July 17th 2021
Well I got tired of waiting for the remaining 3 Cali-Orange plants to come out and wanted to be as sure of getting seeds as I am of harvesting sensimilla. So I dug out the smallest female and put it in with the 3 males and gave it a shower of pollen. Most of the pollen sacs have opened but a noticeable amount of pollen rained down.
This is an interesting part of the MY 4 PLANTS project. I'm glad I saved some male plants for this. They're thriving and are fulfilling their raison d'être.
My early season stressing over the repotting and fear of pollination has passed now, even though I still have 3 plants of questionable gender. Of course it's statistically unlikely that they're all male. So I'll be raising MY 4 PLANTS as planned. It's a surprising amount of rigmarole. However this is only my second season and my systems are undeveloped. Some articles say the early maturing, autoflowering varieties can and should be started in their final pots. This is what I want to do. Let's say I have 15-2 gallon pots. I plant in April again.... 12 germinate, 10 survive, 5 are males and thus are easily removed.
I've seen that these plants don't grow very big and can be raised in much smaller pots than my 7 gallon pots. The chore and more frequent watering required will be taken care of by the drip system. The smaller pots can line the perimeter of the greenhouse. No daily watering....ease of being away for a week or more ....no repotting and no digging out males. Problems with this system are A:. These plants are too small for a decent harvest with only MY 4 PLANTS. I'd really need 10 or 12 mature plants to get only 4 or 5 ounces of dried bud. This is the ridiculous part of the new legality. Obviously the people who've maid the laws have never grown any pot. Reading the predictions of yield for the various varieties seems like a huge harvest but I'm sure these are for fresh buds not dried. It takes a lot of fresh buds to get a dried ounce. The guys selling seeds and stating harvest weights are like weed narcs telling reporters how much they've seized and burned! My entire harvest of last year dried out to only a couple ounces of bud......a moisture loss of maybe 80% by weight.
Current provincial law allows 1 kilo to be kept in residence.....I would certainly like to accomplish this AND I'd like to do while growing MY 4 PLANTS. Of course this would require each plant to yield 250gms of dried bud. A tall order indeed for little plants such as I'm growing. Sigh. To achieve this I'd need to grow some mighty big plants......not autoflowering and started early and harvested late. Based on my experience I don't want to tend my4plants from March to October. It's been a learning experience of the type that I've done many times in my life. It's been interesting and rewarding but Id like a 3 to 4 month season.
July 24th 2021
I needn't have been concerned about labelling my plants for variety and gender since it's plain to see now. The BettyWarp plants are well into the flowering stage and the 3 remaining Cali-Orange plants are looking healthy with still no sign of gender. One of those is only 2' tall. All plants are branching out and getting bushy and stems are thickening.
July 25th 2021
One Cali-Orange plant showed a wispy white pistil today under a magnifying glass. It's not 100% but that's the first strong sign that it's female.
There are hundreds of buds on the Betty Warp plants. The tallest one is within a foot of the greenhouse peak. One plant is growing a cola at its top. It appears that harvest will begin at the end of August as described, for these seeds. But the later maturing Cali-Orange seem to be developing as predicted as well. Given as much as two months more growing time, albeit late season, will they yield big buds???
July 28th 2021
The long warm dry summer is continuing and so growing conditions are ideal.The plants are filling the 4x8 greenhouse slowly but surely. There a lot of yellow fan leaves on 2 of the 3 BettyWarp plants These are probably about the size of MY 4 PLANTS when I harvested at the end of September last year.
The biggest plant is now quite impressive at 55" tall and nearly 4' wide. It's very healthy looking and is just beginning to form flowers. I wish my4plants were all like it. The Cali-Orange plants are thriving but are much smaller and still not flowering yet. I really like the idea that I'll be harvesting at the end of August, not in October! Will I beat last year's harvest size? I think so. The buds are many but are still small overall I got only about 2 ounces of dried bud last year and all things considered, I'm expecting a little more.
Comparing now to last year at this time is strangely difficult because the plants are so different and so were the start times and the weather. The one Texada Timewarp I got last year in the middle of June was 18" tall, was root bound in a 2 liter milk carton and was very thin and pale. It had been topped and ultimately produced two nice colas but it was stunted. The others were 3" clones I got in late May. These Pink Kush plants were quite beautiful and were bushy, compact, dark green plants. I don't know whether they were autoflowering or not. They grew beautifully but only to about 3'.
Hopefully things continue like this!
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