Panama x Malawi - Probiotic & Organic Indoor Soil Grow

[TheFertilizer]

You can still bud wash even if it has seeds if they fall out they float to the top n jus pick em out n save em if u want if they r good enuf to save that is lol. And it it sounds 2me like she prolly hermied on u alil bit. If anything happens to change my light pattern in my flower tent when I have my purple kush going she tends to make a few hermie seeds as well. And u mentioned ur light timer had an issue so It was prolly that altho i could be wrong. Jus my 2 cents worth for what ever thats worth haha.

Yeah the interesting thing though is that the power/light problem happened about a week ago, and these seeds look almost half-way developed, so I don't know if it was the light problem or if they hermied earlier. I haven't seen any seeds except on the PxM #3, kind of sucks because that's the one that looked the best to me too lol

The seeds can still be saved after they've gotten wet? What if they don't fall out of the bud and dry out with it? I don't know if I'm overthinking it. But I have to wash it to get the duct tape flakes off.

Honestly I foresee a lot of this going to bubble hash.

Shot of the seeds I'm finding...

 

[Van Stank]

Yeah the interesting thing though is that the power/light problem happened about a week ago, and these seeds look almost half-way developed, so I don't know if it was the light problem or if they hermied earlier. I haven't seen any seeds except on the PxM #3, kind of sucks because that's the one that looked the best to me too lol

The seeds can still be saved after they've gotten wet? What if they don't fall out of the bud and dry out with it? I don't know if I'm overthinking it. But I have to wash it to get the duct tape flakes off.

Honestly I foresee a lot of this going to bubble hash.

Shot of the seeds I'm finding...

I bud washed all the plants that I have been harvesting seeds from. Think about how the plant grows in the wild. It rains, the buds get wet.....the seeds naturally have a coating that repeals water over shorter periods. Nothing happens when they get rained on. The seeds will be fine and your buds will be fine as well. You are good brother.....don't overthink it.

 

[Blazinjones]

Yeah the interesting thing though is that the power/light problem happened about a week ago, and these seeds look almost half-way developed, so I don't know if it was the light problem or if they hermied earlier. I haven't seen any seeds except on the PxM #3, kind of sucks because that's the one that looked the best to me too lol

The seeds can still be saved after they've gotten wet? What if they don't fall out of the bud and dry out with it? I don't know if I'm overthinking it. But I have to wash it to get the duct tape flakes off.

Honestly I foresee a lot of this going to bubble hash.

Shot of the seeds I'm finding...

Yup bro like stank said it's all good ive washed my plants who had seeds and jus scoop the seeds out that fall out and pick the ones that dont. And make sure completely dry b4 putting them into any sort of closed up container. You don't wana create mold it happened with my first batch of seeds. I put like 40 of em into a pill bottle after letting them sit out for an hour r two. But it wasn't enuf so thts y i say make sure to completely dry them out. But yea good luck and jus dont over think it lol u got this bro.

 

[Van Stank]

I leave my seeds on a plate in a dark corner for about 2-3 days before I put them in any sort of container. Lets them dry and out and prevents the issues that Blazin was talkin about with PM or mold.

 

[TheFertilizer]

Interesting, the one time I ever made seeds I think they must have got dried out when I dried the bud, otherwise it was the desiccant I bundled them up with, but they never had any problems. I've been wondering why people talk about drying seeds lol

I've been running tests. I pulled off one of the buds with the duct tape bits and dunked it, swished it around, hoping to see it get the duct tape bits off. It didn't. Well, hopefully with lemon juice and baking soda it will have more of a scrubbing effect. But I did smoke the weed and it didn't seem overly harsh, I just know I'm breathing in duct tape fumes :/

I haven't seen many seeds on any of the other plants but the PxM #3. Still looking for the male flower that started it at all and I can't see any. I wonder if it's just real hidden somewhere inside of a calyx or something like that, but there's seeds at different parts of the tent, so the pollen must have got pretty air born. It would be really cool if it was the result of my trying to pollinate the Maddog with the Blackberry Kush pollen, but I don't think it was as I can't see any seeds forming on that plant. It's nearing chop time for that one as well.

I'm not really sure if I should try the seeds out. I've heard a lot of people saying that when a plant goes hermie for no reason like that, its offspring tend to do it too. I would bet that being so close to landrace/wild cannabis that these strains are just more prone to it. I don't know that those seeds were produced in the 1 week since I screwed up the light timer, I feel like it happened some time before. Would have needed to be enough time for male flowers to form, open, pollinate, and then for the seeds to reach that stage of development, which in my limited experience is at least 2 weeks of growth.

