Hyena's Never-Ending Adventures In Growing

It's a new year, so here's a whopping

HYENA'S GROW HOUSE harvest and smoke report!

Sunday night I went up to the GH to harvest. This is what I faced:


At first look I wondered if I let it go too long...both parents of the plants in this room finished nicely in 8 weeks. These had now been flowering for ten weeks and a couple days. So I sampled some bud tips and looked under the microscope...mostly a little cloudy, just a tiny few ambers (I could only find a couple) so I knew everything was ripe and ready. I also know the strain in all its forms takes ten weeks. I don't know exactly how two 7-8 week parents produce 12 phenos that take 20% longer but...let's see if it is worth the extra time.

Friends, it was. :ganjamon: :yahoo:

But the last 5 days were a long slog in many ways. So before I tell you what I went through, here's some final portraits of some of the best buds I've ever produced!






Okay, I could go on and on but you get it, it's a whopping crop of amazing, stinky, sticky chunkers!

After donning my chop clothing and smoking a fatty of this crack on a stick, I sat down with a vengeance. My single pair of two-inch bonsai shears began to fly. The pile from each plant was daunting...


Each one typically takes between 2 1/2 and 3 hours...but this grow was different. The first one took 4 hours, and I'm not slow! In fact, I'm faster than two Chinese women added together but the amount from the first plant was pretty huge. No sweat, I came here to work and work I did, 12 straight hours day one and two, which knocked out exactly half the plants. I checked my pace by the amount of finished product and all but one produced three full hangers of trimmed produce plus a couple more ounces of smaller trimmed buds, and a couple produced four full hangers!

The buds just kept stacking up, higher and higher...


Day three I started at 5 am. I got through 4 plants for a new personal record! Plant after plant, while there were some differences, mostly was just a study in perfection. Thick, tight colas, many the size of a baked potato...a supremely perfect crop with not a sign of bud rot anywhere, nor a single seed, I mean nothing...this is truly the best crop I've ever grown. I have a huge difficult problem to choose the final form of this strain from so many worthy phenotypes but I know this, the final one (or two...?) will be AMAZING!

I got to the biggest and best of all on the last two days...plants 10 and 11 were almost beyond belief!

One cola...


That's a regular size Bic lighter for scale. :love::love::love::oops:

These two plants produced an insane amount. They are definitely two of the three finalists! Here was plant 11:


So after almost 4 full days of mind-numbing effort, it was all cut and hung:


The frostiness of these potatoes is beyond my wildest dreams. I dropped one and it hurt my foot. :yahoo:


And by the way, I got six pounds more of pebble buds and frosty finish trim...!


This will make one pound of hash. Just a little bonus. The finished bud haul will be over 5 pounds. So, I'm pretty happy with the first crop of SATURN 5. It has certainly shown it has its parents hugeness and super-frosty qualities. Insane production and wonderful buzz...an absolute hammer stone from every sample I have tried. And in comparing the samples from 8, 9, and 10 weeks, the final week+ of flowering REALLY kicked the stone up another notch...I was actually uncomfortably high several times from a small half-joint. I mean high-school high...you know what I mean. Destroyed. Heading for Taco Bell and then the couch. I shouldn't be driving kind of high.

I am so happy!

But my elation was short-lived...

THIS is a bitch:


Hours of bust-ass, sweaty work to clean and recondition this room. Then the equally tedious chore of planting the clones! The clones are all fine, they have gone 4 weeks in the cloner now.


And well, they have some roots...


Even the clone of #10 looks badass. These babies all went into their new homes like champs.


Only five of the original 12 phenos are left in this group, but we are whttling it down...to the winner! After everything was finally done and the new babies were all tucked snug in their beds, I let it all work overnight and run a few fill/drain cycles to make sure everyone was okay and there were no leaks or such. All seems in order and the clones looked quite happy.

And I haven't even mentioned that the hedge in Tent #2 was just flipped on Monday, and I am afraid I may have waited a bit too long...!


Is it even possible to imagine this run could be even bigger? WE SHALL SEE!

