Black Venus's secret garden 2022

[Black Venus]

Thank you @flee420. So the chilli powder seems to be working for you? That's encouraging. I'll try it a while longer then.

 

Yes, I've had the odd ant get stuck to a frosty nug and die there. What a way to go! At least the deceased ants are relatively easy to pick off. When you get an infestation of kamikaze aphids dying all over your buds, their little corpses turn white. Looks revolting, especially on dark coloured buds. Yuck.

[CustardVape]

@Black Venus Although very good, just be cautious with those dry amendments. I used them for an indoor grow and burnt the shit out of my plants, and that was at half the dose based on their feed chart. Start low and build up

All the best..

[Black Venus]

Thanks for the warning @CustardVape, that's helpful to know. I've already mixed it in and waiting for it to stew, but I did put in a bit less than the stated dose. Maybe I should mix in some more growing medium to dilute it further before I put the plants in there, just in case.

[flee420]

On 25/05/2022 at 2:08 AM, Black Venus said:

Thank you @flee420. So the chilli powder seems to be working for you? That's encouraging. I'll try it a while longer then.

 

Yes, I've had the odd ant get stuck to a frosty nug and die there. What a way to go! At least the deceased ants are relatively easy to pick off. When you get an infestation of kamikaze aphids dying all over your buds, their little corpses turn white. Looks revolting, especially on dark coloured buds. Yuck.

Yes the chilli seems to move them on and they don't want to nest inside, find the odd worker ant still searching around, but having raised all my pots off the floor and regularly applying chilli really seems to move them on though

[Black Venus]

1 hour ago, flee420 said:

Yes the chilli seems to move them on and they don't want to nest inside, find the odd worker ant still searching around, but having raised all my pots off the floor and regularly applying chilli really seems to move them on though

 

Raising the pots off the floor – that's another good idea. Thank you.

[Ccs141]

Good luck man hope all goes well 

[Black Venus]

This isn't the most riveting stuff to be posting in a diary, but just in the interests of being up-to-date: all my seedlings are now potted up into slightly larger pots (whooo, the excitement).

 

I started my autos off in Rootrainers, which has always worked well for me, BUT it is crucial to get the timing right. They need to move to their final pot/position when they're two weeks old, just as the second set of true leaves is developing. Any later than this and they get stunted and you end up with a plant the size of a toffee-apple (yes I have done this).

 

 

I'm happy with how the roots are looking with these – the Rootrainers encourage the roots to grow straight down, then air-prunes them at the bottom. I'm also happy with how the mix of John Innes seed compost with a bit of coco has worked out – it holds together really well, so I was able to slide these beauties straight out of the trainers and into their proper pots without them falling to bits. I pot them up very carefully, placing the plug into a hole in the soil and then just gently backfilling. I don't press them down to firm them in – gently gently does it! That way they suffer minimal root disturbance and can hit the ground running.

 

Four out of the five autos have gone into big-arse pots, the other has gone into the soil in the greenhouse border.

 

 

Following my worry about whether I might have put too much Grow Auto dry nutes in the pots, I decided NOT to dilute it with more compost, on the grounds that I know exactly how much of the dry nutes I put in there (a 45ml scoop for a 13 litre pot) and if that turns out to be too much then at least I can make an educated guess on how far to dial it back next time.

[Black Venus]

Which brings me on to seed batch no.2, and my first disappointment of the season. Earlier this month I sowed a small batch of Smile F2 seeds which I received as subbies in 2017, and they failed to germinate. Well, one of them broke the surface, but is malformed and not growing. The others were a no-show.

 

Normally I shrug off a bit of non-germination as part of life, but in this case it's more like "Nooooooooooooooo!" Firstly because these seeds are not readily replaceable; they show up from time to time as subbies but I don't know when/if I'll be able to get any more. Secondly because Smile is a very, very special variety and I desperately want this one, above all others, in my garden. There is plenty enough already written on this site about the work of Oldtimer1 and how Smile can be a life-changer for people with depression and anxiety issues. Suffice for me to say that this strain is close to being the holy grail of cannabis for me. It is absolutely wonderful and has a beautiful spiritual mind-and-soul-expanding high which lasts at least 3-4 hours. It's in a different league from any of the commercial strains I've grown and there is nothing else like it.