What's really weird is I'm not seeing seeds on the other plants, so if it was a male flower that opened you wouldn't think it would discriminate. But somehow the PxM #3 is the only one showing. I think maybe the others just aren't splitting their calyxes open yet but are probably pollinated as well.

 

[Van Stank]

Pop one and grow it out!! Only one way to find out. Give it a small corner and see what it will do......it might surprise you!

 

[TheFertilizer]

Well today is week 9

The Maddog is getting closer, I think it probably only needs about another week. It's getting quite pretty ( uhh if you ignore the cat hair )

The Panama x Malawi are continuing to lose more of their fan leaves, and the PM #3 has the seeds maturing quite fast. I'm kind of bummed out that it's shifted energy to the seeds as it was quite potent looking with all the resin. I'd like to know if it self-pollinated itself or if one of the other plants sprouted a nanner, but so far I can't see any male flowers anywhere--gonna have to inspect after the chop. I don't think I'm gonna get much more swell, so this looks about the size of the final haul. Really wish the PM3 didn't seed up on me and all this duct tape flakes didn't get on these...

In other unfortunate news, it seems the clone room has become infested with russet mites :/ I haven't seen any signs of them on the flowering plants *knocks on wood* Brewing up some neem tea and have some Spinosad on its way right now. Just hoping that they stay secluded to the clone room and the infestation doesn't spread over to the flowering girls. I think it would be quite troublesome to spot them on the buds, the only reason I'm able to see them on my clones is because they appear like a brownish/beige dust on the top of the leaves, and the leaf serrations begin to turn up.

But as if those problems weren't enough, there's other discoloring of the leaves. Maybe it is related to the mites though, but it kind of looks like a calcium issue.

I don't really know what I want to do but I'm not sure that risking an infestation on these flowers with such little time is wise and whether the reward for a few more weeks development on them would be worth it. I've taken some sampler cuts and stuff here and there and they're fairly potent, so I might decide to harvest them a little early. I'm just concerned about the mites moving over from the other tent and attacking these plants once I start treating the clones. With THAT in mind, I am actually considering just keeping them at bay with soapy water to leave the plants "susceptible" and keep the mites more interested in the tender young ones than my flowering girls. I think the flowering girls are too close to their harvest window to be sprayed with either neem or spinosad unless I want to be questioning whether I'm smoking neem and spinosad. Kind of a rock and a hard place here.

Plus in the end it's all for flower that I'm skeptical of now anyway with all that duct tape flakes in there. I'm not really convinced bud washing is going to get rid of it from the experiments I've tried with a few I've cut early so far. I'm getting a set of bubble bags at the end of the week to run some friend's trim for him, so at least nothing will really go to waste.

I probably sound really pessimistic to everyone but meh, this hasn't really gone the way I hoped and not for reasons I expected. I guess that's how it always is though.

 

[TheFertilizer]

So I took a look at the trichomes today, and I think my safest bet is to harvest now. I don't see any mites on them, and they're fairly cloudy, so I think there's too much risk in trying to let them go a few more weeks. I might get a little more potency/yield out of them, but who knows how much, and then it just leaves them vulnerable to the mites in the meantime.

All that said, I think I'm going to be looking at a green Christmas. I pulled the light on them today, going to try giving them a little while in darkness, and lowering the room temperature. I've heard this drives up trichome production, maybe I can get them to finish what they were gonna do in the last couple weeks in a few days. The added benefit of lowering the temps is that it will slow the breeding of the mites in the veg closet.

I'm a little worried about my soil mix having been infested with mite eggs. So even if I sterilize and clean the crap out of my tents, there might still be mites in the soil mix I made, because I'm not really sure when I got them and at some points I've put older/used soil back into it. Not really sure it's worth the risk trying to reuse it, or to just cook up some more. Will have to do some more thinking about that. Kind of a little bummed I couldn't let the seeds that were growing in this PM #3 mature. I'm not sure where this will leave me with the seed project either. I may focus my efforts on the Maddog since I can just buy some more Panama x Malawi from ACE, meanwhile I really want the GSC-dominant influence of the Platinum GSC x Cherry OG cut that the Maddog is. Those ones are top priority.

 

[TheFertilizer]

Harvested them last night. I didn't notice the 48 hour darkness give them much more crystals. But leaving the room cold definitely brought out the purple in the Maddog.

