YOLO’ing Carribean Queen

Keef_Moon I feel like I’ve found a cheat code. I’ve never had growth this fast. I’ve been eyeballing tray2grow for a while now. However I was fighting the idea of coco coir. I wanted coco hydro mechanics without the coco chemistry. I did a test run with some black widow on the T2G and did some tweaks. Straight promix was a bit too swampy for it so I added 20% pumice for this run. Just mixing it, I could feel it was right. These results are definitely remarkable. These are ACI 1/2 gal nursery bags (cheap and porous). After seeing air pruning on day 12, I’ll just simply drop them into their forever 5 gal. No root binding and they just continue on. They’ve tapered to 14 hours 20dli. Node 5 will be 12/12 and observe.

Keef_Moon Up potted to 5 gallon with my Gaia mix. I add chelaters and transplant support at this stage and at top dress. They are listed above. There was lots of lateral air pruning up the sides of the 1/2 gal bags so it was time to move along. I spaced out on getting a picture of that. I’ll keep 20 DLI and 14 hours of light for a few days and assess the bedtime droop. The 2 closest queens to you on the previous entry were for a friend and have left the building.

Keef_Moon It’s a lot of real estate for the 1/2 gal bags to populate so I top watered them in and then alternated sides up top as needed. I filled the tray2grows and shut them off until they emptied to ease the roots in. I did this twice and they are now on constant. The front left plant air pruned so I went for it. One watering I gave some ‘recharge’. The two on the right unfortunately HAD to lose a few leaves. Other than that, some specific tucking all around. Dropped to 12/12 at 30dli. I’m gonna bump and keep bumping til they tell me. Tomorrow I’ll try 32 and watch the camera. Again, when I see a droop at 60 ish mins left, I will pull back and let em ride it out.

Keef_Moon As I progress, I think I’m on the right track with this 12 hour veg. The leaves are talking and seem content. Mid week I topped at the 7th. I was originally warned about this for general control and LST. We are at 30 DLI still because each of them had to lose some GIANT fans …and it was a lot of lumber. Big enough that I thought the biomass would need a recovery time. So ‘recharge’ it was as well and they haven’t barked at all. If it was one plant in there I’d have kept my hands off because it was super impressive. Time lapse showed the fans rotating like the ISS to try to give the lowers some love. This is the shit I geek over. I’ll try 35 DLI tomorrow and watch the time lapse for droop time. This is where mystery lies and if I succeed at all. Apologies if I’m long winded or aloof on this. I’m a rogue with only one live person in the hobby around me to bounce stuff off of. I suffer for my art now you get to 😉

Keef_Moon At this point in a typical hybrid, I’d definitely see evidence of flower. It’s now up to them and a lot of speculation from me. **crosses fingers and hopes that 4’ is mid button onset** I bumped to 33 DLI and they started to pale. That supersedes the daily leaf droop that I was looking for. So I’m gonna park at 30 DLI- 700 PPFD for now. If veg stays manageable this way, I’ll maybe consider playing with bud development intensity. If it goes sideways and it’s controlling monsters, I’ll consider a dip even. But hopefully it all stays the course of static DLI because I have a bias and kinda want that outcome 😆.

Keef_Moon This week marked the turning point in my educational Queen experiment. Now the loooong burn. After more than 6 weeks under 12/12, the first female preflowers finally appeared. What surprised me wasn’t when they arrived—it was everything that happened before they did. Rather than showing the abrupt transition from veg to flower that we often expect, these plants spent the entire time steadily building their framework. Branches lengthened, structure matured, and the canopy continued to evolve without any obvious “switch” being thrown. Kinda like they were in ‘stretch’ from launch. That has become the central lesson of this grow so far. Instead of thinking in terms of a plant being either in veg or in flower, these equatorial genetics seem to operate more like they’re always moving toward flowering while continuing to build their architecture until sexual maturity catches up. The first pistils didn’t signal the beginning of growth—they simply confirmed what the plant had been working toward all along. If there’s one takeaway from this, it’s that Caribbean Queen has challenged almost every assumption I had about the timing of photoperiod flowering. Instead of asking, “When does flowering start?” I’m finding myself asking, “When does the plant decide it’s mature enough to show me?”