 

At the moment I don't know why they failed. The seeds were certainly good when I received them – I did a small test grow in 2018 just to check that they would finish OK in my greenhouse, and they germinated well ... but I'm down to the last few buds from that grow and I need to grow some more. My seed storage is not optimal, but it's good enough ... I've happily germinated seeds way older than 2017, including others stored in the same tub. Older seeds are generally slower to start but I still get 90-100% germination in most cases.

 

I can't think of any reason why the seeds shouldn't be viable so it's possible that something got cocked up along the way ... too dry, too wet, too hot, whatever the bloody hell might have happened after I put them in the dirt. I have enough seeds left that I'm able to have another go, so there's currently a batch of four more seeds soaking in some home-made germination solution, and we'll see if a pre-soak makes any difference. (For the record, I'm no longer a paper towel fondler ... I used to do it that way, but I now prefer just shoving them straight into the compost, so I didn't do any pre-soaking with the previous batch of seeds.)

 

Meanwhile, the universe has been very good to me. I only recently learned about the amazing, fantastic work that @GSZZ is doing with the launch of Turnspit Genetics, beginning with a seed drop of Celia bx1 – a cross between Smile and its own mother, Celia. They were exclusively available through UK420 but sold out at lightning speed, and I'd already missed them. I was reading through the thread thinking "bugger, I would really really really like to have tried those!" Went down for dinner, leaving the thread open on my computer. When I came back, a new post had just gone up from Joolz three minutes ago, saying that a few packs had just become available again due to some non-payments. I got my arse over to the UK420 store in double quick time and grabbed one!

 

 

 

I can't begin to tell you how thrilled I am to have these. I'm a huge admirer of Oldtimer1 and a huge admirer of @GSZZ for the work he's doing in keeping these treasures alive. I wish Turnspit Genetics all the very best and it thoroughly deserves our support. 

 

I sowed four of the Celia bx1 seeds and they're practically bouncing out of the soil. At the time I sowed them I didn't know that my Smile F2s were going to go tits up so if I can't grow any Smile this year then these will probably be a good substitute. I'm not sure how they'll get on in a greenhouse grow as they're probably really an indoor strain but there's only one way to find out.

[CustardVape]

Ah damn I'm sorry to hear you had problems with your special seeds not germinating , such a pain. I guess mother nature has the last word.  On a more positive note, thats just awesome you were able to grab some Turnspit seeds these guys are doing great work indeed and I wish you the best of luck with them

[GSZZ]

 

4 hours ago, Black Venus said:

Meanwhile, the universe has been very good to me. I only recently learned about the amazing, fantastic work that @GSZZ is doing with the launch of Turnspit Genetics, beginning with a seed drop of Celia bx1 – a cross between Smile and its own mother, Celia. They were exclusively available through UK420 but sold out at lightning speed, and I'd already missed them. I was reading through the thread thinking "bugger, I would really really really like to have tried those!" Went down for dinner, leaving the thread open on my computer. When I came back, a new post had just gone up from Joolz three minutes ago, saying that a few packs had just become available again due to some non-payments. I got my arse over to the UK420 store in double quick time and grabbed one!

 

I can't begin to tell you how thrilled I am to have these. I'm a huge admirer of Oldtimer1 and a huge admirer of @GSZZ for the work he's doing in keeping these treasures alive. I wish Turnspit Genetics all the very best and it thoroughly deserves our support. 