So that's all for now, I got home after 5 grueling but massively rewarding days of good old hard work. I'm a little surprised my poor old fingers can still type all this but you know me, I'm tough, baby. Time for a nice night out with my wifey and she'll probably be all over me when we get home...so the chores just never end, eh? :hmmmm::laughtwo:

Besides, This shit is dangerous work...


A man could get hurt!

Peace, Hyena
 
Highya HM,

Love the presentation! Reads like a playboy profile!! Pictures, and narrative. Anyways, I know you've harvested a crop many times. I'd never get through it; at least, like you do! Sounds like you had a super crop. Glad for you! Happy Smokin'
 
You made it out alive! can It get any better?

My ass absolutely DRAGGED out of there...I am once again looking into mechanical trimming options.

Highya HM,

Love the presentation! Reads like a playboy profile!! Pictures, and narrative. Anyways, I know you've harvested a crop many times. I'd never get through it; at least, like you do! Sounds like you had a super crop. Glad for you! Happy Smokin'

Thanks my friend, the last time my hand was this sore involved a copy of Playboy. :laughtwo:

Absolutely stellar! Both the reading, photos and crop!

Appreciate that bro...the whole 5-day experience is like going to jail, with the punishment being trimming down 12 big plants. And I'm too cheap to just hire someone to do it! Stay tuned!

Thanks you all for reading...hope your new year is a great, fun adventure with lots of GREEN!

Peace, Hyena
 
How about a small hump day

HYENA'S GROW HOUSE update!

The successful launch of SATURN 5 has me all happy...I tripped back up to the GH Monday to finish bucking my harvest.

The piles of frosty chunkers just seemed like they would never end...


All told, there were four pounds of buds after my multi-stage process of finishing everything down to perfect nugs. I will take that every time. I could have got 5 pounds but it would have had a slightly fluffier character and that ultra-trim is amazing for hash so nowadays I really make everything tidy. The stickiness and frost is over the top. The aroma is insane. SATURN 5 is a worthy strain indeed!

Now the real test begins, as I still have 5 phenos from which to choose the final form this strain will take. An amazing, once-in-almost-a-lifetime task. This will require much thought, evaluation, and smoking of weed. Let's do it!

Pheno #1is a uniquely leafy plant, but it's also very bulky and a great producer. I got a little over 7 ounces from her, all insanely good. The taste is amazing and the buzz is narcotic. I love everything about it except the incredible leafiness. It's just too much to try to hand trim wet and I've never seen such a structure. I dried it and sent it through my processes and I'm extremely happy with the buds, they are gigantic and unbelievably frosty. Just super leafy, I kind of like leafier buds because I dig the slightly-greener flavor just fine, and buds with leaves that are tight are usually ultra-frosty and this is no exception.



The other major player is Pheno #10. This baby was a lighter green than the typical plant in this garden, with a foxtail characteristic on her awesomely huge and long colas. From the start she stood tall, and the gigantic buds were all they appeared and more. This plant also yielded over 7 frosty ounces of mega colas, but was WAY easier to trim up! That's a huge thing in one respect, since the bag appeal of mostly leafless nugs is undeniable. BUT, because of the leafier nature of the buds Plant #1 needed a LOT less effort since it was impossible to hand trim. If I ran #10 I would have great production but the full trim job too.



It's a fabulous problem to have to decide between these two unique and deadly phenos of a brand-new strain. Maybe I will just run both...they are so different they are seriously two different organisms altogether even though they are sisters from the same 3 plants. The fact that 3 plants had seeds originally leads me to speculate that I might actually have two different strains here. One is a cross between one Incredible Bulk plant and a Delhi Friend. The other is a cross between that same Delhi but a DIFFERENT Incredible Bulk, so obviously different traits emerged from the handful of genetic cookies in the cookie jar! So even though there are only two strains represented, very different sets of characteristics are present. I might end up keeping both and just re-naming one as a completely different strain. Technically it could be viewed that way!

And what about Pheno #11?


Also in the running...just a stellar plant!!
I will conduct many smoke tests to find out which I prefer, or maybe it will end up being both. Fun work! :ganjamon:

Meanwhile, I flipped Tent #1 a week ago and it's already scaring me...


This crop has a bit different growth patterns than the last, probably because the size and number of nodes of the clones varied.


