relaxing high.

Juice Pineapple

The Paonia Purple never turned very purple, sadly enough. The trichs were clouded and turning amber when we harvested it, and there was a tint of purple but nothing to really notice. This stuff has a milder aroma than any of the other indicas, sort of a citrus/pine with the faintest after taste of black licorice. it's another strong body high weed that will park you in a chair grooving to music for hours.

I'm going to finish the journal soon, when we finish trimming and get a final throw weight. I'll post a review of the year, what we will do next year, what we won't try again, etc.

I will say that the GE Psyclone psychrometer (measures temp, humidity, dew point very accurately) was a super useful tool to help us in the drying and curing process. Being able to have consistent, accurate, and instant feedback of moisture content kept a lot of guesswork out of the picture.