Stunger's Organic Soil Stealth Balcony: Landrace Mulanje & Other Sativas

[Stunger]

The balcony is coming along really nicely but I have to say that the two Mulanje are a perfectly matched pair!

Still, stray pollen from the male really makes me hope the prevailing winds blow it to your neighbors house.

Thanks Shed! It is certainly a good point to be concerned with unwanted pollen. However, I have done the same thing in the past where I have kept the male plant separate at the back of the house, and used it's pollen to selectively pollinate 2 or 3 branches only on each of the balcony girls, which when I harvested them I found no additional pollination had occurred on the rest of the plants so I imagine I should be fine.

I am intending to do the same thing this grow and selectively pollinate, say, 2 branches on each of the 4 balcony girls. If some stray pollen does happen to make a few extra seeds then no problems, it just allows anyone I share the buds with to use them to plant if they like the buds!

 

[stinker]

I stopped getting notifications.
Your gardens are looking great. I'm with Shed, pollen can and does travel very effectively outdoors. Maybe a concern for neighbors?
Every time I see a pic of your Mango I think about growing it out.

Ordinarily I would tape wrap it, but it was very fragile when I 'handled' it and I could see that the tear was worsening. However, yes I would like to still do something, I did think of applying some pruning sealant to the wound area to stop water and stuff getting into that area. But it is looking quite strong for what's happened so maybe it will do ok with it's own resources?

I have had bad breaks like that outside, I even let them hang once they can. My experience is that growth will slow above the break and go elsewhere, and the break will knot up.

 

[tropics]

Thanks tropics, I know what you mean with unexpected 'incursions' to your stealth efforts. Last week when mowing the lawn, I could hear the neighbour cleaning out his gutters. When I got to the back yard he was on top of his garage and he sees me and we had a 5 minute chinwag, the whole time I am aware the male Mulanje was just 10 feet behind me so I was trying keep his eyes engaged while hoping that I was blocking the view behind me, there wasn't much else I could do.

Talk about tales from the Dark Side!

 

[Stunger]

General update

Greetings 420 amigos! I have continued performing LST on the 3 younger plants to keep their height down.

The Mulanje female is noticeably more delicate in her leaves than the others. Other than that, all appears to be going well.

Mango Sherbert

Mango Sherbert

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras

Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

Her damaged mainstem doesn't seem to be slowing her down. It is still lifting against the training wire that I originally put over to stop it falling off the support in the wind.

Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras showing broken main stem

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

Malawi/Ethiopian x Mulanje

Malawi/Ethiopian x Mulanje

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

Mulanje male

Mulanje male

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

Mulanje female

Mulanje female

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

All the best folks, I hope your gardens are humming!

 

[InTheShed]

So healthy and happy looking...they're obviously loving the worm wee! I must say that keeping that broken branch tied down makes me nervous but you're a grower on the edge.

 

[Stunger]

So healthy and happy looking...they're obviously loving the worm wee! I must say that keeping that broken branch tied down makes me nervous but you're a grower on the edge.

Thanks Shed!
Re the broken branch; I have never had one quite like that one. It was actually never tied down, I only rested the broken stem on top of the support, initially the wire was never touching it, but the plant in spite of it's injury has grown off the support and now is lifting itself against the wire. I can see it is forming a bit of a knuckle at the injury site so it'll be interesting how it progresses.

 

[Stunger]

Every time I see a pic of your Mango I think about growing it out.

Actually I'd be really interested if you did, because you've grown some really lovely frosty looking plants and it would be interesting how you would compare it to those.

 

[Jon]

General update

Greetings 420 amigos! I have continued performing LST on the 3 younger plants to keep their height down.

The Mulanje female is noticeably more delicate in her leaves than the others. Other than that, all appears to be going well.

Mango Sherbert

Mango Sherbert

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras

Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

Her damaged mainstem doesn't seem to be slowing her down. It is still lifting against the training wire that I originally put over to stop it falling off the support in the wind.

Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras showing broken main stem

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

Malawi/Ethiopian x Mulanje

Malawi/Ethiopian x Mulanje

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

Mulanje male

Mulanje male

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

Mulanje female

Mulanje female

• Stunger
• Jan 9, 2022

All the best folks, I hope your gardens are humming!