But they're all doing fine! I'm learning to take bigger clones, this reboot in Tent #1 looks better sooner than the previous one did...


Everyone took to their new (and final) home so nicely.


Grow my girls, grow. Three are #1, Three are #10, then the others are 2 each of #4, #9, and #11, also all three very good specimens. Might keep one of those too...or all 3...oh gosh it's hard to decide to leave someone behind forever!

Now the next 7 weeks or so will be more routine, just a weekly visit for some leaf plucking and some watering. But I have 3 or 4 weeks to decide who will continue and who will become extinct. I will conduct much research...


That's funny cause it's so true. SO true!

Peace, Hyena
 
Highya HM,

Lovely pictures as always. Your talent seems to grow with time as do your ladies!! Gorgeous colas!! Management decisions are fun when you have to choose which are best all around specimens! You have no bad choices!! Only you can make that choice. Happy Smokin'
 
Thanks for the calendar my furry friend! I’m surprised there is no Holiday mentioned for April 20th...it’s the most special time of the year...as Someone here once said “Stay Stoneder”
 
Happy Sunday!

Here's a supplemental HYENA'S GROW HOUSE smoke report update!

I have been sampling SATURN 5 Pheno #1, and also Phenos #10 and #11, trying to decide which will become the new strain.

This is a real dilemma. :hmmmm: :nervous-guy:

Pheno#10 is the choice I believe. It produced the most, and overall best, colas. It grows a little taller and the branches are full a good ways down, the secondary buds are also strong. Lots of third-tier buds as well and they were nuggy which makes them also bagworthy. Relatively easy to trim, not super leafy. Awesome taste and smell, a sweet skunky fragrance that's just wonderful, and a stellar hammer stone. It's perfect weed.

Pheno #10:


It has a foxtail characteristic but it didn't translate into a lot of wasted prime buddage in the trim stage (like most foxtailing buds do), rather, the foxtailed heads I left kind of natural and the dried cola is lip-smacking, the foxy protrusions are totally frosty and you just want to snip them off one at a time for amazing bong hits. :bongrip:

This plant produced over ten ounces of prime. The bag appeal is off the charts. I can't lose if I go with this one, at least after one plant it seems that way. However, we'll be harvesting at least four more over the next two crops so we'll see how much variance the finished product has in successive grows. Seems of course like it should be identical since it's the same plant, but the second "number ten" in Tent #2 seems to be one of the smaller ones...weird. Probably a lot more to do with the size and structure of the clone I took so we'll see what's up with that as it buds out...but the hunt ain't over yet...

Because there is also Pheno #1.

Pheno #1 is shaggy, I can't describe it any other way...but COOL shaggy. The gigantic colas have this neat coat of beautiful half-leaves, all as frosty as the underlying bud, so if you're like me (and you don't mind somewhat shaggy buds if they're totally frosty) this pheno will have appeal.

Some prize colas of Pheno #1:


ALL the nugs look really good dried, which is cool because I simply couldn't hand trim these buds...just kind of evened them out with my scissors. But all are good and many are huge. And way frosty. I just really, really like this plant. It has two things I'm looking for on this pheno hunt: HUGE buds and AWESOME flavor and buzz. It smells more like a cheese variety, definitely some cheese in the lineage which has emerged nicely. The buzz is very strong, and the flavor is very delicious in my opinion, the slightly extra leafy component isn't really evident in the ground-down bud, it's a fabulous flavor-filled feast. It's quite different from #10 but both are the real deal and would easily hold their own as independent strains since their characteristics are so dissimilar.

The production from this plant was over 7 ounces so it's a very good producer, not quite a amazing as #10 but again, let's see what the average of four more of each looks like. After the next harvest in about 8 weeks from now we'll know a LOT more about both of these. The advantages of this bud structure include a LOT less hand trimming time, and that means something at this point in my evolution. I may opt for expansion and I can't see adding six MORE weeks of mind-numbing torture. So, I hope to move to a mechanical option if one proves worthy. I am in discussions with other wizards currently to find that path.

So you probably can tell I smoked some of this stuff before I barfed out all this prose in one unbroken stoned stream of semiconsciousness. This shit is very good. Mission accomplished I guess...I feel like important ideas come to me in this state of contemplation, not unlike other great thinkers of our age...


