PROJECT 23: HYDROPONIC HOMEMADE HYBRIDS - AMNESIA HAZE X BLUE DREAM Plus WIDOW X BLUE DREAM
By Hyena Merica
CHAPTER 1
WELCOME TO MY WORLD
Hello everybody, my name is Hyena Merica and yes, I am. Let's have some fun together and grow some great cannabis!
If you have read my first journal (Project 21: Dream Grow - A Complete Guide to Hydroponic Growing) then you already know I'm a decent hobby grower and mad scientist, creating beautiful monsters using a fully hydroponic setup in a secret attic laboratory. (Maniacal laughter) I wrote the first journal to give anyone the knowledge and advice they need to grow perfect cannabis, every time, from seed to smoke. If you think that's an ambitious claim you haven't seen my journal. It is a 120-page mini-novel with almost 200 photos...before you spend money on a How-To program, read Project 21. All you need to learn is there for free. You're welcome.
That was a lot of work. This time I will dial back the instructions and keep it more to real-time reporting, sort of a play-by-play reality show about growing killer buds. My attic botanical chamber is hidden and even my wife doesn't know anything about it, remarkable since I have produced nearly four pounds of primo bud over the last 8 months right over her head. I have so much weed in half-gallon Ball jars I could open a small dispensary but like other connoisseurs, I love having a sophisticated stash of years' worth of fine buds...a "bud cellar" if you will. A lifetime dream achieved. Seven different varieties and all completely killer. I get high a lot.
Now for my resume:
This is what I have been able to achieve with my techniques. There are admittedly many different ways to grow top-shelf cannabis and I always believe we can learn more from every project but when you find a way you can achieve these magical results I believe you are wise to simply repeat it.
Sooooo, what next? Well, I'm glad you asked! Perhaps the best outcome of Project 21 was the creation (accidentally but who cares?) of about 150 or so fresh seeds of at least 3 new hybrids! A tiny "banana" must have appeared deep within one giant cola on one of the Blue Dream plants. I never found the tiny pollen emitter but the resulting seeds didn't hurt the overall yield one bit and we ended up with some sweet hybrid beans to try. Let's try them!
First, a brief description of my lab. It is a secret chamber with floor space of about 9 x 12 feet, with a sloping ceiling that's plenty high where it needs to be. The space is partitioned into a nursery where we can hatch and raise seedlings up to 2 feet if necessary, and a main grow room, built around a nifty 9-pot fully automated hydroponic system. The system uses Dutch buckets just under 3 gallons each, which are awesome for growing cannabis because they have a little siphon drain so they can't overflow, and they hold about 3 inches of nutrient solution in the bottom between waterings so if there's a power failure the plant will have up to several days' worth of juice still available. These are important points because my grow lab is stealth and I can't go up there very often plus a water leak or spill would be a catastrophic giveaway resulting in my doom. That's bad.
My lighting is basically 1,000 watts of HID (a 400 and a 600 in air-cooled hoods with the big carbon filter and bigger can fan) and I augment the grow in the blooming phase with a few Mars Hydro 300's which are the original inexpensive ones. They are great lights for plumping up the edge areas and expanding the width of the canopy but they aren't penetrating enough to be a main light no matter how many you have. A 400 watt Metal Halide will go much deeper than a 400 watt LED and is worth the extra heat within reason. Best way is to use both together. Dat what I do.
For a detailed (WAY detailed) description of my entire setup down to the smallest nail, read PROJECT 21. This time around we'll spend our time mostly on the plants.
Having nearly 200 freshly home-grown hybrid seeds, all feminized, is a luxury I never thought I would experience so soon after beginning my endeavors. The happy accident of just the right bit of cross-pollination gave me three new crosses all guaranteed to be female. The monetary value of that alone is significant. I don't buy many seeds but when I do I pay about ten bucks apiece on average. Plus it's a major pain having to have something quasi-legal mailed to another address then get it on some pretense without that person knowing what's up. It is incredibly exciting to think my home-grown crosses could be even more killer than their mothers. It's time to find out!
