I've grew up during marijuana prohibition and now, a lifetime later, Justin and the Liberals finally and surprisingly legalized recreational pot. Yes it's complicated and typically Canadian with silly differences between provinces but the bottom line is, here in British Columbia, I'm allowed to grow MY 4 PLANTS!
Virus Days forced me to mail order seeds.....all stores were closed. I got 11 BettyWarp but I dropped one and lost it. I also bought 10 California Orange seeds. Both are sold as regular, autoflowering seeds.
$115 by mail its an outrageous price for a few pot seeds.....I guess I paid some tax somewhere in there but it wasn't listed on the receipt.
After asking friends for seeds, several said yes but none ultimately came through and by that time in March, I could not buy feminized seeds in a timely and affordable way. So I ordered these from Vancouver Seed Bank.
I planted them in egg cartons in garden soil.
4 are Betty Warp
6 are Cali Orange
1st batch seeds planted April 18th
Second batch April 27th
The Betty Warp seeds took longer and are smaller......most germinated but 1/2 didn't make it....I think I overheated a couple too early in the sunny window.
4 of 10 seeds in the 1st batch are up and transplanted into small pots for sexing later.
Several of the 2nd batch have germinated.
May 10th
I cut the egg cartons into single cups and planted them in 4.3" pots full of garden soil and covered loosely with plastic wrap.
I bought an LED plant lamp with me and a small heat pad but the weather has been warm and sunny for days so I haven't used either.
I've been carefully watering and watching but a couple more are very stunted and one seems to have died after barely germinating.
So of my original 21 seeds I have 13 that look strong.
May 19th.
I've gotten the seedlings under watering spikes in their own pots buried in the big pots...two more have died. The 11 are generally thriving in the 4 or 5 inch range. If I can accurately identify the males and separate them I feel fairly confident that I'll end up with 4 strong female plants.
It's a drag having had to pay over a hundred bucks and plant 21 seeds to get 4 good plants by summer but the MY 4 PLANTS project is underway!
Although I wish I'd gotten feminized seeds, the cost is so high that I hope to have lots of seeds of my own for next spring. But do I really want to wait until summer to see which plants I'm keeping? No!...I do not. Still, I intend to farm out my male plants to neighbours along with a female if I can spare it, to try and get some seeds. I may not want to grow regular seeds but as we've seen, getting femenized seeds is expensive and can be tricky. I don't want to grow regular seeds again next season but to grow MY 4 PLANTS next season without spending any money is VERY tempting....but lets not get ahead of ourselves. All told I've spent hundreds of dollars over the last two years on MY 4 PLANTS (including the greenhouse) To have cost free future seasons is a fine idea, especially since I neither sell nor (hardly) smoke marijuana!
May 3rd.
The plants are thriving but for one stunted. The problem is that they've outgrown the 4.3" pots already.
Luckily I scored some 1 gallon pots at the IGA so can transplant again and wait for them to show their sexes. But it's a real pain, especially because it'll have to be done again in a couple of weeks....
I've decided to plant them all in the big pots and just dig out the males later. Maybe this compromises my yield somehow.....like damaging roots when digging or shading each other but it seems like the best way to get just female plants into the big pots ultimately. I want to just water them mostly, from now on.
I'm using CIL 20-20-20 plant food in the water. A kilo was $10 bucks at Home Depot. I've been careful not to over do it. I remember years ago when I worked at a sod farm that we used 19-19-19 all the time and it was powerful.... wherever some got spilled it burned a brown patch.
The online articles that write about fertilizing recommend everything from bat shit to pee to secret organic blends to specialty store proprietary brand plant food, the cost of the latter would likely exceed the value of my crop. Some online commenters has stated that they use ordinary plant food successfully. Are pot plant's needs much different than other plants? There's a lot of folklore, hearsay and selling of products.
If 4-7 females survive to bud then we have a good season.
They all seem nonetheworseforwear except one that is droopy.
May 31.
This morning all the plants look vigorous after yesterday's transplanting into the big pots. The Betty Warp seeds were smallest and took longest to germinate but now they have significantly outgrown the California Orange plants.
I have spent many hours over the past 2 years studying online and actively gardening and harvesting MY 4 PLANTS. The greenhouse project took many hours over a couple of years and there are still details unfinished as usual. Last year was a complete success despite my inexperience, a cool damp summer and slightly frantic efforts to attach scrap plexiglass to the frame so that the seedlings which arrived unexpectedly could be protected.
But this season the greenhouse is nicely enclosed and vented. And, I have watering spikes and pots. So I've been able to manage the nuisance of rearing many plants in order to finally harvest only MY 4 PLANTS.
with tea, in the morning watching my view and MY 4 PLANTS. The design and location of the greenhouse seems good and it's maintenance free. The plexiglass is attached with stainless screws, the frame and deck are painted on all sides and connected with deck screws. So I expect it to last indefinitely .....the sun has just reached the plants at 9:15am
My reading says 6 hours of direct sun will suffice for my4plants along more hours of light.
Betty Warp apparently is an early maturing type that is ripe in late August +/-. But the California Orange is a 1980's variety that traditionally isn't ready until late October. These are both advertised as hybridized, autoflowering types so who knows?