Man......dude you know your training. It's hard to believe that Mulaje female is one plant. And you also manage to produce all those bud sites while keeping space for each individual bud, or at least that's what it looks like. I see plants that are NOT crammed all together. It's beautiful, really. And the lift off your support! Unreal. I betcha no matter what you tried, 8 out of 10 times that break was unrepairable. Great job. So I notice you seem to kind of take your time in terms of establishing the actual canopy, yes? Like, the three you LST'ed, they look great, but also like you're letting them grow out some more before "shaping the canopy" as it were. Like the Mulanje female is a shaped canopy, for example. Is this correct? If so, would you agree that decent sized buds, no matter what the grow, require at least some nominal or decent sized stems? Btw, my god all your plants are so healthy it's crazy insane. Wow.

 

[Stunger]

Man......dude you know your training. It's hard to believe that Mulaje female is one plant. And you also manage to produce all those bud sites while keeping space for each individual bud, or at least that's what it looks like. I see plants that are NOT crammed all together. It's beautiful, really. And the lift off your support! Unreal. I betcha no matter what you tried, 8 out of 10 times that break was unrepairable. Great job. So I notice you seem to kind of take your time in terms of establishing the actual canopy, yes? Like, the three you LST'ed, they look great, but also like you're letting them grow out some more before "shaping the canopy" as it were. Like the Mulanje female is a shaped canopy, for example. Is this correct? If so, would you agree that decent sized buds, no matter what the grow, require at least some nominal or decent sized stems? Btw, my god all your plants are so healthy it's crazy insane. Wow.

Thanks Jon but the training that I am doing is very much learn as you go, e.g. when I break a main stem then I know I've broken a rule, and then the main thing is to try and learn something from it. Your questions raise a few points that I will cover in the next update.

 

[Carcass]

Nice work, Stunger- and all as healthy as can be.!
Your balcony is going to be a sight to behold in a month or so

 

[Stunger]

Nice work, Stunger- and all as healthy as can be.!
Your balcony is going to be a sight to behold in a month or so

Thanks Carcass, it should be getting pretty tight for space by then.

 

[Stunger]

Training Update

Greetings 420 enthusiasts! This update is covering some of the training that I am giving the balcony girls.

Space
The space required by the developing plant's canopies does get very tight, and on this grow I have 4 plants on the balcony, it gets 'tricky' applying training to such tight canopies. When I have to turn the canopies around for access, I have to do so without causing contact damage when the plants jostle against one another, and plus I have to do my best to avoid making noise to keep the neighbour's attention from looking up and wondering what's going on. Also too, opening the bi-fold doors of the balcony becomes an issue, as they open outwards and can be blocked by the pots and canopies. I find it hard to purposefully prune off weaker growth, previously I have tended to fit them in some other alignment by supercropping.

The main training aim
My main training aim is to try and keep them close to this current height until their main growth has stopped and budding has taken over, then I should have enough height in spare to allow them to grow but still remain under the horizontal sightlines of neighbours.

The 3 LST girls
These 3 plants have had their mainstems trained out in a leaning clockwise curve by using a number of garden ties.

Mango Sherbert; Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras, Malawi/Ethiopian x Mulanje

• Stunger
• Jan 10, 2022

Secondary growth encouraged with LST to 'fill in spaces' while hopefully keeping the canopies to a uniform height.

Mango Sherbert; Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras, Malawi/Ethiopian x Mulanje

• Stunger
• Jan 10, 2022

Astoundingly, the injured Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras is the most vigorous of the 3. She is the hardest to train, each node of growth really requires LST before it gets too woody and becomes impossible to train. She has already almost doubled her width at the injury site. So, if she's not bothered, then I'm not bothered.

Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras - knuckle forming at site of injury

• Stunger
• Jan 10, 2022

Mulanje

The Mulanje was germinated 5 weeks or so before the others, she was hexlined so when trained out horizontally, she has become more 'pancake like' than 'Christmas tree' in shape (which is what I wanted). She'd be less than a foot tall currently, and is showing some new stretching growth.

Mulanje female showing new fast growth

• Stunger
• Jan 10, 2022

The Mulanje's stem growth is looking quite 'spindly' compared to the other girls, but she is looking nice and healthy as far as I can tell, I am interested to see how she develops from here.

