Purple Berry Kush

October 1 > Harvest morning. New trick... get up before dawn... cut your plant down and hang her upside down... then go back to bed. Hehe... I like this retirement stuff. We get smarter as we age. 😎 I did a fair job of plucking fan leaves before harvest morning so there wasn't that much work for me to do anyway on this girl compared to some of the other monsters she grew up with. Took me only about 90 minutes to complete my normal processing and washing. She developed into a wonderful purple color at the end there. The unique feature of this grow for me was that I never topped this girl. Subsequently she developed a huge single top cola that grew about a foot taller than the rest of the plant. Served as a demonstration of why we top plants in general. Hard for me to imagine what a bunch of these in the wild looks like but this is what WILD looks like. Diary note > I'll come back later and add weights and things. I threw in a weight of 100 grams as a marker to appease the gods. Total guess. ======================================================================== October 7 > Guess I underestimated my yield a tad... love when that happens. 😁 Ended up coming in at 212 grams buds and 181 grams trim. Woohoo. Another growing season officially comes to a close today. 👌✊ Initially I wasn't sure I wanted to use the Trimbag on this baby... because she was my last plant to harvest this year and I had plenty of time to hand trim her... and I harbored various possibly incorrect assumptions about the Trimbag originally which I have now shed. More on that later. Let me lay out my personal Trimbag history here as a learning experience for the community... ======================================================================== Originally I won this tool as part of my September 2018 diary winnings... and I looked at it strictly as a tool for fairly large scale growers.. of which I did not consider myself at that time. I grew an amazingingly oversized Durban Poison for a 5 gallon pot and I got lucky I thought. ... Then I took a look at how much herb I processed this summer and I said THANK YOU Trimbag! It saved me more than enough hours of hand trimming to demonstrate it’s usefulness. (October 12) >> Already slowing down in post-harvest mode hehe... so it looks like I did the same thing as last year diary-wise. Now I have another Trimbag on my hands but all I need is another magnet actually (hehe)... the zippers show no signs of sticking up at this point after me throwing about 2-3 pounds of herb threw the mill, and the overall bag has only lightly been used at this point IMHO. I'm a little surprised I lost that magnet and it's not a great sign for the longevity of the embroidery - so to speak, but other than that it's solid construction. And simple. I’ll be contacting Trimbag to see if I can acquire a new magnet and we’ll see how that goes. Back to my expectations... I only used this device on stuff I grew outdoors... of which I had enough... more than twice what I grew last summer - but that was by design. If I was to set out a general rule… I would say that I expect the weight of buds to be roughly equal to the weight of trim. This is AFTER I have thrown away any fan leaves plucked on the morning of harvest which are not saved as trim. I stop plucking when buds start to get ripped up if I don’t. Round 1 >> The first go was the early Amnesia 7 batch (Little Girl flowered early), and honestly, I was unimpressed. I looked at it as maybe I didn't let it dry long enough. I have a ritual of washing all my outdoor grown herb which has generally tended to cause things to dry a tad quicker than what one would expect in the field. I walked away from this initial experience like boy I hope I screwed that up and it works better on round 2. Round 2 >> Cream & Cheese CBD ... I think this girl did more to confuse me than anything else. The buds were not oversized but she seemed to take forever to dry. Part of this is probably attributable to excess humidity in the first few days - a weird week - we actually had some rain which is very unusual. But even after a week of drying I only managed 63g of shake on this batch (via the Trimbag). I'm going WTF? Ahem.... I ended up with 269 grams of buds for my Cream & Cheese. After that 63 g shake by bag I added 165 g trim by hand... and I was seriously wondering why this bag thang existed. Turns out C&C was not a good example.... so don't let the bad things weigh you down. Round 3 >> Next came Northern Lights - and my attitude changed completely. I harvested 319g buds, but the initial run with Trimbag generated 144g trim which I followed with 186g hand trim. NL had very dense buds and large internodal spacing which made trimming EZ. She was a monster… but at the same time I had her trimmed in under 4 hours. Of all the beasties I grew outdoors this summer, this was the largest yield for a single plant - but trimming her was a relative breeze, and it felt like it. I thought I hit the sweet spot for maybe how dry the herb needed to be for the product to work well… but probably only partially correct. Plant structure is significant. Round 4 >> Next