Working with Pollen

Emilya;2680464 said:

Today I wish to describe my current project, producing, gathering, storing and using pollen.

The strain is AK-47. When I started this winter run, I planted 4 AK-47 regulars, and as the odds would have it, ended up with 2 males. These frisky guys were immediately isolated to a special stand alone 2x1 love tent and were not up-potted with the rest of the group.

Over the last month, the boys have matured while the girls in the big 4x4 bloom tent continued to veg and prepare for their debut. Right on schedule, within days of flipping the switch in the bloom tent, the boys became ready. The love tent has a peeping tom feature to it, so without disturbing them, or releasing any of their pollen, I have been able to look in the little windows to check on them. Yesterday I noticed that pollen was falling all around the tent, several fan leaves coated with the nasty stuff.

So today, stripped down to a sports bra and panties, I turned off all fans in the area and carefully opened the tent. Armed with my snips, a picture frame with a clean glass front, a credit card and two different sizes of paint brushes, I went to work. Carefully I gathered as much of the pollen as I could, bent down branches to my picture frame and gently shook the pollen to the glass. Once I knew I had enough, I sprayed the area down with my mister, plants, walls floor.. everything... soaked it all down real good to kill any remaining pollen. I will later go in with a bucket and a sponge and lots of clean bleach water... but that is later... I am practically naked at this point.

Next step was to bag and remove the guys, and get them out to the back porch to the supersoil compost bin. The soil is cooking out there for a couple of months before the next run, and the boys were chopped up and mixed in with this soil to send all of their goodness and their rootballs back into the mix for the next plants to use. The soil was watered again, mixed thoroughly (now I am almost naked and dirty up to my elbows) and we are done with the boys. They served well and I am proud of them.

The next step was to clean out the green debris from my pollen powder and work with it to make it more manageable. For this task, the paintbrushes and the credit card become very valuable tools. I ended up with a nice pile of pollen, and then next to it, I put an equal amount of flour to mix 50:50. This makes a very easy to work with powder, that will stay put when I use my small watercolor paintbrush to aggressively paint selective buds in the flower tent. More on that later when we get to that point, for today we are just preparing pollen.

Now that I have all this pollen put away, I have taken a shower and put on clean clothes. I will wait an hour for any possible floating pollen to settle down, and then I will turn all the fans back on. Task done, and I am clean. Could it get any better?

The resulting combined pile of flour and pollen

Then, this pile was carefully picked up with the credit card and paintbrushes, and put into an empty clean prescription pill bottle, with a desiccant pack to keep it dry. It is now stored in my fridge... waiting for the end of stretch and the official beginning of bloom.

I will continue this thread with chapter two in a couple of weeks... the actual pollination of a bud. I plan on producing a bunch of AK-47 seeds at the end of this, along with some interesting crosses of TangerAK Dream 47 and AKGC (AK Crack) Hope to see you then!

Sense Emilya

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