Here she is after she has received her first round of supercropping this afternoon. I have made use of @InTheShed's supercropping approach where he uses paper clips to assist the 'folded over' supercropped branches to stay in place. Unfortunately where was a bag of paper clips when I needed to find them? So I just cut up previously used plastic coated garden wire that is a heavier type to give a bit of extra weight, and hooked over the folded stems.

Mulanje female after first round of supercropping

• Stunger
• Jan 10, 2022

And another pic from more side on.

Showing Mulanje female side on, after first round of supercropping

• Stunger
• Jan 10, 2022

And just for completeness, here's the Mulanje male. Initially I hexlined it too, but now that it's a male and given that I am only keeping it for pollen, I am not too bothered about training it further if it stays within reasonable size limits.

Mulanje male

• Stunger
• Jan 10, 2022

That's it for now, it's a hot day here, be well folks!

 

[nickeluring]

Hey mate, your plants look amazing like always.
That's some remarkable recovery of the Honduras plant. As others here have already commented, next time it happens it's better to seal it up straight away if possible. I had some bug entering a branch of one of my previous outdoor plants. It was happily munching away inside that branch, eventually killing the whole cola. The buds just started to rot.

Also, those twist ties are really bad. I use soft ties instead. They never cut into the stems. Best size for me is 3 or 3.5 mm.
Now I always have a roll of electrician's tape next to me when I do LST. It works very well because it's stretchy. I also keep some of that soft tie nearby. If something breaks it's easy to make something to hold it up with soft ties plus the tape.

 

[7Dust2]

I wish more people felt this way. There are so many questionable hybrids being produced, of such questionable value, and so little pure, natural cannabis to be had. My hat's off to you.

Stunger wrote: "...to think that I spent time in many places including Oaxaca in the 1980's, and at the time I wasn't thinking of seeds and strains, such a shame when I think about it now!"

I could start a seed bank with all the Thai and Colombian and Mexican and Hawaiian and African and Jamaican and Panamanian seeds I threw away in the '70s! Makes me sad to think about. Who knew that equatorial sativas would one day be unavailable, to be replaced by a genetic train wreck of indica hybrids?

Seeds now are getting hard to come by now. With delivery as such. Might be good idea. Start a bank. I would love to have old afghan and Jamaican seeds. They were really good back in old days. But now crossing them with new stuff should make them better . Smoother

 

[Melville Hobbes]

Caught up. Great job training those plants, I'm looking forward to see how they do for you.

 

[Stunger]

Hey mate, your plants look amazing like always.
That's some remarkable recovery of the Honduras plant. As others here have already commented, next time it happens it's better to seal it up straight away if possible. I had some bug entering a branch of one of my previous outdoor plants. It was happily munching away inside that branch, eventually killing the whole cola. The buds just started to rot.

Also, those twist ties are really bad. I use soft ties instead. They never cut into the stems. Best size for me is 3 or 3.5 mm.
Now I always have a roll of electrician's tape next to me when I do LST. It works very well because it's stretchy. I also keep some of that soft tie nearby. If something breaks it's easy to make something to hold it up with soft ties plus the tape.

Thanks Nick. In future, I'll definitely look to seal it up as soon as I find it. I have electrical tape on hand from previous stems spilts, but in this case, it is forming a pretty strong looking knuckle and still trying to drive her growth up.

They were really good back in old days

I had some brilliant weed in the 80's and 90's. The talk you hear sometimes of the old weed being weaker was I think more likely that it was poorly grown or harvested too early.

Caught up. Great job training those plants, I'm looking forward to see how they do for you.

Cheers Mel, aside from the late introduction the Mango Sherbert, the others are all new to me, so I am keen to see how they progress too!

 

[InTheShed]

They're all living down to their correct height, so on the training!

 

[BakedARea]

Great looking balcony! The plants look good too.

I really do feel sorry for all you folks that have to be this careful about growing. I hope it all stays quiet around there.

 

[Stunger]

They're all living down to their correct height, so on the training!

Thanks Shed!

Great looking balcony! The plants look good too.

I really do feel sorry for all you folks that have to be this careful about growing. I hope it all stays quiet around there.

Cheers BA! Hopefully all will continue uneventfully, it'd be absolutely amazing to be able to grow legally.

 

[Stunger]

Update

Apparently Fiji is sending a cyclone over to us, thanks fellas!