came round 2 with Amnesia. As I noted in my diary I knew I was going to end up with a pound of herb on this particular strain so I tried to beat this particular batch up to minimize my hand trimming and see what the effect was. The end result of this was that I generated a smaller amount of buds from the larger sized pot (Little Girl was in a 10 gallon container and generated 235g buds/ 360g trim and Big Girl was in a 15 gallon container that generated 223g buds/ 493g trim). Round 5 >> Next came where we’re at in this here diary…Purple Berry Kush. Now originally I wasn’t sure I wanted to run this baby thru the mill. I THOUGHT that maybe because I hadn’t topped this girl and I didn’t put her in a pot bigger than 7 gallons which put her at a direct disadvantage vs my other outdoor girls that the yield would be substantially smaller, but I’ll be damned she ended up with 212g buds. Very satisfied there… and this stuff smells great when I let her get some air. The key here on trimming for this round was twofold. I let the buds dry longer than I normally would have by a few days… because I had nothing pushing me to make space for reason A… and because stuff was intervening for reason B… golf tournament… Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in SF (Robert Plant was awesome - we share the same birthday and he was 71 in August - I can only hope I’m still rockin’ that hard in 9 years)…you know - stuff. PBK ended up working out the best of all. 212g buds vs 181g trim. That’s the ONLY variant that ended up with more buds than trim. Part of that was how easy PBK was to maintain. I only did ONE major pruning of internal growth - probably later than I should have - I was trying hard to let her grow as wild as possible. But she was very easy to prune fan leaves off when that purple time came. It’s seems clear at this point that indica’s are easier to trim than sativa’s with a Trimbag…. but I’m not sure that’s going to be a revelation to anyone. As far as I’m concerned, anything that grows with an inter-nodal spacing that allows you to neatly separate your buds will work better with the Trimbag. DRY is a necessary ingredient for using this device. Probably drier than I am accustomed to… but that’s why somebody invented Boveda packs right? Anyway… I’m a VERY SATISFIED Trimbag customer at this point. It takes a little work to determine how dry your herb needs to be but even if you have to experiment, the number of hours you save from hand trimming will eventually make it worth your while… and as a newly minted senior citizen I can say that while my time might be free - anything that helps reduce pain - including time spent trimming - becomes quite significant. NOW —> The other side of this coin is that I will probably NOT use the Trimbag when I get back to indoor growing in early December… because I expect to be growing much smaller plants. Most of the things I’ve grown indoors top out at less than a couple ounces so it’s not clear to me that Trimbag is necessary with a yield that small… but I can test that theory later this winter. ================================================= hehe… I kinda promised myself “no more winter crops” after last summers bounty but I found that making edibles consumes a significant quantity of herb, and I really like my brownies. So now that I’ve stocked up to solve that problem, I plan to get back to some indoor growing (because growing is FUN)… mainly autoflowers. I actually have better control of temperature for things that I grow in winter as opposed to summer… but I have to add the heat to make that happen. That compares with the difficulty of adequate cooling if I run my lights during daytime in summer - even with night lights summer temps can be a problem with no AC. I don’t have AC in my house. It’s a function of California microclimates. If I lived 15 miles east of here - we’d BAKE with no AC (air conditioning). If it weren’t for coastal fog - this whole place would be a desert. With climate change - we’re heading that way even WITH the fog. We roll the dice here every winter and hope we get enough snow in the Sierra to hold off the firestorms that will come in the fall. We went thru a period of “drought” here in California a relatively short while back but even though we are officially out of our drought phase the fall firestorm intensity seems to be getting worse every year. But this is a clear sign I’ve consumed too much indica for one evening and I’m starting to lose track of.... just about everything. Anyhow… I think I’m about diaried out for this year. I have a pretty freaking serious vacation planned to celebrate my retirement for late next month… Las Vegas golf > Joshua Tree National Park camping > Palm Desert resort golf > Beach camping South Carlsbad > Torrey Pines golf > Laguna Beach > Pismo Beach camping > Monterey. It’s been about 30 years since I did anything this crazy (and that was a Grateful Dead tour in 1987 thru Arizona/Utah/California for my 30th birthday). Big difference this time around? Cannabis is LEGAL for the entire trip. I will be well stocked enough to sedate anything that gets near me. See y’all in December. 😎