My nursery hydro bubblers use 4 inch net pots and two 300w LEDs
The primary crop will be Amnesia Haze x Blue Dream. This Haze strain came from Ripper seeds and it produced several fat plants laden with super-sticky, fabulously stony buds, about a half pound. The colas were gigantic and the smooth taste of the fragrant smoke is amazing. It gets you very high. I started a half-dozen or so of the seeds and they all popped fast. They look very healthy and are growing well after about a week.
Probably half of my feminized hybrid seeds are Blue Dream x Blue Dream, meaning the plant basically grew a testicle and mated with itself. I will experiment with this mainly at some future point because I have a suspicion that the genetics of this batch might produce less-than-desirable plants, having been the result of self-fertilization. This act produces unpredictable havoc in the DNA sequence since plant life (and all life, really) needs input from 2 different, unrelated individuals to reliably reproduce. I test-fired a small number of these beans and examination of the seedlings after a week confirmed my hunch...two were dwarfs, two sprouted and showed a cotyledon but never developed leaves or a root system, and only one seems normal. It is possible only the seeds that came from the exact same Blue Dream plant that produced the pollen are bad, and there were several other Blue Dream plants which means some seeds would have two different parents, sort of, but not involving two different strains. We will see what the one decent-looking seedling grows up to be. She comes from a same-sex marriage and I fear she might turn out to be somewhat confused. I will name her Bruce Jenner .
Finally, I had a couple "bonus" plants in my last grow that were identified as White Widow Mix but the seedbank neglected to identify the daddy. A common societal problem but uber-annoying when you are trying to breed a plant. At any rate, the Widow Mix buds were an eleven so when that plant was fertilized by the Blue Dream we made a potentially great cross. I put only two seeds in water since I have already planned for all but two of my containers and have living seedlings to put in them. Because of the space limitations inherent with stealth growing, sprouting too many seedlings is a waste of valuable beans, yet you don't want to end up with too many open grow pots if the needed number of seedlings is not achieved. Starting another group of sprouts at that point would put the second group ten days behind, a gap that would necessitate either too much veg time for one group or not enough for the other. The fact is, you need a little luck at the very beginning to get the right number of babies without wasting valuable seeds.
One word of advice: use feminized seeds! If my seeds were not guaranteed to be 100% female it would be impossible to plan the grow with any certainty. Nothing would be worse than raising a crop more than half way to harvest then finding out you have to kill half your plants...or maybe even more. No parent should ever face that choice. Feminized cannabis seeds are perhaps the greatest scientific achievement since Penicillin. Just use them.
The need to begin this grow by a certain date made it impossible to put off sprouting the seeds despite the fact that it is August and we are in a stretch of 90+-degree days. Because my lab is in an attic the heat is tremendous in summer...spiking to 100+ for much of the 24-hour cycle. I do not have an AC unit for the room because it would be a major tell, so I time my grows to end before the peak heat of summer then wait until now to start the next one and control the heat to the extent I can using major fans.
I have budded out a grow where the last six weeks of flowering took place in over 100 degrees for most of the day and night and the buds were less dense but still decent. The key to that is lots of direct air circulation and a big can fan that sucks air out of the room through a carbon filter then through the lights and out through the roof. In this manner the effective heat at the canopy level may measure 100 but to the plants it feels it more like 90 and they can make it. However, it still was not quite the quantity nor quality of a more temperature-friendly fall or spring bud-out so we avoid that now.
Sprouting is another matter. Even near-100 won't hurt them with the right fans. Despite the blistering temps I was able to get the girls successfully underway. So, in the end I got seven viable plants (well, eight if you count that one plug has two seedlings) plus I kept one of the plants from the last grow alive and will be attempting to re-veg it. Therefore I will have a dreaded open pot but in the grand scheme of things that's no problem. We will easily fill all our growing space with trained and topped branches and produce a hedge of honeylicious colas. I could probably get the same production from six pots or nine because there is only so much space and either way we can fill it. My technique is to top the plants to get six or eight branches total on each and then SCROG them to fill the entire area, weaving them carefully all through the string net until we have a budding branch in every square. Achieving maximum production from a limited space is both an art and a science. It requires knowledge, sound techniques and patience combined with a little motherly love. The end result will be several pounds of primo buddage and a very merry Christmas.
So at this point, twenty short days since we dropped the beans with a tiny splash, we have beautiful young girls ready to go into the grow room any time now. We will end this chapter here.