The wind is already gusting to 50kph and likely to strengthen in the coming days, so it may be that I won't be able to open the balcony doors if the wind and rain is being driven at them, or maybe the meteorologists are just trying to freak out us small growers! But anyway, I'll do a small update tonight. I carried out some LST on the secondary growth of the 3 smaller ladies as I may not be able to address that in the coming days.

Re-arranging the lineup of the LST girls

I have had to rearrange the balcony lineup because the Mango Sherbert's larger container was beginning to stop the balcony door from being adequately opened, and it risked damage as the door being opened pressed against the canopy foliage. So I have moved the Mango Sherbert to be next to the Mulanje at the deepest part of the balcony, they are both in larger 50L/13gal containers. The smallest plant (not by much) is the Malawi/Ethiopian x Mulanje so I have put that at the extreme left and next to it the Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras (both in 30L/8 gal) which is almost competing with the Mango Sherbert for growth, even though the Mango Sherbert is in a larger container of almost twice the volume.

The 3 LST girls can be seen below

Malawi/Ethiopian x Mulanje; Honduras/Panama x Purple Honduras; Mango Sherbert

• Stunger
• Jan 12, 2022

Diatomaceous Earth/Silica

During the grows I've done, I always see a few ants traipsing around my plants, but I have never felt that they were exceeding their welcome by threatening the plant growth. But I do have a bag of Diatomaceous Earth (fossilised remains of diatoms) which is mostly Silica. I was reading a great thread by @farside05 Making your own silica supplement aka faux-tekt. Now, I don't use bottle nutes as such, but I very much appreciate the efforts of folk to share how they have made alternatives to shop bought. Anyway, he also provided a link re Diatomaceous Earth (DE) from an Oklahoma State University study, and altho the study was done on some ornamental plants not cannabis, but it was shown they were deriving Silica benefits from DE added as a top dressing.

I will add the conclusion that was drawn at the end in case anyone is interested. Since I am also interested in drought stress on cannabis during flowering I found it of interest that the DE was of benefit for water-stressed conditions. Needless to say, I sprinkled several tablespoons of DE over the mulch layer of each of the girls and then gave them all a nice worm wee watering to help 'wash it down' into the soil. I am not expecting anything huge, but I think it will be another healthy amendment to add to the organic soil of the containers.

Several growth and flowering characteristics were improved, depending on the rate and application method, by application of DE. Benefits of DE included increased height, width, shoot dry weight, stem, and flower diameter. An increase in nutrients, such as N, P, K, Mg, and Ca, was seen mostly for dahlia ‘Dahlinova Montana’ and black-eyed Susan ‘Denver Daisy’. The adverse effects that typically occur under water-stressed conditions were alleviated and plant quality, as well as transpiration, was maintained in all three plants due to Si supplementation. Silicon is known to play an important role in cell membrane integrity, in which osmosis, photosynthesis, and transpiration all occur. Diatomaceous earth as supplemental Si was beneficial for plant growth, flowering, and nutrient content under both well-watered and water-stressed conditions. For growth and flower characteristics, MM + Si was similar to the control (MM) with no added silica, and equivalent to most treatments with supplemental silica. To conclude, this research supports that DE, one of the many Si sources, is beneficial to plants; however, this is dependent upon species, Si rate, and the method of application. Benefits of DE include an increase in growth parameters, leaf nutrient content, and tolerance to stress, in which plant quality can be maintained. Future studies should further assess the use of DE on other crops and stress conditions.

Mulanje male

I am growing him out solely for his pollen. He mostly only gets tap water, because the balcony girls tend to drain the worm wee before he gets a chance of it.

Mulanje male

• Stunger
• Jan 12, 2022

Mulanje female

And this is the current star of the lineup! Noticeably fine structure compared to the others. Her stretching stems got a bit of a beat up with the supercropping I gave her 2 days ago. I used needle nose pliers with electrical tape wrapped around the jaws. The bud stems on her are quite frail looking but hopefully they don't get any infection or are attacked where they were mildly crushed. Maybe the application of the DE will be of particular benefit to the Mulanje.

Mulanje female

• Stunger
• Jan 12, 2022

So that's it for now, I am not sure how much the weather will batter the plants in the coming days, hopefully they will be ok.
All the best folks, thanks for dropping in, stay safe!