AK47 Serious Seeds - First Grow - CFL - Soil

[GreeenFingers]

Reading about natural UVb and its mortal effect on young life, I am going to wait until after the 4th node and then increase by an hour a week and keep rotating it around the garden. The hour a week is initial guess, will calculate so start flowering with full UVb.

Ps. Thank you for the active and passive assistance with photography

No problem ajagunle my pleasure

That seems like a good system, I definitely would like to have the UVB up to full blast by the time they start flowering

When are you planning on beginning your next grow ? I'm going to try and start a fresh one as soon as my girls are dry, I am thinking of running these 3 girls again just so that I can understand their needs better along with some Super Skunk

 

[Buckshot]

Thank you Buckshot I greatly appreciate the +Reps

Do you know what else could cause purpling other than cooler temperatures ?

Thanks

I don't want to type it and jinx you. Just watch close.

 

[Greenhouse250]

Thanks donpaul, I have written to Serious Seeds and received a response in as little as 1 hour

I am going to post the dialog between me and the company on this thread as soon as I get their next response so stay tuned ha ha

Thanks for stopping by

Was this the auto email? saying you will get a response soon? Well buddy not looking good, the 3rd email is full of bs!

 

[Greenhouse250]

Serious Seeds Passing off feminized seeds as regular seeds (unstable genetics hermaph

 

[KingJaffyJoe]

Well whenever you begin a grow you should create a journal and we will all be able to help you out

What is your reasoning for wanting to go with CFLs ? Is is due to heat issues ?

Ideally it would be the more light the better so I would probably reccomend having the 2 X 200w CFLs as their light penetration is not very strong, I intended in having 625w of CFL in my little box ha ha

They can heat up a grow room an awful lot faster than you would expect, I found the heat from the 250w HPS in a cooltube much more manageable than when I had 375w of CFL running as the heat can be removed directly from the light through the cooltube whereas the heat from the CFLs can not be re-located or controlled as easily as it dissipates throughout the room.
Just some suggestions

Yea kinda even though i'm planning on a basement tent grow and it can get pretty cold down around my parts. I just love how the cfl's worked for you in veg, your fixture for cfl setup do you have any diagrams? I'm lookin to do something along those lines.

 

[BudMachine]

Sweet plants! Very nice work!

I'm about to start building out my grow room. Have a great attic space to do so. Just need to plan for the summer heat issues. Anyway, have you seen a big percentage increase in your electric bill during this grow?

Looking forward to seeing your final results!

 

[ajagunle]

it can get pretty cold down around my parts.

Well I would definitely wrap your parts up well!

 

[ajagunle]

When are you planning on beginning your next grow ? I'm going to try and start a fresh one as soon as my girls are dry, I am thinking of running these 3 girls again just so that I can understand their needs better along with some Super Skunk

I am going to start a bean this weekend, in a florist bucket, clip on 30w cfl, in a cupboard, should be fine until the garden is empty.



In future I am going to do each strain twice, back to back, so I know exactly how much stretch to expect and fill the space to my best advantage, counting on increased second grow, with added hind sight, to more than make up for any lack of variety.

 

[GreeenFingers]

Yea kinda even though i'm planning on a basement tent grow and it can get pretty cold down around my parts. I just love how the cfl's worked for you in veg, your fixture for cfl setup do you have any diagrams? I'm lookin to do something along those lines.

That seems reasonable enough

If you are going to go with CFLs I would say the best setup to utilise the light would be a SCROG as this will allow the most light to the most buds and does not rely on light penetration for production.

I do actually have some diagrams from when I first came up with the Idea, I hope they help or at least give you a good idea of how it was constructed

 

[GreeenFingers]

Sweet plants! Very nice work!

I'm about to start building out my grow room. Have a great attic space to do so. Just need to plan for the summer heat issues. Anyway, have you seen a big percentage increase in your electric bill during this grow?

Looking forward to seeing your final results!

Thank you BudMachine

I would say the average increase in the electricity bill is only about an extra €10 a month if even that so its actually very cheap

 

[GreeenFingers]

I am going to start a bean this weekend, in a florist bucket, clip on 30w cfl, in a cupboard, should be fine until the garden is empty.



In future I am going to do each strain twice, back to back, so I know exactly how much stretch to expect and fill the space to my best advantage, counting on increased second grow, with added hind sight, to more than make up for any lack of variety.

