__DANNY__H__

Woah, do I see the beginnings of a little greenhouse? You gonna put that massive planter in there?

Ooh man, I've always wanted to try a Kush strain. I'm jealous! Think in my life I've only smoked like 4 named strains. More than half the time it's just called "indoor" or "swazi".  Hahaha!

I look forward to the next time you visit that farm as much as you do bru. Budshots are a-comin'!

Yeah I'm a bit of a DIY guy... sad realisation. Really enjoy doing things the unnecessarily difficult way. At this point I have seriously considered indoor growing but I legit have ZERO free space indoors. So I'll see how well I can do it outside.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I smoked my first real sample of that weird bush. Smoked half a joint rolled with Pure Hemp unbleached (Guess That Rizzla! ) standard sized papers. It's actually not too bad! {^)^} I'd say it's a little more potent than the weed it came from was. Quite brain-fogging but no body effects at all. I basically feel like ADD turned up to 11.

EDIT2: Wow my spelling/grammar are bad.

Lol, I probably should have thought about wiping before I went and sprayed them. What's done is done, though. I only really sprayed the plants that weren't "ready", though. The others might have gotten a drop or two, but probably nothing to worry about.

Anyway, yesterday I cut down the weird bush, and today I cut one of the EL plants. The latter has a great fruity/musky smell that I can't wait to sample in a little joint. (See attached pic.) These weren't sprayed. They're also really unimpressive. xD

--------

So, regardless: I'm gonna be doing a winter grow! I'll do 3 of Killing Fields, 1 of JH's VK cut (which is doing fantastically by the way, topped it a little while ago and it's branching real good) and if I get the freebee I asked for from Sannie, 2 of Big White X Heribei F2.

I want to veg the plants for a while before I let them flower. Naturally this will mean extending their photoperiod artificially, but I'm over taking plants indoors at night because I keep forgetting! So, I reckon I'm going to build a little cover and install 2 lights above the plants. I'm thinking I can build a timer circuit that will drop the cover a certain amount of time after the lights turn on. See attached diagram.

To get an 18/6 light cycle, I'd have to have the lights on from ~1am til when the sun rises.... So I might go for something like a 14 or 15 hour day instead.

I'm in the process of figuring out how to get supports that drop after X amount of time with the circuit on. The timer aspect isn't particularly difficult to do, I'd just have a mains timer with a small DC powersupply and the lights attached, with some 555 timers set up carefully running from the DC. I was thinking of electromagnet latches that open when the electromagnet is powered (by the 555 timer circuit, naturally), thus dropping the covers.

EDIT: It just occured to me that there are IC's much better suited to these timescales than 555's... I'll figure it out later! Lol.

Howzit hochy. I've never purchased from Amazon before, though a mate of mine has two versions of the Kindle which he ordered from them online. I can't really say if he paid ridiculous customs tax or whatever. That said, the company is multi-national and so it's probably gonna be at least as reliable as Takealot, possibly with slower shipment times?

Hochymama[/member]: Yeah Sannie is quite efficient, answers questions willingly and quite quickly. I payed with bitcoin, gets you a 10% discount, but the exchanges of ZAR->BTC->Euro actually ends up making it cost a little more than if you pay via normal means! Lol. I've heard a lot of people saying Sannie is top-notch, including Totemic and some other guys on the weed.co.za forum before it shut down. Apparently his stealth methods are so good first-time buyers often can't find their seeds. xD

I decided to give the ladies a thorough neem oil spraying. I figure I'd rather let the plants go a little longer.

Three of the plants are definitely nearing harvest time, though, so I'm darn excited!

So uuuuhhhmmm, I just found a spider mite and a bunch of eggs under one of the leaves of my plants... -_-

Is it neem oil time, or should I just cut my losses and harvest early? I'm gonna definitely be spraying some neem oil on the Vanilla Kush since it isn't flowering yet, but the others are REALLY far into flower now...

@Justin: It's a sativa dominant hybrid, has a fairly high chance of getting purple phenos. Big yielder, energetic high, not-so-dense buds with lots of foxtails. Stretches like crazy as well apparently. The page on Sannie's site is pretty good and has some nice pics: https://www.sanniesshop.com/killing-fields-f2-nl-en.html

EDIT: Also this smoke report shows a KF substrain bred for deep purple colour: https://www.opengrow.com/topic/45959-killing-fields-the-real-purple-haze/

I've placed my order for Sannie's KF!