That makes sense. To me. :ganjamon:

Peace, Hyena
 
Happy Sunday!

Here's a supplemental HYENA'S GROW HOUSE smoke report update!

I have been sampling SATURN 5 Pheno #1, and also Phenos #10 and #11, trying to decide which will become the new strain.

This is a real dilemma. :hmmmm: :nervous-guy:

Pheno#10 is the choice I believe. It produced the most, and overall best, colas. It grows a little taller and the branches are full a good ways down, the secondary buds are also strong. Lots of third-tier buds as well and they were nuggy which makes them also bagworthy. Relatively easy to trim, not super leafy. Awesome taste and smell, a sweet skunky fragrance that's just wonderful, and a stellar hammer stone. It's perfect weed.

Pheno #10:


It has a foxtail characteristic but it didn't translate into a lot of wasted prime buddage in the trim stage (like most foxtailing buds do), rather, the foxtailed heads I left kind of natural and the dried cola is lip-smacking, the foxy protrusions are totally frosty and you just want to snip them off one at a time for amazing bong hits. :bongrip:

This plant produced over ten ounces of prime. The bag appeal is off the charts. I can't lose if I go with this one, at least after one plant it seems that way. However, we'll be harvesting at least four more over the next two crops so we'll see how much variance the finished product has in successive grows. Seems of course like it should be identical since it's the same plant, but the second "number ten" in Tent #2 seems to be one of the smaller ones...weird. Probably a lot more to do with the size and structure of the clone I took so we'll see what's up with that as it buds out...but the hunt ain't over yet...

Because there is also Pheno #1.

Pheno #1 is shaggy, I can't describe it any other way...but COOL shaggy. The gigantic colas have this neat coat of beautiful half-leaves, all as frosty as the underlying bud, so if you're like me (and you don't mind somewhat shaggy buds if they're totally frosty) this pheno will have appeal.

Some prize colas of Pheno #1:


ALL the nugs look really good dried, which is cool because I simply couldn't hand trim these buds...just kind of evened them out with my scissors. But all are good and many are huge. And way frosty. I just really, really like this plant. It has two things I'm looking for on this pheno hunt: HUGE buds and AWESOME flavor and buzz. It smells more like a cheese variety, definitely some cheese in the lineage which has emerged nicely. The buzz is very strong, and the flavor is very delicious in my opinion, the slightly extra leafy component isn't really evident in the ground-down bud, it's a fabulous flavor-filled feast. It's quite different from #10 but both are the real deal and would easily hold their own as independent strains since their characteristics are so dissimilar.

The production from this plant was over 7 ounces so it's a very good producer, not quite a amazing as #10 but again, let's see what the average of four more of each looks like. After the next harvest in about 8 weeks from now we'll know a LOT more about both of these. The advantages of this bud structure include a LOT less hand trimming time, and that means something at this point in my evolution. I may opt for expansion and I can't see adding six MORE weeks of mind-numbing torture. So, I hope to move to a mechanical option if one proves worthy. I am in discussions with other wizards currently to find that path.

So you probably can tell I smoked some of this stuff before I barfed out all this prose in one unbroken stoned stream of semiconsciousness. This shit is very good. Mission accomplished I guess...I feel like important ideas come to me in this state of contemplation, not unlike other great thinkers of our age...


That makes sense. To me. :ganjamon:

Peace, Hyena
Looking great HM, Pheno #1 sounds great to me; I agree as long as it's frosty it all burns nicely!

7 ounces of that kinda primo just sounds...:drool::love:
 
I’m sitting in my kitchen doing a little planning, of course I have the Hyena Fantasy calendar open in front of me...looking at the frosty buds thinking how lucky you are, to get to sample all of those prime specimens in search of the Optimus Prime of Buds. The update appeared in a timely manner!
Very inspirational Hyena, I’m rolling up another one now!
 
Tuesday. Nothing special ever happens on Tuesday.

So why not a HYENA'S GROW HOUSE update?

Sadly, this one isn't all that great. After a huge harvest naturally there is always a bit of a letdown. Now for a couple months it is just waiting and watering and I even screwed that up because the clones look kind of raggedy...