Good plan

I am actually thinking of only running only the AK47 girls by themselves again for the next round so it would be clones of Ms. Sativa, Ms. Purple and Ms. Tropical as it makes sense to fully understand and perfect the growth of a specific strain before moving on to another, at least next time I will know exactly what they need and when they need it and what their growth pattern is

I am nearly sure that I will be able to at least double my yield with the SOG method as it seems like the best way to utilise a small space, I would be able to fit 8 X 6 litre pots into the space and I would be aiming for an ounce cola from each plant because people seem to be able to get up to a half oz from a plant in a tiny 2 litre pot so I think with 6 litre pots an ounce from each plant should be completely possible

 

[KingJaffyJoe]

Well I would definitely wrap your parts up well!

I mean it'll be in a tent,but how can i keep the temps up without hurting the plants?

 

[ajagunle]

I mean it'll be in a tent,but how can i keep the temps up without hurting the plants?

A small oil filled rad plugged into a thermostat, and in the depths of Winter a hot air blower plugged into a separate thermostat which only kicks-in when there is a sudden, rapid temperature drop. My grow area is enclosed by single skin layer of bricks, 3 sides are outside facing and the 4th is not in a heated part of my house. Not sure this would be OK in a tent, I have never grown in one, I mean, never grown plants in one.

 

[GreeenFingers]

Or you could just use a HID light to heat the area rather than using CFLs

 

[GreeenFingers]

Hello everybody

As promised, here is the conversation about the hermaphrodite plant between Myself and Simon + Thomas from Serious seeds.

I must state here that Serious Seeds were as helpful as I could have possibly imagined and are completely willing to do everything possible to help their customers with any problem. They 100% stand confidently by their solid genetics and great care seems to go into their development.

A seed Company / Breeder we can be sure to trust, I know I now do

I hope some of you find this interesting, it is quite a large post so this is an early warning of it being quite a long Read

Hello Serious Seeds,

I am writing to you as I have recently germinated a whole 11 pack of Regular AK47 seeds to which 10 Germinated and 9 of those Female. The one remaining plant was a Triploid/Hermaphrodite which is my reason for writing to you today.I was really hoping to result in having a male as I have wanted to cross these genetics as the smoke quality is one of my all time faveroutes, this was my intention in buying the Regular seed pack but I resulted in all females and one Hermie which leaves me to believe that the entire pack was Femanised rather than Regular or possibly a little unstable ? I am a member of 420 Magazine so there are pictures to document the Hermaphrodite/Triploid as it happened If you need it for any reason. I have also encountered another member of 420 Magazine who had all Female and 1 late showing Herm so I do not know if this a common occurrence. I bought the seed pack while in Amsterdam about a year ago from \'\'ASG GIFTS SEED SUPPLIES\'\' I made sure of getting the real genetics, and kept them in refrigerated storage to preserve them until they were needed.I still have the original packaging If it is needed.

I am greatly appreciative of your assistance and eagerly await your response

HI, GreeenFingers!

Thanks for contacting us.

The other 420-member, already contacted us about his case, and I asked him to send some pics of the plant in question.

Please send us pics of the plant you are thinking is a hermaphrodite.

First of all, I want to clear up some things.

You write that one plant was a triploid/hermphrodite.

Those are two very different things!

A triploid is like a 4 leafed clover, just a freak of nature, a natural mutation.
A triploid plant is actually very good, because it developes an extra budding-site at every knot. Each third sidebranch growing out of a knot is an extra bonus given by nature.

Then you have hermaphrodites, which are plants developing both sex-organs (=male pollen-sacks and female flowers) at the same time.
This is also occurring in nature with two-sexed plant genuses like cannabis, as a survival instinct.
If no males are around in a population and autum is coming then a female plant will reverse to develope male pollen sacks and inseminate itself in order to produce seeds and survive until the next growing season.
This natural emergency program is inherent to cannabis plants and can be minimized by selecting the proper plants after stressing them.

Simon says he has stressed his strains in every way conceiveable and never had them turn hermaphrodite, therefore we are very surprised by your issues.

Please fill in the missing information (=where there is a questiomark) to answer the questions:

1) What is the name of strain you bought, and the name of the shop were you
bought the seeds?

2) About when did you buy them, the date more or less?

3) What is the (handwritten) number on the package?

4) How many seeds were in the package?

5) How many seeds did you try, and how many germinated?

6) Which germination method did you use?

7) If your problem was not about germination, please tell us in short what your problem was?

8) Send us an address where we can send new seeds to, if you qualify for a replacement.