"Do not give up; the beginning is always the hardest." —Chinese Fortune Cookie
Until next time, my friends.
By Hyena Merica
CHAPTER 1
WELCOME TO MY WORLD
Hello everybody, my name is Hyena Merica and yes, I am. Let's have some fun together and grow some great cannabis!
If you have read my first journal (Project 21: Dream Grow - A Complete Guide to Hydroponic Growing) then you already know I'm a decent hobby grower and mad scientist, creating beautiful monsters using a fully hydroponic setup in a secret attic laboratory. (Maniacal laughter) I wrote the first journal to give anyone the knowledge and advice they need to grow perfect cannabis, every time, from seed to smoke. If you think that's an ambitious claim you haven't seen my journal. It is a 120-page mini-novel with almost 200 photos...before you spend money on a How-To program, read Project 21. All you need to learn is there for free. You're welcome.
That was a lot of work. This time I will dial back the instructions and keep it more to real-time reporting, sort of a play-by-play reality show about growing killer buds. My attic botanical chamber is hidden and even my wife doesn't know anything about it, remarkable since I have produced nearly four pounds of primo bud over the last 8 months right over her head. I have so much weed in half-gallon Ball jars I could open a small dispensary but like other connoisseurs, I love having a sophisticated stash of years' worth of fine buds...a "bud cellar" if you will. A lifetime dream achieved. Seven different varieties and all completely killer. I get high a lot.
Now for my resume:
This is what I have been able to achieve with my techniques. There are admittedly many different ways to grow top-shelf cannabis and I always believe we can learn more from every project but when you find a way you can achieve these magical results I believe you are wise to simply repeat it.
Sooooo, what next? Well, I'm glad you asked! Perhaps the best outcome of Project 21 was the creation (accidentally but who cares?) of about 150 or so fresh seeds of at least 3 new hybrids! A tiny "banana" must have appeared deep within one giant cola on one of the Blue Dream plants. I never found the tiny pollen emitter but the resulting seeds didn't hurt the overall yield one bit and we ended up with some sweet hybrid beans to try. Let's try them!
First, a brief description of my lab. It is a secret chamber with floor space of about 9 x 12 feet, with a sloping ceiling that's plenty high where it needs to be. The space is partitioned into a nursery where we can hatch and raise seedlings up to 2 feet if necessary, and a main grow room, built around a nifty 9-pot fully automated hydroponic system. The system uses Dutch buckets just under 3 gallons each, which are awesome for growing cannabis because they have a little siphon drain so they can't overflow, and they hold about 3 inches of nutrient solution in the bottom between waterings so if there's a power failure the plant will have up to several days' worth of juice still available. These are important points because my grow lab is stealth and I can't go up there very often plus a water leak or spill would be a catastrophic giveaway resulting in my doom. That's bad.
My lighting is basically 1,000 watts of HID (a 400 and a 600 in air-cooled hoods with the big carbon filter and bigger can fan) and I augment the grow in the blooming phase with a few Mars Hydro 300's which are the original inexpensive ones. They are great lights for plumping up the edge areas and expanding the width of the canopy but they aren't penetrating enough to be a main light no matter how many you have. A 400 watt Metal Halide will go much deeper than a 400 watt LED and is worth the extra heat within reason. Best way is to use both together. Dat what I do.
For a detailed (WAY detailed) description of my entire setup down to the smallest nail, read PROJECT 21. This time around we'll spend our time mostly on the plants.
Having nearly 200 freshly home-grown hybrid seeds, all feminized, is a luxury I never thought I would experience so soon after beginning my endeavors. The happy accident of just the right bit of cross-pollination gave me three new crosses all guaranteed to be female. The monetary value of that alone is significant. I don't buy many seeds but when I do I pay about ten bucks apiece on average. Plus it's a major pain having to have something quasi-legal mailed to another address then get it on some pretense without that person knowing what's up. It is incredibly exciting to think my home-grown crosses could be even more killer than their mothers. It's time to find out!
My nursery hydro bubblers use 4 inch net pots and two 300w LEDs
The primary crop will be Amnesia Haze x Blue Dream. This Haze strain came from Ripper seeds and it produced several fat plants laden with super-sticky, fabulously stony buds, about a half pound. The colas were gigantic and the smooth taste of the fragrant smoke is amazing. It gets you very high. I started a half-dozen or so of the seeds and they all popped fast. They look very healthy and are growing well after about a week.