 

Theres a few of us, in the Smile High fan club  I loved reading about how much Smile meant to you, because thats what made Smile so so special - it wasn't anything beyond how she made people feel, and for some of us she forged a very special bond indeed. Growing Celia for the first time and getting to know her was a huge eye opener, as much as getting to know Smile was. When I grew out the BX seeds, the expression of that unique psychoactive quality was present in all of the progeny along what I imagined as like a volume control of intensity, where there was  everything from the quiet end - the Smile types, all the way along to the loud end - the Celia types. It makes me so excited to know that those who made that meaningful connection with Smile are going to be able to get to know Celia, and really pick a scale of intensity suited to their individual needs. Its really validating to be able to offer that again to people with room to make it a much more personal experience. The BX1 release was and is much much more than just a preservation project - and special in more ways than just the quality of high, a true greedy man wouldn't have let them out at all. 

 

4 hours ago, Black Venus said:

I sowed four of the Celia bx1 seeds and they're practically bouncing out of the soil. At the time I sowed them I didn't know that my Smile F2s were going to go tits up so if I can't grow any Smile this year then these will probably be a good substitute. I'm not sure how they'll get on in a greenhouse grow as they're probably really an indoor strain but there's only one way to find out.

 

on the whole they can get quite tall unlike Smile, so try to keep them as short as you can. They really psychoactive plants tend to flower long, 10 - 12 weeks, where as the more quiet end of the spectrum tends to finish around the 9 week mark (and don't get as tall!). Our resident @Road_Runner even had one that finished super early at 8 weeks! 

 

I'm not all clued up on growing outside, so I'm not entirely sure when the season and light hours change enough to initiate flowering, but if possible I'd be half tempted to try and do some kind of light deprivation to get them flowering a bit sooner than they would naturally while still quite small, that way if you get a few of the Long Lisa's they'll keep to a reasonable height and not end up hitting the greenhouse ceiling! 

 

 

Thank you so much for getting a pack and supporting the site and the Celia project, it really means a lot. I am really looking forward to hearing about the connection you make with Celia. 

[Revive]

On 20/05/2022 at 9:58 PM, Alys said:

I’m Lat 51 too    

 

and me  

[Ccs141]

No way can't wait see how the Celia bx1 does outdoor 

[Black Venus]

Thank you for your lovely post @GSZZ, and for the inspiring work. I've just finished catching up on your grow diary for creating and growing out these bx1 seeds, so I have some idea of what a treat I'm in for if I can pull this off.

 

Yes, the Smile high is truly special. The first time I tried it I wasn't sure I liked it, because it caught me off guard! It's so different from the usual mongy buzz, and I wasn't quite sure where it was taking me. I also made the mistake of having it at 11:30 at night, and it kept me up until 3am.  But on a second attempt I was completely in love with it. It's partly that it's so unconditionally joyous, and smooths out all the negative thoughts and makes everything feel OK, but it's also because the high is really complex – it's an actual experience, which evolves and changes as it goes along. And it seems to open doors within the mind that other weed doesn't reach. Now I save it for special occasions and try to set aside a whole evening for it.

 

I'm really excited to have the chance to get to know Celia. I'm having to limit myself to a small number of plants (can't push my luck with the neighbours) so I'll have to hope for at least one girl and it'll be pot luck what phenotypes I get, but that's all part of the fun. Thanks for the warning about the height – I'm hoping that starting the seeds off in mid-late May will keep them relatively small, but they may have other ideas.  I'm not sure either how long they will take to go into flower after the solstice – there's so much difference between varieties on that score, I can only try it and see. I'm hopeful though. I'm a big sativa-lover so I've tried growing out plenty of late-finishers in the garden ... sometimes I pull it off and sometimes I don't, but it has far more to do with the good ole UK weather than anything I'm doing. Even in a bad year though, I usually end up with enough bud to make it worth the effort. And as Celia bx1 is not yet tried outdoors, I guess it will be useful for others to see what happens!

 

I love the ethos behind Turnspit – it really is all about the high. I mean, I enjoy a fruity terpene as much as the next person, but if I really want to smell fruit I'll go and sniff a lemon. Cannabis should be an experience. Oldtimer1 knew what he was doing when he entrusted Celia to you, and although I'm sure it must feel like quite a weight of responsibility, you're absolutely doing him proud.