Aloha, Thomas.
(Marketing-Manager Serious Seeds)

Hello Thomas,

Thank you for replying so quickly it is very much appreciated.

There are 3 pictures attached

I do understand the difference between Hermaphrodites and Triploids, apologies if I did not go into enough detail but what I meant by Hermaphrodite/Triploid was the fact that the plant first grew as normal throughout the first 2 weeks of the Vegetation phase as a Diploid, it was only after this point that the plant began to show its Triploid characteristics and all new nodes that developed were in Triploid form which I thought was quite strange considering that the plant had began its growth as a Diploid.

All plants were kept in the Vegetation phase until they produced pre-flowers ( this period of time was approximately 4 weeks or a little more until all plants showed ) It was at this point that I noticed every single plant had female pre-flowers which did not make sense as it was a Regular seed pack, I was almost certain that I had made a mistake so I went through all the plants again checking every single node and then I noticed that ( coincidently plant no. 3 the Triploid ) that I previously thought was female and was happy about and would have liked to use as a mother, had a few little pollen sacks on the 4th node down from the top, therefore it was a Triploid plant with both male and female sex organs, It is this whole combination that makes me think the plant was just a highly unstable genetic mutation.

I must state that at no point were the plants stressed in any way and all were in a perfectly stable environment and all of the plants grew up completely healthy otherwise.

Here is the Information you requested

1) What is the name of strain you bought, and the name of the shop were you
bought the seeds?
AK-47 regular, ASG-Gifts in Amsterdam

2) About when did you buy them, the date more or less?
about a year ago

3) What is the (handwritten) number on the package?
6728

4) How many seeds were in the package?
11

5) How many seeds did you try, and how many germinated?
11, 10

6) Which germination method did you use?
Paper towel method

7) If your problem was not about germination, please tell us in short what
your problem was?
9 female plants and one hermaphrodite

8) Send us an address where we can send new seeds to, if you qualify for a
replacement.
******************

I am greatly appreciative of your comunication and am very interested to see your opinion on this situation.

Kind regards

Hi GreeenFingers,

Thomas is not in today so I respond to your interesting email. He will be back tomorow I think so he will pick up the rest of the ‘problem’.

You have indeed a rare find I think. Normally when I see triploidy it is a plant which starts its life as such, with 3 leaves at the same node, but usually after 5 to 8 nodes it goes back to normal. After that there is nothing indicating it started its life as a triploid. In your case it started life as a normal plant and became a triploid later on, backwards to the normal situation.

What could have triggered the triploidy is the change of sex of the plant, becasue that is what seems to have happend to me. The plant was a female, but ‘decided’ to become male. Hence the female preflowers, and after some time, the male clusters. This does happen from time to time, also with female seeds. (and from the results it looks like female seeds you got in stead of regular, we dont think this is the case but this is another thing) Changing of sex is in the genome of the plant, and with regular seeds you do not notice this. But this is a known fact of cannabis plants to respond to certain stimula to change its sex. It is impossible to get this out of female seeds, and this is totally different from hermies. The only way to recognize this is when you see preflowers of a certain sex, and then when real flowering starts ( or already before as in your case) it is all of a sudden the opposite sex.

Real hermies have flowers of both sexes at the same time. Buds which carry female and male flowers intermixed, or one above the other. Sex change plants have only buds with either male or female flowers, and preflowers of the opposite sex.

I think this is what happend in your plant, and with the changing of its sex, there was also a trigger to grow triploidy. It would be interesting to see how it grows out.

Thomas will deal further with your case.

Simon

Hello Simon

Thank you for your reply, your reasoning seems to make sense but does that not usually only apply to feminised seeds rather than regulars?

I would have expected an occurrence like this from feminised seeds as I understand the process of feminising plants. Would it not be expected that something like this could not have happened where the F1 AK47 seeds were produced from stable parents rather than the feminised seeds being a grown out F1 AK47 plant that has been stressed or grown past harvest to create pollen or seeds?

This is what makes me think that my seeds were actually Feminised because of the fact that there was a Sex Change or Hermaphroditism with the fact that all 9 remaining plants were Female this seems like two reasons for me to believe that the seeds might have been a mix up.

I was just curious about your opinion on the harvest time of AK47 based on trichome development either being Clear, Cloudy Amber or combinations of each. I am reading an awful lot of differing opinions on when to harvest based on the trichomes but I was just wondering how you personally know when your AK47 has hit peak ripeness or at least the level of ripeness that you intend the plant to have based on the effect that you originally bred AK47 to produce.

