Hey Nosias, looking forward to following your 3rd grow, when you kick off pls include me in your tagging so I can follow. In the meantime, I have a few questions about your Dutch Passion Blackberry Kush experience. I scanned pretty much all of your second grow thread, most enjoyable read & congrats on your final results.
I was REALLY excited about this plant as it grew. Early into the veg cycle it started developing what looked like BLACK centers in all leaf clusters. As it aged and started showing flowers, the color spread until the entire bud cluster appeared black. As the buds developed, the black transitioned to purple, and was one of the most beautiful strains I have ever grown. I got even more purple than you experienced in your grow. The plant in my avatar is BBK.
HOWEVER - as the plant matured, the calyxes opened up, and by harvest they were quite fluffy. As the buds dried and cured, they became even LESS dense, and lost most of whatever poor flavor it had earlier in the drying / curing cycle. It did retain all of the purple color through a two month cure, and the smoke quality is very good - 8 out of 10? but t
he taste reminds me way too much of Mexican dirt weed- you remember, the bricks we used to get in the 70's that was water-cured in dirty assed ditch water while the whole harvest was being taken.
So a few rambling questions for you:
You said your plant developed an intense orange aroma as it matured, and if I recall accurately (I was smoking BBK when I read your thread so my recall might have been off
) you said that aroma stayed through cure? I believe your harvest was mid-December, two weeks earlier than mine. So how is the taste and aroma now that it's cured longer?
How was the bud density of your BBK compared to the other strains you grew? Mine suffered here, see-through wispy.
Your yield was an oz better than mine. I'm happy for you, and that's not in itself so meaningful to me, except that over the last several years I've transitioned to only do single plant grows, concentrating on per-plant yield. M
y yield was subpar, 104g / 3.7oz. cured, when I am used to two to three times that amount per plant in my past grows using the same tent / light / nute system.
I'm curious to figure if I had a bad phenotype that contributed to our differences? I'll drop a couple of my pic's here after this post, for your comparison.
Last, you said none of your plants stretched significantly & I'm looking for clues here.
O
ver the last couple of years, I've begun transitioning from HID to LED lighting. As experience has started making the connections, I've tallied four LED grows have been great bud quality and yield, including an all-time single-plant high of 11.76oz.. But surprisingly, NONE of my LED grows have stretched at all. That 11.76 oz grow never went over 10" above my ebb 'nGro container. Compared to all nine of my previous autoflower grows under HID, in which every one of those stretched. I reverted my BBK grow to HID to test this theory, and it DID stretch.
So my rambling question on this topic is, what was the distance between your plant canopy and your light?
In my past HID experience I've settled around 12 - 14" from the bulb to the plant canopy during full bloom cycle. And virtually all of my old photoperiod grows, and all HID Auto grows, have stretched. Usually 2-3X for photoperiods, and at least 1X for auto's. Using approximately the same spacing for my LED's again, NONE have stretched. So my suspicion(s) with LED is that more distance may be needed to encourage a healthy stretch? But my current grow of Dutch Passion Blue-AutoMazar, with LED at 18 - 20" above the plant canopy, is not stretching either.
I'm going to be watching as many auto grows as I can to see if my theory holds - that auto's won't stretch under LED's as well (or at all???). Do I need to veg all my auto's under HID to encourage a healthy stretch, then finish bloom under LED hoping for increased bud growth and density? Can I accomplish the same thing by raising the LED higher above the plant canopy?
Thanks for letting me ramble through this using your thread as a sounding board. I need to start a thread on this topic and track it diligently until I get to the bottom of this. Probably WILL do that after I return from vacation later in the month (I'm an ORF as well, so I also get to come and go whenever the #~@# I please). But for now, seeing a common thread in the BBK, I figure I'll get started with putting the thought to paper... uuuhhh, magnetic ink, that is
Looking forward to your next grow, Bro. In the meantime I'll be in KeyWest for St. Patty's so I'll' have one or three for ya. Until later,
may your right hand always be stretched out in friendship, but never in want.