[Black Venus]

Well, I had to have another go at germinating the Smile F2 seeds. It's getting late in the season for starting off outdoor seeds but it has to be done! Even if they end up as small plants, I'll be grateful for them. 

 

I normally chuck seeds straight into compost, but decided to pre-soak them this time. And rather than using plain water I soaked some mung beans overnight and used the greenish-tinted slop from those. The idea (whether it actually helps or not) is that the beans release some natural gibberellic acid into the water as they start to germinate, which is one of Nature's special gifts to tell seeds it's time to germinate ... a little hormonal wake-up call.

 

 

So I strained off the green gibberellin-water and put some in a test tube with four Smile F2 seeds. They float to start with, but after a few hours they all sank as they started to absorb the water. Which is a good sign.

 

Come on ganja gods, you can do it!

 

 

After 24 hours in the gibberellin water, I put all four seeds into compost, and 5 days later TWO of the seeds popped! 

 

It would've been nice to have all four, but the others don't look like they're going to show – and I'm so bloody grateful to have these two, I'm not complaining. Fingers crossed for at least one of them to be female, but if they're both blokes I will put their jizz to good use.

 

They will be treated like royalty. They already look slightly different, in terms of the pigmentation in the stems.

 

 

And as a bonus, the mung beans I used to make the gibberellic acid were ready to eat a few days later, nom nom nom.

 

 

Meanwhile, back in the greenhouse, here (below) are the Celia bx1 seedlings, looking very chipper. They already stink!

 

 

[Black Venus]

In the first post on this diary I mentioned I’m growing a variety called Red Sticks. While we’re waiting for interesting things to happen in the greenhouse, I will tell the story of how that came about. It’s an F1 cross between Black Cream and an unknown inbred sativa line.

 

I’m not a breeder! Proper breeding is a numbers game, especially with a naturally outbreeding plant like cannabis. In the current legal climate I can only grow a tiny sample of plants, which makes any structured breeding project impossible. What I do instead is try to keep a genetic melting pot rolling along from year to year. Sometimes it yields treasures, and sometimes it doesn’t, but since I don’t have any facilities to keep cuttings, I just save seeds from the “keepers” and throw the dice again the next year. My choice of what to cross is largely determined by what’s flowering at any given time, or trying out whatever cross takes my fancy. It is literally a case of making a bouquet with the flowers available. I may never be able to create the same thing again, but I get enough in the jars to keep me happy and then take a punt on getting something else wonderful – but different – next time.

 

Red Sticks started out in 2016 when I was growing a few autos from Sweet Seeds. I was growing a single seed of Black Cream which came free with my order from Sweets and I really liked it – nice creamy and fruity aromas and attractive colours, and the high was pretty nice and ‘uppy’ for a strain which leans indica. It was my favourite of the autos that year, although the yield was small. That became Red Sticks’ mother.

The dad – well, that’s a much longer story.

 

When I started growing at the end of the 20th century you couldn’t easily get seeds and info on the internet the way you do now. There wasn’t a lot of choice available locally either (or maybe there was but I didn’t know where to look) so you’d just grow whatever you could get hold of, often without having a clue what it was. In 1999 a friend gave me some of her own home-grown buds, and they had seeds in them which I picked out and planted. She’d been growing them for a few years in her back yard and got them from her former next-door neighbour, who had grown them in his own back yard for many more years. Where he got them from is anybody’s guess, but I think they originated as bagseed, possibly in the 1980s. They grew into a thin and lanky sativa with very narrow leaves and lots of branches. The buds weren’t especially large or resinous and smelled of sunflower seeds and carrots but they gave me a beautiful fizzy high. It took until early November for them to finish outdoors but as the buds were light and not too sticky, they didn’t have too much trouble with mould except in the really crap weather years. At any rate they’d been grown outdoors in local gardens here for years and were well adapted to the local climate. So I started growing them every year, crossing one or two males to one or two females and saving the seeds. None of us understood a thing about inbreeding depression in those days, I just kept inbreeding it until I noticed it was becoming a bit stunted and crap, so I stopped growing it.