Apparently I neglected to mind the drift and the PPM in the clone reservoir is 2200...yikes. Kind of burned them a little.


But no worries, I half-drained the res and added fresh water, got it down to 1600 which will be fine. But I hate to even nick my girls...
Fortunately, cannabis is the most resilient plant on Earth. :morenutes:They'll be fine.

THEN, dealing with tent #2. 3 weeks ago one of my lights lost part of a panel and went to well under 50%, though it is still working so I have left it as-is to see what happens. HLG was great and when I finally sent an email to the correct place they said they are sending me a new Quantum board to replace the bad one. But this makes 3 weeks so far with less light on one side of the tent and the plants on that side are now TOTALLY different!


The left side has developed HUGE leaves, obviously seeking out that elusive light that's brighter on the other side. The difference is amazing. Everything is flowering but we'll see how this affects the final yield. In addition, the overall room is too small. I let this go quite a while but these clones got super bushy and not tall at all. I fear this run won't produce like the last one because there's just not the height. Hoping for density that will even it all out in the end.

But stuff happens. It will all be fine in a couple weeks. But we FINALLY got some snow! So at least I finally got some snowmobiling in!

Ride on!

Peace, Hyena
 
How about a small hump day

HYENA'S GROW HOUSE update!

The successful launch of SATURN 5 has me all happy...I tripped back up to the GH Monday to finish bucking my harvest.

The piles of frosty chunkers just seemed like they would never end...


All told, there were four pounds of buds after my multi-stage process of finishing everything down to perfect nugs. I will take that every time. I could have got 5 pounds but it would have had a slightly fluffier character and that ultra-trim is amazing for hash so nowadays I really make everything tidy. The stickiness and frost is over the top. The aroma is insane. SATURN 5 is a worthy strain indeed!

Now the real test begins, as I still have 5 phenos from which to choose the final form this strain will take. An amazing, once-in-almost-a-lifetime task. This will require much thought, evaluation, and smoking of weed. Let's do it!

Pheno #1is a uniquely leafy plant, but it's also very bulky and a great producer. I got a little over 7 ounces from her, all insanely good. The taste is amazing and the buzz is narcotic. I love everything about it except the incredible leafiness. It's just too much to try to hand trim wet and I've never seen such a structure. I dried it and sent it through my processes and I'm extremely happy with the buds, they are gigantic and unbelievably frosty. Just super leafy, I kind of like leafier buds because I dig the slightly-greener flavor just fine, and buds with leaves that are tight are usually ultra-frosty and this is no exception.



The other major player is Pheno #10. This baby was a lighter green than the typical plant in this garden, with a foxtail characteristic on her awesomely huge and long colas. From the start she stood tall, and the gigantic buds were all they appeared and more. This plant also yielded over 7 frosty ounces of mega colas, but was WAY easier to trim up! That's a huge thing in one respect, since the bag appeal of mostly leafless nugs is undeniable. BUT, because of the leafier nature of the buds Plant #1 needed a LOT less effort since it was impossible to hand trim. If I ran #10 I would have great production but the full trim job too.



It's a fabulous problem to have to decide between these two unique and deadly phenos of a brand-new strain. Maybe I will just run both...they are so different they are seriously two different organisms altogether even though they are sisters from the same 3 plants. The fact that 3 plants had seeds originally leads me to speculate that I might actually have two different strains here. One is a cross between one Incredible Bulk plant and a Delhi Friend. The other is a cross between that same Delhi but a DIFFERENT Incredible Bulk, so obviously different traits emerged from the handful of genetic cookies in the cookie jar! So even though there are only two strains represented, very different sets of characteristics are present. I might end up keeping both and just re-naming one as a completely different strain. Technically it could be viewed that way!

And what about Pheno #11?


Also in the running...just a stellar plant!!
I will conduct many smoke tests to find out which I prefer, or maybe it will end up being both. Fun work! :ganjamon:

Meanwhile, I flipped Tent #1 a week ago and it's already scaring me...


This crop has a bit different growth patterns than the last, probably because the size and number of nodes of the clones varied.


But they're all doing fine! I'm learning to take bigger clones, this reboot in Tent #1 looks better sooner than the previous one did...


Everyone took to their new (and final) home so nicely.