I need to work on getting the tents cleaned and sanitized, and treat for the russets with some spinosad. I brewed up some neem tea but I think I let it go too long, it ended up getting a weird organge head on it from the air pump and felt like it grew over with bacteria. :/ I might just buy some neem oil, it takes too long to let it steep anyway.

I usually would put these on drier racks and put them in the tent for dark-drying, but given the tents are infested with russet mites, I don't want to put this nicely washed stuff back into the tent and let the mites get all over my buds before I jar them up. So I think I'm just going to let them dry and hang in the kitchen, I left most of the leaves on in hopes they'd curl down and act as a protective shield for the trichomes.

 

[TheFertilizer]

Trimmed and jarred today. Well, the sad news first... I only got 112 grams off this entire harvest. 42 grams of trim. I trim pretty damn heavy, but still, that's a low ass yield. Pretty sure it had something to do with harvesting them early, but on the other hand, the Platinum GSC x Cherry OG only got 10 grams off the entire plant in a 3 gallon pot, so I feel that I screwed the pooch somewhere on this. Probably the ridiculous no-idea-what-I'm-doing-training on the scrog. I know there's been a lot of pessimism in this journal, but this kind of is just the nail in the coffin, because I don't think I've had a yield this low since before my first journal Pessimism, optimism, I'm a realist: This was a failure. The bud washing didn't even get rid of all the duct tape flakes, and then because I harvested early I think I shorted myself on yield. I wasn't willing to let them get consumed by russets though, so I think in the end I still have to consider myself lucky that I get anything at all.

I'll probably update with some more pics later on. I'm waiting for the trim to freeze to make some bubble hash with. The good news is that everything smells and tastes AMAZING, especially considering that it has had no cure time at all and has simply dried. I really wish I would have got more of this Platinum GSC x Cherry OG. I've decided not to call this cut Maddog, because it's so heavy on the GSC influence, it might as well be GSC. But that's nothing to be sad about. I just wish I had more than 10 grams of it.

Anyway, here are some shots of the biggest colas. Plus my new 315 W CMH

 

[SamSmith]

Look on the bright side the tent is clear for the new year to start a new grow and you still have some good smoke. The buds you did get look awesome.

 

[Rider509]

Burn everything! Bugs must die!

 

[Rider509]

Aside from the bugs, it was a good experimental run. Now, quit playing in the dirt and do a RDWC grow! Plants are nothing but chemical factories powered by light. Give them the chemicals and light they need and they get happy. And that'll make you happy.

I'll never go back to soil. It's dirty. LOL

 

[Van Stank]

Hey Fert, sorry to hear about the disappointing yield brother. But be glad you got what you did before those mites got it. Hope you get them bastards cleaned up and start up the next batch of plants. A belated Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you and your family!

 

[TheFertilizer]

Hey Fert, sorry to hear about the disappointing yield brother. But be glad you got what you did before those mites got it. Hope you get them bastards cleaned up and start up the next batch of plants. A belated Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you and your family!

Yeah, currently treating them with spinosad, thinking about trying to get a NoPest strip too. I've just been spraying ever couple of days, haven't seen them come back, but the plants are still looking pretty rough--don't know if it's from the spraying or the fact that I'm letting the room get down to the 50s to slow the little bastard's breeding. My biggest worry is that my soil mixes are contaminated with eggs or something, so I'm not sure if I should be trying to treat them with neem/spinosad drenches, or just starting over with new batches--I'd have to let new stuff cook so I'm leaning toward just treating what I have. My back has been hurt lately though so I've been putting off lugging around pots and totes. I hate it when physical limitations keep me back.

Aside from the bugs, it was a good experimental run. Now, quit playing in the dirt and do a RDWC grow! Plants are nothing but chemical factories powered by light. Give them the chemicals and light they need and they get happy. And that'll make you happy.

I'll never go back to soil. It's dirty. LOL

The whole idea of packing everything into the soil that's needed and then just giving the plants water was SO alluring. I get so damn sick of mixing nutrient solutions, pH'ing, etc. It's not just a chore, I have a bad stomach condition called Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome where I literally can't do much but writhe on the floor in my own puke for about a week. So you know, I crawl to the tents to give the plants water, but that's about all I can muster lol The whole RDWC, DWC the type of setup has been alluring too but I kind of wanted to see if I could do it this way first because it meant less equipment--on the other hand now I have a bunch of totes and soil ingredients and crap littering my apartment, so it seems like there's a trade off in everything. Plus soil is heavy, hurts my back, more energy, harder to deal with when sick, etc. Definitely has its disadvantages.