Also I should say that the spider mites appear to have been completely eradicated. Haven't seen the little bastards in ages. Hopefully won't see them ever again.

Here's some high-quality pictures of my plants I took the other day: https://imgur.com/a/s7cSe

Oh damn, hopefully that isn't going to cause too much trouble. I've seen plants split in half that still recovered perfetly, but this is quite late into flowering... o_o

I've had aphids all over my garden so many times I've lost count. Honestly, when there aren't lots of them, I've found success by just searching the plant thoroughly and squishing the buggers wherever you find them.

Yeah, that's what I've been doing ^_^ My lights are typically on in my room until 9 or 10pm, so it's getting *at least* 2 extra hours of light, and that's a pretty conservative lower-bound. When I'm on my 5am rising schedule on mondays->wednesdays, it's getting an hour of light from 5am til 6am as well. (Albeit followed by some darkness because the sun hasn't risen when I leave home.)

That's a real pretty plant, Justin!

The VK has to go outdoors because I have absolutely zero indoor growing facilities. I'm bringing the plant indoors at night so that it doesn't get the current outdoor photoperiod, which will definitely induce flowering (as demonstrated by the other plants xD), since it's still so small. I was hoping that before I let it flower I could get it large enough to top with a week or two to recover from said topping.

I figured since I'm pretty sure I got 100% for my first test today, I reckon now is as good a time as any to post some update photos!

My shitty phone camera and flash makes it look like they're all on the verge of dying out right where they stand but they don't look that bad IRL I promise. xD

BTW, Justin: The VK is starting to show preflowers despite a lightcycle with more than 14 hours of light. How long you reckon this'll continue? A drop from 18/6 was obviously going to cause this to happen, but it shouldn't continue flowering properly if I keep this up... I don't want to send this thing through a long reveg just to let it get a bit bigger before I let it flower lol. Also the granidilla cuttings I've taken a couple days ago are very stubbornly refusing to root, sigh. -_-

Pics are (in order):

* (1, 2) The two damaged plants

* (3) The weird bushy-bud (frankly the existence of this plant is an enigma, I've got no fucking clue what it's doing)

* (4, 5) The pink plant and it's comrade, and it's top bud (real pinkeh!)

* (6) My current favourite plant (stretched so much so quickly, putting on much more frost than its friends)

* (7) The accidental-topping (doing better than most of the others, hilariously) and it's sister. The sister (in the background) has this beautiful gentle fruity smell that I can't wait to smoke!

* ( The slow-flowering plant that's kin to the plant in picture (1)

I've seen good thing about Grapestomper OG on this Youtube channel:

Those plants look frostier than a Canadian winter, but the buds are relatively small and sparse.

I've heard Chemdog is famed for it's frostiness as well, so if that cross is between some good parents I reckon the Chemstomper could be pretty frekkin awesome. ;P

Is CapeMail still an issue worth worrying about?

I really want to order some of Sannie's Killing Fields F6 seeds (link) when I get payed in a couple days, but I can't really afford to risk the little piggies coming around since that'll have me screwing over my roommates as well as just myself.

Hahaha don't worry guys it was just the one plant that got damaged like this, the others had almost nothing wrong with them. I mean, one other one also got a bit fucked (it has lost like 5 of its bud sites, totally dead, but 4 or so are left and are doing okay) but the others are all completely untouched by this effect.

I think I might have gone a bit over-kill with my spider mite eradication program...

The plant I sprayed the most was this one I've attached a picture of. The leaves are going dark, dark gren and are curling up. They're quite moist, like they're sweating. Several of the leaves have out-right died. The same effect is present on the other plants that I sprayed, but far less severe.

I think I put too much dish soap in my spray. Or maybe leaves aren't supposed to get up-close blasted with high pressure water twice a day... xD Hopefully they recover quickly...

On the plus side, I haven't seen a single spider mite in over 3 days, lol. I'm still keeping a very watchful eye, of course: apparently spider mite eggs take about 3 days to hatch.