I thought who better to ask than the person who created it

I greatly appreciate your communication, help and assistance and look forward to speaking to you again

Hi GreeenFingers,

Sorry for late reply. We have people sick and on holiday, and I’ve overlooked your first mail.

For my answers see below in your mail.

You mean triploidy? I have so far only seen it in plants grown from regular seeds, not in fem. plants. Although I have grown far more Regular seeds.
If you refer to hermies, then I have to say that they certainly occur in reg. plants, but one should expect a higher % in fem.plants, how much more depends on the way the fem. seeds were made.

Many unfertilized female plants will produce a few male flowers or a few bananas here and there after their peak of the flowering cycle. This tendency is part of how the sex expression of the cannabis plant works. I dont want to go into too much detail here, but I’m sure you know this is not as clear as in humans, which is almost 100% pure male or female. In cannabis its rather a gliding scale with on opposite ends the true male and females, because they do exist. Those plants have no tendency to grow flowers of the opposite sex no matter what you do to them. You could trie this out with (some) plants you have; let them flower on and on till death. Many will show some flower from the opposite sex, but some will die by themselves and will never show any banana or full male flower ( a banana is only a part of the male flower), also not under any type of stress.

It is those true male or female plants which we use for breeding. For reg, and also for fem seeds. Many seed companies do not do this but rather choose the easier plants to produce fem seeds with. But, as you’ll understand, when choosing the parent plants for your fem seeds, the easier the plants change sex, the lousier the fem seeds are.

But the really difficult plants to change sex, are for that reason rather difficult to work with. And so the question is; what kind of plants does one use to produce seeds, easy to-change-sex-plants (lousy fem seeds) or difficult ones which leads to good fem seeds. If you want to make life easy (and the fem seeds not so good) choose for the easy plants, and vice versa.

Fem.seeds should not be produced from the female plants which will produce male flowers or bananas after either stress, or when they are permitted to flower way passed their normal life expectancy, period.

If you do use those ‘easy’ plants then you will produce inferior fem seeds, which will be unfair for the customer, and bad for the reputation of fem seeds. Well, this is going on off course.

A change of sex has no higher occurance in fem seeds, it might even be so that this happens more frequent in reg. seeds but it is a rather difficult thing to test out. As you may know the environment influences the sexual expression of Cannbis plants. For example high temps during germing of seeds leads to a higher rate of male plants. People who give their germing seeds temps of 30 Celsius or higher know this from experience. They think the seeds were bad but it was their own doing.

What is going on here? This means that the same plant ‘decides’ to become male under certain circumstances. (Even some animals have the same trick, the temp of hatching eggs decide which sex the young crocodiles will have.)

Temp is one factor but there are more factors which influence sex and we do not know all of them. If in reg seeds a plant changes its sex, who will recognize this? If in fem seeds a plant (which should be female, right) turns into male it doesn’t go by unnoticed. As usual the seeds are blamed, but it rather is the environment. Which factor(s) exactly can be held responsible is unclear. But when growing fem. seeds, certainly if there are many together in 1 room, you better keep an eye open for these unwanted flip overs.

This changing of sex is strongly embedded in the cannabis genome and cannot be taken out. May be with genetic enginering we will, but I don’t think oldfashioned breeding can do this. So we have to deal with keeping an eye open.

Can we recognize these sex flip-overs? Certainly we can; those plants usually start with showing female preflowers. Then, after the onset of the flowering cycle you can see a full blown male all of a sudden. What is that a Hermie?? No, a hermie has male and female flowers in the same buds. This is a plant which was determined to be female but decided to become male in stead, hence the female preflowers.

The perfect harvest point cannot be pinned down to a certain day, plants are living objects and they develope differently for each individual, therefore you should always check the trichomes before harvesting.
After 53 days you should check one top bud of your plants with a handheld microscope (available in every growshop). You look at the trichomes (=cristals), they look like a mini mushroom, with a gland (=stem) and a head (=round ball on top of stem). You have to take a closer look at the heads of the trichomes.
When they develope they are clear and transparant, as soon as the plant starts to ripen the heads will turn milky, they get a white colour inside the heads and when the plant is ripe the heads turn amber (=yelowish colour).
The perfect moment to harvest is when appr. 1/3 of the heads of the trichomes are amber.
You look at one top bud and when in the area you are looking at has about 1/3 of the amber heads, you should harvest.

Simon.

HI, GreeenFingers!

I am sorry, but i was sick last week, because of my hernia acting up. My back hurt so bad I couldn’t walk anymore...oooouchh......