Keef_Moon Another week and the girls continue to write their own story. The two on the right are most similar. Front left is just gonna be a short weirdo. They’ve all gotten the same love. I would have liked the back right one to be in a 10 gal and given the whole tent. Just let it ride. Maybe next time if I like it. Stretch hasn’t stopped, but it feels like it’s easing off. Instead of racing for the light, they’re beginning to settle into the canopy they built over the last several weeks. This grow continues to challenge what I expected from a typical indoor flip. There was never an explosive transition into flower. They simply kept adding structure under 12/12, slowly stacking branches and leaf mass while maturing at their own pace. The environment has become almost boring—in the best possible way. Around 30 DLI still appears to be their sweet spot. They let me know pretty quickly when I pushed harder, so I’ve stopped trying to force the issue and started listening instead. Now it’s mostly a waiting game.

Keef_Moon Life got in the way and I had to skip a week. The past 2 weeks have showed me that these would be awesome in a green house and let loose. But tent restrictions and airflow led me to lollipopping. I was hoping for natural shape but these girls want more room than I can give. Now let’s just get some good flower. I’m conflicted on pumping more DLI or staying the course at static 32ish. I called this ‘week 3 defol’ because the back girl has buttons and it was getting tough rh wise. The little one got culled because it had no pistils and was just acting weird. I’d rather have the space at this point. It’s now outside on a our flip week outdoors for my region. Let’s see what it does for fun. I’ve seen what I set out for I think to support my 12/12 hypothesis. If someone can correct me that’s cool. It seems to me that this equatorial region plant at this point just feels like they are always in stretch at 12/12 from the start. They just flowered when mature. Comparing that to an auto needing to race to get there at 20 hours+ of light in a 90 day window, this feels relatively correct. And this modality really did help from making them giants indoors. And quite frankly, had I not topped and this was a huge grow room per se, these would have been damn close to how they look in the original video. How did I get here? In the end, I kept hearing that equatorial’s herm and that’s just that. I cried foul. When maybe the typical hybrid modality is the fly in the ointment. Especially when you have a video receipt of nice Rasta dudes pheno hunting in Barbuda. DGC’s ‘Banner’ once interjected on their show, to grow for the cultivar and that stuck with me.

Keef_Moon Week 10 from seed — and this week is all about phenotype variation. This is long but stay with me here. These four Caribbean Queens were started together and have shared the same environment, containers, soil, light schedule and general treatment, but at this point they look like four very different plants. Medium girl has separated herself with the most developed flowers so far. She’s stacking early and building noticeably more mass along the stem. Praying girl is second in flower development and still has that upright, aggressive posture she’s shown from early on. Spindly girl is taking her time. She has the sites and plenty of stem to work with, but she looks like she’s only beginning to build the flowers the other two started earlier. I’m very curious to see whether those widely spaced sites eventually turn into long spears. And then there’s the short girl. She remained dramatically shorter, broader and later to transition than her sisters, to the point that I moved her outdoors. Seeing her away from the others really emphasizes just how different her structure is. …Same seed line. Same starting date. Same room. Four very different expressions. At this point, that phenotypic spread is becoming one of the most interesting parts of the grow. One important takeaway: Caribbean Queen still appears to be a young, variable line. Based on these four plants alone, I would be hesitant to judge the cultivar from a single seed. The phenotypic spread here is enormous — from the short, broad, reluctant-to-flower plant now outdoors to the much more equatorial-looking indoor expressions, and even those three are developing flowers at noticeably different rates. If I had planted only one of these seeds, my impression of “Caribbean Queen” could be completely different depending on which seed I happened to pull. For me, this looks much more like a line to hunt than sample. Four seeds haven’t shown me what Caribbean Queen is — they’ve shown me how much territory Caribbean Queen can currently cover.