But one thing that I can do with the buds I grow that seems to be... Not unique, but kind of unheard of to most I talk to... Is I cut them, dry them, and smoke them without much of a cure or a flush and they taste and burn great. I think the secret is that even when I used synthetic nutrients, I always run very conservatively on how much I give them. Most people I know practically force feed them, and so I think that's where the flush and cure becomes a necessity to them. I kind of like the fast turn around, so I'm not sure I really want to sacrifice the ability to be able to do that for higher yields.

One thing is for sure though, I'm not going to be going that route with soil again. It's back breaking to lug those pots around and flush them out and such when the salts build up. Maybe coco since it's lighter, setup with an auto-watering system, but I don't really have any reason to choose that over RDWC as long as the electrical overhead for the pumps and stuff is the same. I know for most people's grows such electrical demands are negligible, but for me I live in a crappy crackerjack-box of an apartment with a total of 30 amps for ALL of my electrical needs. I'm hoping my new 315 W CMH will improve things. Got a sweet conversion kit for $200, the Philips AgroElite lamp, just popped right into my existing setup.

So yeah tl;dr I've been thinking of trying a few more runs with this soil, and then switching to either coco with auto watering or RDWC, depending on electrical demands.

Look on the bright side the tent is clear for the new year to start a new grow and you still have some good smoke. The buds you did get look awesome.

Thanks man, yeah they came out really nice, the quality is definitely not lacking. I'm not actually sure how much I lost out on harvesting early, or if they just weren't going to yield much in my new soil mix in the first place. Either way it came out with quite a bit of trim so I made some hash and cannabutter too.

Saving the butter to make rice crispie treats with

Still gotta get some shots of the buds, but I'm waiting to clean out my tents and stuff for better lighting. They smell amazing though, it will be hard to decide which of these phenotypes to choose because each of them is a little different. I have 2x of each so I might just do another run with the same plants. Assuming they make it through this little mite escapade.

My plan for the mites really is just to keep spraying spinosad every 2-3 days for about a week, clean out the tents all nice, swap all the plants over to under the 315 W CMH to give them some nice strong light to recooperate under for a while, then split them up and start running an alternating weekly spray of neem/spinosad for a while, and get some no pest strips.

Honestly I might be speaking too soon, but I noticed these russet mites earlier on in this whole grow, and sprayed some soapy water that seemed to keep them at bay for weeks on end, so I assume with this neem/spinosad treatment, they're going to be knocked down into non-existence within a few months. Then it's all about cleanliness. I'm pretty sure I got them off some clones I took in from a friend, or some bagged soil. Shit happens.

 

[TheFertilizer]

Wow. Well, I decided to just eat that entire thing of butter because I'm never really having any effect with edibles that I buy and I've tried those 420 mg cookies with nothing before. I basically just melted some marshmallows into the butter and then added rice crispies until it was just big enough that it wasn't super gooey, but it was all large enough that it didn't taste awful. Still didn't taste great, but I was able to scarf it all down. I was pretty high for about 4 hours, but the weirdest thing is at about the 4th hour, I started getting double-vision and feeling a little sour-mouthed as if I had been drinking, so I went to bed. I used the 42 grams of trim that I had ran in the bubble bags plus some left over already-been-vaped weed with 1 stick of butter, and let it simmer in a pot for about an hour. I'm pretty sure I could have got away with eating half of that thing so it was a good test.

 

[Van Stank]

Interesting work on the butter/rice krispies. I haven't really tried any edibles so I can't compare to that....but I do make a lot of canna-coconut oil which I love. I make my strong so I don't have to take as much. I prefer to keep my dose to between .5 and 1 teaspoon. Hell if I could figure out how to get it strong enough to only take a few drops, I would love that but that will have to wait for next harvest!

 

[TheFertilizer]

Interesting work on the butter/rice krispies. I haven't really tried any edibles so I can't compare to that....but I do make a lot of canna-coconut oil which I love. I make my strong so I don't have to take as much. I prefer to keep my dose to between .5 and 1 teaspoon. Hell if I could figure out how to get it strong enough to only take a few drops, I would love that but that will have to wait for next harvest!

Yeah dosing edibles is tricky, and for me there's nothing really in the stores that's an effective dose for me. I've ate literally up to a gram of THC for as much as an effect. I don't know what level of dose I got out of that, but I mean, that trim was about 42 grams. I've bought stuff from the stores and they only allow 10 mg max haha That is pretty much nothing.