Simon was writing a very extensive e-mail to answer your questions, but he never sent it, i just mailed it to you.

I also have mailed with the other 420-forum member today, the other member who had a similar problem.

We are now in the middle of a thorough investigation about this issue and we will try to find out if the seeds you received have been switched (could also be a shop-employee who wants to grow some decent genetics and exchanged them for some bag-seeds he had...very unlikely,but possible etc.).

Since all of this is a mystery to us and none of this was your fault, we
want to make sure you have a positive experience with our original genetics.

We from Serious Seeds strive to make all our customers seriously happy.

We therefore will send you a replacement pack of AK-47 regular to the
following address:

*********************

Please confirm to me that this address is correct and I will advise our
shipping department to send out your replacement.

Aloha, Thomas.
(Marketing-Manager Serious Seeds)

 

[GreeenFingers]

UPDATE:

DAY 59 OF FLOWER ( 0 - 4 DAYS REMAINING )

Hello everybody

The girls have been doing great and packing on more and more resin every day

If going by the breeders recommended flowering times I would have 4 more days of flowering remaining but I still think that they all might be able to go up to another week or so but I will keep checking the Trichomes every day until the tops have about 30% amber meaning that the slightly lower buds and the Trichomes on the interior of the buds should be almost fully cloudy which is what I am looking for, If I harvest when the tops are fully cloudy it would mean that a much larger proportion of the harvest would not have hit peak maturation. At the moment I would say there is an average of about 20% Cloudy 5% Amber and 75% Clear so there is still some waiting to do

The colas of Ms. Sativa have become so encrusted in resin that they actually look completely white rather than green.

The colas of Ms. Purple are showing way more signs of purpling on some of the smaller leaves and on most of the calyxes.

The Colas of Ms. Tropical have suddenly gone into quite a large bloom of new white pistil development which I just think might be showing signs of the final swell, she actually has a higher % of cloudy Trichomes than the other girls, they really are very different Phenotypes ha ha

They are all still being fed with only plain PH'd to 6.5 water and now a lot of the larger fan leaves are beginning to yellow and fall off along with a slight yellowing among the smaller leaves, it is happening quite quickly with Ms. Sativa and Ms. Tropical but Ms. Purple does not seem to want to yellow as easily and a lot of her green fan leaves remain but are beginning to yellow.

The very final stages have begun, Harvest could be any day now

I threw away all of my clones, aside from the 3 Sisters growing now and decided to keep one extra which looked to be showing more indica leaves than any of the girls so far. She has been appropriately named Ms. Indica. These were all Re-potted to continue their lives as Mothers. The very small Veg box now comfortably fits these 4 mothers rather than the 10 clones that I did have ha ha

So It is decided for the next grow that it will be a SOG method with 8 to 10 X 5 Litre pots consisting of:​

Ms. Sativa, Ms. Purple, Ms. Tropical, and Ms. Indica,​

That's about all the new news that I can think of for now, I'm just patiently waiting with my eyes glued to the plants ha ha Here are some pictures showing the development since the last update

Enjoy

Below: Tops.

Below: Macro shots.

I hope you all enjoyed this update, Please feel free to join in and comment

 

[Grand Daddy Purp]

Very nice bro!

 

[KingJaffyJoe]

Gorgeous plants GF thank the man upstairs you didn't kill Ms.Tropical hahaha ...my Lights just came in today almost ready to set up Can't Wait!

 

[donpaul.p]

damn mate, thems some very nice buds, im trying to get some purple buds myself, i have got a bluematic which clearly shows blue or purple buds on the packet, yet i am getting no purple at all, i have taken the plant out of the grow room at night and placed it near an open window so it lowers the temp which should give me some purple buds, yet nothing is happening and the plant has nearly finished flower, im not sure where im going wrong or what i can do to bring out the purpe, ill keep trying and see what happens, ive heard that its in the genes of the plant or it can be induced by lowering the night time temp, ive also seen plants that turn purple and have purple leaves when they are flowering out doors and later in the growing season, but i wondered if you have some idea of how to bring out the purple in plants,

 

[GreeenFingers]

Gorgeous plants GF thank the man upstairs you didn't kill Ms.Tropical hahaha ...my Lights just came in today almost ready to set up Can't Wait!

Thanks KingJaffyJoe

I am so happy that I kept her as her smell really is phenomenal in comparison to the others, she should make a great mother ha ha

Hope to see a journal from you as soon as you get everything all set up

What strain are you planning on growing ?