Blues, Bubs and Strawberries

[Black Venus]

OK, the time has come for the autos to go into their final homes. Saturday was a biodynamic "flower" time so that seemed like a good opportunity. The weather has been a pain in the arse during the last week and the seedlings are looking a tiny bit battle-scarred from the cold nights but still growing strongly. We had two nights last week when the greenhouse temperature went down to 2 degrees and one night it got as low as 0.2, which is quite rare for late April in this area. Just the way it goes though, and doesn't look to have done them any harm.

 

Only got small rootballs at the moment but enough to hold them together for planting out.

 

 

Original Amnesia auto, Blue Amnesia XXL and Haze 2.0 went into the greenhouse border, while Sour Diesel went into a large pot. I want to have the option to move her to a safe place if she ends up stinking the garden out. The greenhouse soil doesn't need anything else adding to it so I just used a bit of Rootgrow at the bottom of each planting hole.

 

Sour Diesel auto – the potting mix was Jack's Magic mixed with a coco coir brick and some well-mixed-in Ecothrive Charge.

 

 

 

Haze 2.0 auto

 

 

 

Original Amnesia auto

 

 

 

Blue Amnesia XXL

 

 

Then it was a case of protecting them from the two main dangers in the greenhouse: snails and cats.

 

Snails speak for themselves and I use organic slug pellets for those. As it's been so dry recently, they're not as rampant as usual.

 

My cats use the greenhouse as a place to chill out and they enjoy stretching out on the warm soil for a kip. They will quite happily sit their big hairy arses down on a seedling unless I put something there to stop them. Upside-down wire hanging baskets do the job perfectly, and the cats still have plenty of room to warm their bums in between. So everyone's happy.

 

[flighty]

Is that wall baskets you've covered them with? That's a really good idea!

[Black Venus]

@beezee Yup, cheap and nasty ones from Wilko's! Works a treat.

 

They also work well if you want to grow catnip without having the plant bitten and rolled to death by drug-crazed felines – but with catnip you have to pin the basket to the ground with sturdy tent pegs or the cats will just rip it straight off. That's not a problem with ganja though ... the cats take the hint and park their bottoms somewhere else.

[flighty]

I want to grow some catnip now, dot it around the garden to confuse the local moggies.

[Black Venus]

Cats enjoy getting high just like we do.

 

If I'm growing my own drugs, the least I can do is grow something for them too.  

[Dinafem-Mark]

On 2017-4-26 at 10:02 PM, Black Venus said:

Gotta have a larf.  

 

Not sure Gumtree shit would be as nice.  

 

Thanks for stopping by @Dinafem-Mark – I'm glad you're able to retain a sense of humour when you have about 500 diaries to read and comment on.  

 

 I have to retain a sense of humour mate or I would go mad

 

All the best 

 

Mark..

[Black Venus]

Cat bum defences in action.

 

[Dinafem-Mark]

On 2017-5-9 at 0:34 AM, Black Venus said:

Cat bum defences in action.

 

 

Nice to see the cat potrol mate mine is a bugger and eats them

 

Great to see they are in the ground and looking nice and Healthy

 

Until the next update

 

All the best 

 

Mark....

[Black Venus]

Er ... sorry it's taken me five years to finish this diary. There is a reason for it but it's a long story.

 

Most of the Dinafem varieties did really well. This is Haze 2.0, which is an absolute star. Grown in the greenhouse border.

 

It started out with a trifoliate leaf order, but grew fairly normally once it got going.

 

 

The buds were so frosty and white they looked like a bird had shat on them! The edges of the leaves were curling up with the density of trichomes. A real beauty.

 

I harvested it on 13th July, at 12 and a half weeks old. It was just starting to show some early signs of rot, but I didn't lose any bud because I got it in quick.

 

Overall yield was moderate – not bad for an auto. But the main thing was the high, which is out of this fucking world. Up high and cerebral, euphoric and trippy, exhilarating and long-lasting.

I can also say that I still have some left (because I've kept it as a special) and it's still absolutely amazing even after five years in the jar. Very enthusiastic endorsement from me!

[Gaijin]

 that's a hell of long time in flower 

 

 

welcome back 

[Black Venus]

Haha. Thank you @Gaijin. Well, the short version of the story is that I nearly got busted, and decided to lie low for a while. The good news is that I made it through and got a lovely crop, so more pictures coming soon!

 

It's good to be back. This is a great community.

[Black Venus]

Right then, Strawberry Amnesia. I love my sativas and I love fruity terpenes so this was a strain I had been keen to try. I did grow one plant in 2016 but it was sitting downwind when a Double Durban male plant dropped his bollocks, and ended up giving me a lovely crop of seeds. These went in as subbies a few years ago and had some good feedback from those who grew them – Strawberry Amnesia x Double Durban is a lovely thing in its own right. But I did want to try out some original Strawberry Amnesia bud without having to spend 10 minutes picking the half-formed seeds out of it. So I included one in this grow.

 

I'm always pushed for space, and it ended up being placed in a corner close to a hedge, so it wasn't really an optimum spot. It grew tall and lanky, maybe even a bit scrawny, with large medium-broad leaves and a mild but noticeable skunky smell. Up until flowering time it didn't look as if it would be anything special.

 

 

 

It was still mostly in preflower at the end of August but once the flowering got underway it really started to fatten up.

 

In late summer the weather turned to shite and there was almost daily rain with lots of warmth as well – terrible conditions for budrot. At this point I had to do some emergency harvests of other varieties which were supposed to be relatively mould-resistant but which turned out not to be. But to its credit, Strawberry Amnesia just kept on growing and didn't get any rot. In fact the removal of some of the other plants from the plot probably helped to improve the air circulation and she really began to thrive by late September.

 

Being such a late bloomer, the buds only started to look mature around 15th October, and at that point the first few spots of mould did start to appear. But I managed to keep on top of it by removing the spots as I found them, and the plant kept on maturing and began producing some really lush and dense buds. Have a look at these!

 

 

 

 

By this stage she was around 7ft tall (fortunately screened off from the neighbours by a large tree, otherwise she'd have been visible over the fence). She also absolutely stank – a hoppy skunky weed smell with traces of fruitiness. So this may not be the best stealth variety for growing in a domestic garden. But wow, what a beauty! 

 

She was eventually harvested on 27th October, and although there was a tiny bit of budrot, she was such a generous producer that the losses were negligible. Certainly she's a fairly late finisher but she survived to the end, which is the main thing – many of my other plants didn't. If she did this well in a year with terrible crap weather, while growing in a corner beside a hedge, then I'd have thought she'd do even better in decent conditions. I don't weigh my yields but I'd say it was above average, and it was beautiful quality, deliciously aromatic bud. She's an absolute gem.

 

After curing for a while the bud had a nice creamy smooth aroma and a very nice uplifting high.