EDIT: For some reason I literally cannot upload files anywhere... think my browser is broken. -_-

EDIT2: Yup. Chrome works fine. Firefox, why u no upload?!?  Things like this will never cease to irritate me.

JustinHemp420[/member]: Some kind of local schwag.

It's got the magenta hairs typical of swazi, came from a bag I payed R150 for 10g. Was decent stuff if I remember correctly. The buds were quite fat and whole... not like this stringy, tiny-branches-with-sparse-calyxes growth at all. If you compare it to it's tied-down sibling on its left, that seems more representative of what I got the seeds from in terms of bud shape.

I reckon I'll make some seeds with it to see if its a phenotypical expression I can duplicate, just for the hell of it, lol. Collected a little bit of pollen from the male I killed ages ago.

That photo with the text "Getting bushy" directly above....

I find it so satisfying to look at...

mmmmmmmnnnmmnmmmmmmmmmmnnnn yaaaaas

Hey all, update time I rate.

The mites are not going out of my control. So far. Thank god. I've been doing daily water sprays, looking under every damn leaf and shooting the little bastards off with a jet of water whereever I find them. Also done two canola oil/dishsoap sprays now, and I've ordered some neem oil online. The plant I originally saw the mites on is totally clean of them, hilariously. Only one plant had any visible mites today, and it got sprayed real carefully and perhaps excessively. I think the reason the mites were even present on said plant was because it's in an awkward spot. That is, I can't spray under the leaves as easily as the other plants. Hoping that if I stay on top of these frequent plain water sprays that they'll not be able to stay around long enough to breed to large numbers.

Has anyone ever seen a plant with a main cola like this btw? Such an odd way of developing. It's looking almost like the male flowering structure of sparely placed pollen sacks on lots of little branches. It also has a lot of dying stigmata despite my efforts of literally searching the whole plant for pollen sacs and finding none.

There's probably going to be a long gap between now and my next update, because life is going to amp up real fast this year. I thought about blocking all the weed sites because I have kept coming home and reading about weed instead of reading the materials of the courses I am studying. Not a good idea with two weeks til the first set of tests...

P.S. Big shout outs and thanks to the good fellow Justin. I'll still be coming on 420SA until I get that granidilla to you, I'm not going AWOL like a dick. xD

Wowie! Those plants look like they're really loving life, hey?

Just found mites on two more plants, one in each box. At this point I figured it's pointless to quarenteen the plant that originally had mites, so I just transplanted it into the box. Let's hope these mites don't spell a terrible fate for my babies. I sprayed the plants that are still early in flower formation with a soap/canola oil mixture, and probably got a few drops on the ladies that are really blooming. Pretty sure they'll be fine since it was early in the day, plenty time to dry off in the sun.

Luckily it's only the one plant. I figure I can keep it away from the others, treat it with the "destructive" stuff and get some "preventative" stuff for the beds.

EDIT: I just sprayed the infected plant. Couldn't see any left, so that seems like it worked quite well, hahaha. Of course I'll be keeping watch and am still gonna do what I said above.

Hein[/member]: I didn't want to spend any more money, lol. Perlite is quite expensive both online and "offline" for me. I'm gonna buy some red wrigglers soon, hopefully. Everyone in the "no-till" community says they do a really great job aerating soil.

Anyway, I have sad news: Pretty sure I've got a red spider mite colony on one of my plants. Pics attached. I pray to Jebus that they don't spread to the other plants. I plucked some of the leaves (all the ones that had visible mites), maybe 6 leaves in total. Gonna see if I can get a remedy tomorrow. Anyone else dealt with these little bastards before?

Pics are the top and under-side of the same leaf.

Okay to be honest I take back the Jik part, lol. Moth balls and... it's an indescribable smell. Very toxic, chemical-like. It smells like some type of cleaning product. They're just getting every couple days some tap water and a tiny splash of Seagrow.

Anyway, today the beds were filled with soil. Due to some serious measuring errors on my part, there are in each raised bed:

* 60 litres of mushroom compost

* 45 litres of kraal manure

* 45 litres of potting soil

* 60 litres of coco coir.

It only just occured to this stoner right here that this soil mix is probably a bit hot, lol. I'm gonna wait off transplanting until I am sure the soil isn't going to go into a composting process and heat up a shitload.