 

In 2016, armed with a slightly better understanding of plant biology, I remembered what a nice strain it had been back in the day and it occurred to me that I ought to try to preserve some of its genes, as it might be lost forever if I didn’t (bearing in mind I’ve no idea what it is, other than a random sativa). My friend no longer grows it and she’s lost touch with the neighbour she got it from. I only had really old seeds left (like 10+ years old) but I got three to germinate. However, I made a mistake. I started them off too early (30th March) and they went straight into flower! I didn’t understand the reasons for this at the time, but I think they must have got confused by the light cycle. The plants, frankly, were shite. Weak and inbred and ludicrously quick to flower, they only grew a few inches tall! One was male. I had intended to cross them with a photoperiod strain, but because they basically autoflowered, the only female plants flowering at that time were the autos. I pollinated a small branch of Black Cream along with all the other Sweet Seeds autos I had at the time.

 

I wouldn’t even have bothered growing out the seeds, but another mistake led to me putting two seeds in the soil in 2017, thinking it was a different cross! I’d got my labels mixed up on the pollinated branches of Black Cream. As soon as the seedlings got going they showed very obvious sativa leaves and growth, so I knew for sure who the father was. But fuck my old boots, the plants were fantastic! You’d never believe they were a cross between an inbred runt and a low-yielding auto, they were huge! After all those years of giving that sativa more and more inbreeding depression, crossing it with Black Cream gave it a new zip of life and a load of hybrid vigour. The two plants grew like rockets, and both turned out to be girls.

I grew them in 12-litre pots down the arse-end of the greenhouse, and they rooted through the bottom of the pots into the soil border. They went up to the roof of the greenhouse and were VERY sativa. In veg they smelled of furniture polish and sausagemeat. Both plants were almost identical, with unusual dark red colouring in the stems. Most distinctive were the leaf stalks – dead straight, skinny and bright red – which made them look like some kind of Japanese ornamental plant. Hence the name Red Sticks, as the red stalks were very eye-catching. Being a cross between an auto and a photoperiod, they turned out to be a ‘fast version’, and semi-autoflowered – they began producing buds in June. The buds were only lightly coated with small trichs, not too sticky and not too smelly. The aroma changed first to veg and nuts, and then to a scent of pear drops and old-fashioned sweeties which was absolutely beautiful.

 

They were harvested on 30th September – not bad for an outdoor sativa – in almost perfect condition with barely a spot of mould. Because the buds were not excessively dense, they didn’t trap moisture and go mouldy. The lack of big sticky trichs appears to have no effect at all on the quality of the high! They have an absolutely beautiful sativa lift – very up, creative and euphoric, and lasting up to 3-4 hours. Much like the high from the original sativa strain, it makes your head feel like the centre of a sherbet lemon. Yield was high, as they were big plants. The taste was lovely too – pear drops leaning towards lemon. It was possibly the best strain out of everything I grew in 2017. Absolutely bloody fantastic and a really lovely surprise.

But now the downside. I probably can’t make any more of them. I can’t make the cross again, as I don’t think I can get any more of the ancient sativa seeds to germinate. I COULD (and probably will) cross them with one another to produce an F2, but it’s likely that any F2 seeds will be very inconsistent as the different genes segregate out – could produce anything from runty autos to slow-flowering sativa triffids. If I had enough space to grow out a load of F2s I could possibly find something which resembles the Red Sticks F1, but I don’t. I have about 16 seeds left from the original cross, and some full jars, and will have to make the most of them.

 

I currently have three Red Sticks seedlings in the greenhouse, hoping for a mix of males and females so that I can pollinate them with one another (I didn’t do any pollinating in 2017 because both plants were girls). One of the three was very runty as a seedling but seems to be growing out of its cabbage phase now. It will be interesting to see whether these plants turn out the same as the previous two – complete with the distinctive red sticks.

 

Now, if you’ve read through all that lot you deserve a few bud shots. The photos don’t really do justice to the colour of the leaf stalks though – in real life they are very striking!

 

Edited June 13, 2022 by Black Venus
Tidy up formatting