Grow my girls, grow. Three are #1, Three are #10, then the others are 2 each of #4, #9, and #11, also all three very good specimens. Might keep one of those too...or all 3...oh gosh it's hard to decide to leave someone behind forever!

Now the next 7 weeks or so will be more routine, just a weekly visit for some leaf plucking and some watering. But I have 3 or 4 weeks to decide who will continue and who will become extinct. I will conduct much research...


That's funny cause it's so true. SO true!

Peace, Hyena
Was donated Bh5a seeds. Do you have information about this? (Hard to find)
 
Was donated Bh5a seeds. Do you have information about this? (Hard to find)

Do you mean Blue Hyena seeds? Yes that's one of my strains...from my attic lab days...if that's your question.

A nice set of genetics (Ripper Haze x Blue Dream) for sure, she has a lot of Sativa influence and really tasty. Back crossing a strain that's already a Haze derivative with another Haze might seem strangely repetitive but it resulted in a few amazing phenos. Others grew some of the seeds and a few were incredible, I saw a 15-footer outdoors. I still have seeds, I am thinking about running it in my grow house sometime but right now I'm working on two new strains as you probably have read. Plus the down side indoors is these are tall and they take 10-12 weeks to fully finish.

Nothing's perfect!

Here's one cola of Blue Hyena grown by a friend...
1612208913967.png



One of my monsters...it's fun to play Frankenstein!

Peace, Hyena
 
Another Tuesday, so another

HYENA'S GROW HOUSE update!

Okay, the last installment was a tad bleak...I had a broken light and my newest clones were looking bad...

BUT things have gotten sweet again! My newest girls, who had experienced a bit of nute burn briefly, have taken off again like the champs I know they are!


An explosion of new green growth, an obvious response to a week with better-balanced nute levels.


I knew they would come back, but I'm relieved it wasn't something more.

It was strange to have even a tiny hiccup in this whole endeavor, as things have become so automatic I almost never have a problem. So some sketchy leaves got me immediately worried...I admit the thought crossed my mind briefly, what would I do if I killed my little friends? Kind of a stoned paranoia now that I think about it, I was really high.
I'll kill them in time. Just not right now. :ganjamon:

Meanwhile, in Tent #2:


This mass is flowering nicely considering there's one light pretty much out of service.

HLG sent me another Quantum board which I replaced...


That was really nice of them (A+)...but sadly it didn't help. :hmmmm:

Something else is apparently preventing the light from reaching more than maybe 50%. The left side over there is getting pretty weird trying to capture any lumens available, and I angled up the opposite light just enough so it gives that side some additional love too. :love:

So I have to replace this broken light with something for the duration of this grow. :idea: I picked up 6 red LED's and some sockets, etc. I will build a red light bank and replace the bad light with that for the time being. By next visit next Monday I should have it ready. If I like it I'll make one for the other tent, too. More red light=always better.

That's all for now other than smoking lots of my yummy new strain(z). I love SATURN 5 and I also love Pheno #1 which is so completely different from #10 I have decided to keep it going as well. Introducing: BIGFOOT.


Yes, two new strains are better than one, so Pheno #1, the mighty, somewhat prehistoric-looking plant will live on as BIGFOOT. It deserves to...especially since this baby is big, shaggy, and wild looking, with a huge stink and an awesome monster buzz! It has a distinct cheese influence, as well as super frost everywhere which makes the leafier bud structure a unique looking and very tasty treat. BIGFOOT seems like the natural name for this forest giant!

And on we roll until next week! And always remember...


Be careful out there!

Peace, Hyena
 
Good to see everything is still in full swing and each wave seems to still be bringing new improvements and surpassing previous benchmarks!

Out of curiosity do you top or train them at all before they get weaved into the scrog? What height do you put the net at and how many weeks till you usually are starting to weave? I am thinking of trying a scrog next crop.
 
Good to see everything is still in full swing and each wave seems to still be bringing new improvements and surpassing previous benchmarks!

Out of curiosity do you top or train them at all before they get weaved into the scrog? What height do you put the net at and how many weeks till you usually are starting to weave? I am thinking of trying a scrog next crop.
Top and bamboo to hold them up
 
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