They're mostly at the point where most posts say I can and should top MY 4 PLANTS. But boiling down the mass of online recommendations into usable instructions is tricky. Some posts are for indoor grows, some outside, some for other climates, hydroponics, and some for containers, greenhouses different varieties and whatever.
One site says that autoflowering plants shouldn't be topped, that they are bred to be short and bushy, and that topping sets the plants back from it's maturation date by at least a week or more.
Although I'm planning to increase my harvest over last year, I don't need nor want more than MY 4 PLANTS. I don't have floor space to spare in my 4'x8' greenhouse, nor low hanging lights. But I have 7 feet of height.....I want tall plants. B. warp is expected in the 42" range......C.Orange much taller.
Last year's Texada Time Warp was topped when I received it and that made 2 main stalks with big buds but MY 4 PLANTS are not old 1970's strains like that. So for now I'm going to simply let my4plants grow for the next few weeks.
I never thought I'd live to see the day, in Canada, when I could brew my own beer, drink it in city parks, grow my own pot and smoke it, all legally AND TAX FREE!. Ya live long enough you'll see everything I guess. I mean, obviously governments want me to do it or else they'd tax it right?. I'm such a good little Canadian.
Three weeks until the summer solstice. Virus Days seem to be ending, albeit rather slowly. I have definitely been with the trends of home brewing and home growing pot.
Here on the coast, most of the fish are gone and the rest of the fishing is tightly regulated.......so I'm growing MY 4 PLANTS instead of fishing..
June 3rd
A full dose of fertilizer yesterday in a few liters of water and they all look fine today.
June 5th
The weather turned cool and cloudy...it seems impossible that the plants will be big. But the greenhouse has already proved to be very successful. It's warm and dry and bright inside on cool wet days and the plants are thriving.
The weather forecast is like that for the next 10 days.......
June 9th
Unsettled weather for the last week has deprived MY 4 PLANTS of sun but the greenhouse has done its job through the squalls and all plants are thriving.
Even the runty seedling while undersized has grown to about 5"
The biggest is 20+"
I've added the full recommended dose of fertilizer to the water the last two applications. All plants seems perfectly fine. The biggest B. Warp plant remains the one that sprouted first. The others in its group are nearly as tall but not so bushy.
I feel happy about the prospect of this season's crop despite the early season struggles and the late germination date.
As some online posts warned, more than one plant per pot will find roots very tangled and of course I'll have to sacrifice males to avoid damaging females.
It remains to be seen how well I identify and separate the males and nurture them offsite. If I produce lots of seeds, my natural frugality will pressure me to plant them. But for about $60 buck I can save myself not only lots of work, but risk of pollination as well. So not to get ahead of myself but I'll try to do it the easy way next year.
I've examined MY 4 PLANTS with a magnifying glass but there isn't any sign of gender yet as far as I can tell.
June 11th.
The oldest and biggest Betty Warps are showing their genders. One female and one male are developed enough for me to be certain. So I dug out the male, put it in a 2 gallon pot and it's been banished to Glyn's greenhouse. It's the 2nd biggest. The root ball wasn't big so the plan is working so far. I topped up the soil in all pots, watered and fertilized and I now have a ready 5 gallon bucket I can use in case I end up with 3 or 4 females in one pot. There is no sign at all of any other males yet.
The weather remains cool and windy and mostly overcast. It's beautifully comfortable inside the greenhouse but I fear it's not enough sun for my4plants to grow BIG. The largest one is 22" and it's noticeably larger than the rest as it has been since germination with a thicker stalk and longer branches. Hopefully it's female.
June 13th.
As unlikely as it seems I'm starting to think that most of my plants are female since none have shown to be male except one. Only one continues to show the characteristic wispy white pistils. The rest show tiny green leaf like points. Because the largest plant is 2' tall I'm starting to believe that some size is possible..... we're a week from summer if we get some sun......4' will be likely.
July 5th.
Already 3 weeks + have gone by since the last report. 3 male plants have been banished to Glyn'greenhouse where they have already dropped some pollen. They remain small plants however..... under 3'.
I will give them a female but only 4 of the remaining ones are certainly female .... I still cannot definitively identify the remaining 5.
The tallest plants are over 3'.....the other BW plants have almost caught up to the biggest one but the others remain noticeably smaller. Although the sunshine has been plentiful and the have received regular water and fertilizer, I don't see even the tallest plants as being impressively large yet.
July 12 2021
I've cut down another Betty Warp male that was 40" high. Of my remaining 7 plants, 3 stubbornly refuse to reveal their genders. The other 4 are females in flower. The tallest is 42". They're becoming bushy but haven't grown taller in a week.
At first I had difficulty cutting down my male plants, wanting to rear them seperately. But there are too many and I really want to just grow MY 4 PLANTS so the the last 2 males have been quickly whacked.
Even though all plants have been equally watered from the same container one plant has significant leaf browning and another a little bit. The others seem fine although one has a lot of big pale green leaves. One plant is actively flowering and its leaves are striped light and dark green.
I'm still waiting for another plant to identify itself. Also I want to know there aren't anymore males. One article I read says it could be as late as the 3rd week in July.
However, in general, my4plants have entered the flowering stage and this blog is long enough. So the flowering stage will be in the next blog.
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