Strain
๐The Good๐
As of writing this I am 7 days post jarring so she is still a little young (hasn't gotten the full cure yet) and all I can say is that this suff is EPIC! Don't know if I just happened to get a great pheno but vaping this tastes great, like a caramel pine with the smell having a lemon sent as well (but the lemon doesn't come through in the vape). The smell and taste is A+.....
The high itself (again remember this is only 7 days cured so it's still young) is amazing! The high comes on really strong and has long lasting waves of relaxing euphoria. This stuff is listed at 22% THC from Canuk seeds and I believe it, I haven't had it tested at a lab (yet, I'm pondering it) but I can compare it to the NG Blueberry that is also an very similar Indica hybrid and I did have the NG Blueberry lab tested. We have tried it and shared it with 2 other friends and all of us agree that it is significantly stronger then the NC Blueberry, so much so that we are warning friends to take it easy when they smoke this.
Breeder says quotes the high as "Couch Lock and Physical", out pheno doesn't really go down that road. It's relaxing and euphoric (extremely nice), it's also great to sleep on but I wouldn't describe ours as "couch lock" in any sort of way. But maybe it'll move more there as it cures in more and I'm sure we could get ourselves couch locked if we over did it.
๐The Bad๐
The buds are really small, the cola's were long and I did a fair amount of lollypopping on her but even her top buds were small. This isn't a huge issue as it has a ton of kick and the smell/taste/high are amazing, I'd personally rather have a tasty amazing high that is a small but then a huge bud that disappointed.
The temps in the room for the last ~3.5 weeks of flowering got too high (27C-29C) this stressed the plant and she didn't handle it very well. I got some taco'ing and ~5+ banana's formed on her. This is my fault for letting the temps get that high, we had very outside temps and although I made major changes to my grow room over the winter this was the first real test of it. The changes I made did work to keep the temps lower and handle the heat better, but it wasn't enough to keep it at the magical <26C that is ideal. In the grow room I had 4 plant, all different breeders/strains and out of the 4 plants 2 had taco'ing leaves and banana's and 2 didn't. So the heat stress was too much for the Northern Lights but it was also too much for one of my other girls. Right now I blame myself for this not the breeder, I'll be growing Northern Lights again in the future and hopefully I can keep the temp <26C and I'll be able to determine if the banana's were a result of the high temps as I suspected.
The good part of the bad banana news is that I marked all of the cola's that had banana's (that I found). We are smoking those cola's first and so far we have found no seeds. So it looks like there is a high probability that those banana's are immature and didn't result in any seeds.
๐Harvest In Numbers๐
The Northern Lights was in a ~4x4 tent with 2 other girls (3 plants total). The inside of the tent is a little smaller then 4'x4' I'm using 15.1 sq.ft (1.4sq.m) because this is more realistic to the actual area in the tent.
During the grow I had heat issues in the grow room, this made me have to change the light schedule to running during the coolest parts of the night/morning and also resulted in my having to turn down the lights. So when I went to flower the lights started out at ~500w for the entire 4x4 tent, I then increased it over ~2-3 weeks up to 800w total for the entire 4x4 tent. However with the heat issues I then had to turn the lights down again to try and reduce the heat in the grow room, I ended turning them back down to and ended up at 600w. Realistically this grow got the 800w tent power for ~10 days and then it started to be turned down. This means that the actual wattage used is a bit hard to pin down since it changed during the grow. As a result I'm going to use the 800w total tent power, this was the peak power I used only for 7-10 days and thus it makes my numbers loose worse then they probably realistically are.
Northern Lights
350w LED above her
6.6 sq.ft (0.6125 sq.m)
1,620 g (57.14 oz) Wet Total
335.9 g (11.85 oz) Dry Total
20.7% Net dry weight
19 weeks growing + 1 week drying = 20 weeks total
335.9 g / 20 weeks = 16.8 g / week (0.6 oz /week)
335.9 g / 46 branches = 7.3g / branch (0.26 oz / branch)
335.9 g / 350 watts = 0.96 g / watt
335.9 g / 0.6125 sq.m = 548.4 g / sq.m
I'm extremely happy with these number. Canuk seeds doesn't quote a grams per sq meter, and I feel like 548 g per sq meter is very good. I'm also happy with my 0.96 g/watt, this is actually looking worse then it is since I only ran that high of wattage for ~10 days so realistically I got over 1g/w.
One of the reasons I veg for so long is its legal to grow here (4 plant limit) and for me I feel success in growing is more about how many grams I get per week invested rather than grams per watt or grams per sq meter.
Very happy with this strain and I will be growing it again... just gotta find some more seeds since I only had one of these.
๐Final Thoughts๐
Breeder suggestion F49 for harvest, I harvested at day F54 because I felt it needed more ripening and fattening up. I was thinking to let it run longer, however I was going out of town and dealing meant to committing to let it run until F58+ if I didn't pull it now. I was a bit worried if I let it go longer that it would get into a bad "couch lock" situation, however now that I've gotten to smoke it my pheno was not a couch locking one and I would have like to let it run longer.
If you are growing this strain I'd suggest to make sure your temps are <26C to prevent stress and to let it run to F55-F60 before harvest. It puts on a lot of weight in the end and I would suggest going a little more aggressive that I did on the lollypopping.
I'll do a bit more update with this as it cures and such, but for now happy growing.
Below is more info on the grow