Probably half of my feminized hybrid seeds are Blue Dream x Blue Dream, meaning the plant basically grew a testicle and mated with itself. I will experiment with this mainly at some future point because I have a suspicion that the genetics of this batch might produce less-than-desirable plants, having been the result of self-fertilization. This act produces unpredictable havoc in the DNA sequence since plant life (and all life, really) needs input from 2 different, unrelated individuals to reliably reproduce. I test-fired a small number of these beans and examination of the seedlings after a week confirmed my hunch...two were dwarfs, two sprouted and showed a cotyledon but never developed leaves or a root system, and only one seems normal. It is possible only the seeds that came from the exact same Blue Dream plant that produced the pollen are bad, and there were several other Blue Dream plants which means some seeds would have two different parents, sort of, but not involving two different strains. We will see what the one decent-looking seedling grows up to be. She comes from a same-sex marriage and I fear she might turn out to be somewhat confused. I will name her Bruce Jenner .
Finally, I had a couple "bonus" plants in my last grow that were identified as White Widow Mix but the seedbank neglected to identify the daddy. A common societal problem but uber-annoying when you are trying to breed a plant. At any rate, the Widow Mix buds were an eleven so when that plant was fertilized by the Blue Dream we made a potentially great cross. I put only two seeds in water since I have already planned for all but two of my containers and have living seedlings to put in them. Because of the space limitations inherent with stealth growing, sprouting too many seedlings is a waste of valuable beans, yet you don't want to end up with too many open grow pots if the needed number of seedlings is not achieved. Starting another group of sprouts at that point would put the second group ten days behind, a gap that would necessitate either too much veg time for one group or not enough for the other. The fact is, you need a little luck at the very beginning to get the right number of babies without wasting valuable seeds.
One word of advice: use feminized seeds! If my seeds were not guaranteed to be 100% female it would be impossible to plan the grow with any certainty. Nothing would be worse than raising a crop more than half way to harvest then finding out you have to kill half your plants...or maybe even more. No parent should ever face that choice. Feminized cannabis seeds are perhaps the greatest scientific achievement since Penicillin. Just use them.
The need to begin this grow by a certain date made it impossible to put off sprouting the seeds despite the fact that it is August and we are in a stretch of 90+-degree days. Because my lab is in an attic the heat is tremendous in summer...spiking to 100+ for much of the 24-hour cycle. I do not have an AC unit for the room because it would be a major tell, so I time my grows to end before the peak heat of summer then wait until now to start the next one and control the heat to the extent I can using major fans.
I have budded out a grow where the last six weeks of flowering took place in over 100 degrees for most of the day and night and the buds were less dense but still decent. The key to that is lots of direct air circulation and a big can fan that sucks air out of the room through a carbon filter then through the lights and out through the roof. In this manner the effective heat at the canopy level may measure 100 but to the plants it feels it more like 90 and they can make it. However, it still was not quite the quantity nor quality of a more temperature-friendly fall or spring bud-out so we avoid that now.
Sprouting is another matter. Even near-100 won't hurt them with the right fans. Despite the blistering temps I was able to get the girls successfully underway. So, in the end I got seven viable plants (well, eight if you count that one plug has two seedlings) plus I kept one of the plants from the last grow alive and will be attempting to re-veg it. Therefore I will have a dreaded open pot but in the grand scheme of things that's no problem. We will easily fill all our growing space with trained and topped branches and produce a hedge of honeylicious colas. I could probably get the same production from six pots or nine because there is only so much space and either way we can fill it. My technique is to top the plants to get six or eight branches total on each and then SCROG them to fill the entire area, weaving them carefully all through the string net until we have a budding branch in every square. Achieving maximum production from a limited space is both an art and a science. It requires knowledge, sound techniques and patience combined with a little motherly love. The end result will be several pounds of primo buddage and a very merry Christmas.
So at this point, twenty short days since we dropped the beans with a tiny splash, we have beautiful young girls ready to go into the grow room any time now. We will end this chapter here.
"Do not give up; the beginning is always the hardest." —Chinese Fortune Cookie
Until next time, my friends.