Meanwhile, I'm not really sure this spinosad is working. I have been keeping the temperature super low as well. But I spotted some today on one of the leaves. I'm not really sure if the damage to the leaves is from the mites, or if it's from being kept so cold and because they were root bound. I transplanted 5 of them into 5 gallon pots and put them in my tent with my new 315 W CMH, and then put the others in 3 gallon pots under the T5. The ones in the 5 gallon pots are a little different because I ran out of soil and 2 of the 5 were made some basically a hodgepodge mix of dirt, so we'll see what happens. I'm really not that concerned about it right now because I might be moving, the mites, etc. For all I know these won't even be making it too much longer.

Gotta say, after 2 1/2 hours of playing in dirt, switching to DWC or RDWC does look better. I think when I move into a new place I'll probably give it a go.

 

[Van Stank]

Do you have a sprayer? Not a spray bottle....but a pressure sprayer? I suggest if you want to get rid of them for good......and you have some time each....just start spraying them every day or every other day with just water. Take your plants to somewhere away from your grow room (a bathroom shower works well) and spray fuck out of each plant. Concentrate on the underside of the leaves.

What this will do is essentially pressure wash the bugs and eggs off your plant. By doing this in the shower or bathroom, you can turn the shower on afterward and wash anything that was washed off your plant down the drain. Every 5 days, substitute water with either Neem oil or some other form of safe treatment.

You will have to do it religiously with the water but its just like them getting rained on and won't hurt them at all......unlike heavy spraying with other treatments. Essentially you are just trying to keep knocking any bugs off as well as any new eggs. I recommend defoliating pretty good (though yours look pretty good already) before you undertake this endeavor as it will make spraying a shit ton easier. I will be adding weekly water spraying into my normal routine with a Neem or other form of preventative spraying every week. All I know is I don't ever want to have them become an infestation EVER again.

 

[TheFertilizer]

Do you have a sprayer? Not a spray bottle....but a pressure sprayer? I suggest if you want to get rid of them for good......and you have some time each....just start spraying them every day or every other day with just water. Take your plants to somewhere away from your grow room (a bathroom shower works well) and spray fuck out of each plant. Concentrate on the underside of the leaves.

What this will do is essentially pressure wash the bugs and eggs off your plant. By doing this in the shower or bathroom, you can turn the shower on afterward and wash anything that was washed off your plant down the drain. Every 5 days, substitute water with either Neem oil or some other form of safe treatment.

You will have to do it religiously with the water but its just like them getting rained on and won't hurt them at all......unlike heavy spraying with other treatments. Essentially you are just trying to keep knocking any bugs off as well as any new eggs. I recommend defoliating pretty good (though yours look pretty good already) before you undertake this endeavor as it will make spraying a shit ton easier. I will be adding weekly water spraying into my normal routine with a Neem or other form of preventative spraying every week. All I know is I don't ever want to have them become an infestation EVER again.

Yeah they're pretty far from an infestation. Russets are a bit different than normal mites, they don't hang out on the undersides of leaves so much. I was thinking about doing daily water spraying too, do you use soap? Just plain soapy water seemed to keep them at bay for a while. I am not sure I really did the plants a favor by dropping the temperature. Supposedly it slows breeding of the mites, but these are mostly landrace sativa strains and they did not like the cold at all. So I am not sure how much damage is from the mites and how much is from the cold. To be honest I also haven't been watering them much. Trying to make them unappetizing for the mites since I still have a whole veg period to let them recover.

I have been spraying every 2-3 days with spinosad, but I don't know how effective it is. I figure I'll try the daily spraying and then alternate between neem and spinosad. The neem tea stuff seemed effective the first time around, it took a while for them to come back, I probably just need to keep it as a standard IPM.

I don't see lugging them from the tents to my shower every day as likely though, especially once the plants get bigger. I have noticed a lot of the stuff just ends up in the pot anyway. But spraying in the tents will probably help with my perpetually low humidity too.

I don't know that the spinosad is even supposed to be effective against mites. A friend of mine recommended it but I didn't see mites listed on the list of stuff it treats, so I will probably try to keep using the neem. I have heard NoPest strips work really well too, but I'm already broke this month so I will have to make due. Like you said, daily washing keeps them pretty well at bay.

I have been thinking about trying to find a new apartment. One that I can run a modestly conventional amount of electricity in. So I would like to not take the mites along with me, but I don't know if I will even finish out these ones because my friends old apartment is available and it would be perfect.