Purple Berry Kush

At long last, and after many tries (down to my last seed - I managed to mess things up often enough)... my long sought Purple Berry Kush baby has broken ground and I think we'll be OK... fingers crossed. Not sure I'm going to need the 15 gallon container I procured and stashed away awaiting the birth of this child. Looking at the size of the Anmesia 7 I have in this size pot I think a 10 gallon pot would be plenty this late in the season (those Amnesia's have had a 2 month head start). Many thanks to the folks at Spliff Seeds for the opportunity here. Looking forward to the day when I can acquire some of your seeds without special help, because I will. In any event this girl will veg indoors as soon as my autoflowers vacate my tent, which is a week or two. Then she'll be moved outdoors probably by the end of June or early July depending on how she's responding to my LED lights... then mother nature takes over for the remainder of the season. Grow baby grow! 😘

Slow and steady as she goes. The stalk on this baby is much sturdier than the recent pair of other seeds I germinated, so I'm not afraid to stick her outside in the sun for a couple hours for some early acclimation. She's tuff. At present she's only receiving some Azospirillum for root development. July 2 > Transplanted into a one quart container. No roots were visible on transplant. I've been moving her into the tent for about 4 hours in the morning before the LED lights switch off for acclimation. I think she likes it.

Yesterday was the first day I moved PBK girl into the tent with the older girls full-time. So she's now on LED lighting. She's a little bit ahead of my normal transplant and into LED lighting schedule but the space was available and I like putting as many plants on the same schedule as possible. I'm getting old (or maybe higher) and keeping track of a half dozen plants on more than 2 timing schedules can make your head swim. That's one of the reasons I like growing outdoors. More time to spend with the girls (and inspect them more closely). Indoors I just don't spend that much time hanging out with them. I may start to give her some veg nutrients at the end of the week but for the moment I'm using up the remainder of that small (one gallon) batch of Azospirillum. She won't be drinking much this week.

Everything moving according to plan. All my autoflowers have been harvested so there's plenty of space in the tent now. It's been a mild week temperature-wise with lots of fog (which she's never seen technically - yet) I can put her out in the sun for a little acclimation after the fog burns off. She's got a strong stalk for a little girl so I'm not worried about wind.

Things are looking up. I decided to repot the girl yesterday into her final home, which is a 7 gallon fabric pot. She has the tent to herself now as I've moved everything else outside at present. Lowered my LED lights to 18" to give full attention to this one baby.

PBK girl seems to be advancing quite nicely. Most of the plants I've moved outdoors have started stretching dramatically. I'm inclined to keep her indoors a couple more weeks. We'll see. The secondary growth at this point makes me not want to top her. I'll probably change my mind on that within the week. Temperatures have spiked upwards this past few days... getting up into the 90s. Still cool in the evenings, so my dogs will have to wait until the sun goes down before our daily hike because they no like the heat either. Especially Maggie the black one - she absorbs heat.

This plant is looking so good vegging that I'm inclined not to top her at all. That and she's growing so densely that it would be difficult to get in there and get a clean top. Probably where Fimming comes from. She's about 13" tall now and she really seems to like the LED light at the moment... although today she gets to spend a few hours in the sun for acclimation. She's plenty sturdy at this point so no worries about wind here (unlike my Cream & Cheese plant). When I harvest my smaller Amnesia I'll move this baby outside for the remainder of the summer - that should be within a week or so. August 3 > spending a few more hours in the sun for acclimation. I'm planning to harvest my small Amnesia on Monday morning so PBK will move outdoors permanently early next week. I expect she will start flowering pretty soon after that as my other indicas outdoors are starting to show pre-flowers.

The time has come to move outside permanently for the remainder of the summer. I harvested my smaller Amnesia Tuesday morning and now there's space on the patio for PBK girl. She hasn't been topped and I'm curious to see how much she stretches once she gets a full-time diet of sunshine. She's somewhere between 20-21" now. Her indica sisters nearby are twice as tall with huge internodal spacing. We shall see what develops.

Sure enough as soon as this girl got outside she lit the afterburners upward and she grew 9" last week. She's trying to catch up to her sisters on the patio which make her look small but she's doing quite nicely. The other girls are flowering now and I expect PBK to start shortly. Everybody on the patio got an underskirt trimming yesterday. Temperatures are spiking into the 90s for a few days - still California dry thankfully - but giving the girls lots of extra water in the early afternoon to keep everybody happy... because I can.

Still motoring along in the vertical growth department, but clearly flowering now. Probably could have called her flowering last week if I looked a little closer. Makes mixing up nutrients easier since everybody is eating same thing now - just different quantities. This PBK can drink a fair bit - almost 2 gallons and she's only in a 7 gallon pot. She grew 8" last week after 9" the week before. She clearly has a major top cola but it's probably a result of me not topping this girl at any point. Go baby go.

Things are starting to slow down vertically as she starts to flower more profusely, but she still grew about 5" last week. I did a little minor league low stress training by just pulling some of the branches down that were growing vertically near the main stem. Very pliable. Will probably do some interior lower pruning in the next few days. We're coming out of a pretty hot spell with a few days in a row in the 90s. September 1 > performed a substantial amount of pruning in the interior and base of the plant. The plant had a lot of vertical runners clogging up the interior.

She should be able to get a little more light and ventilation on the interior after a little pruning a few days ago, which should be the last of that necessary. She's motoring right along in the flowering department. She drinks a lot too. Has pretty much no trouble consuming 2 gallons of fluid just like the girls in larger containers. Just give them a few minutes for the pipes to take it up. It's been fairly warm lately but it's due to cool off and stay under 80 for the next week or so. Should be nice.

The height seems to have stabilized on this girl and it's all about the buds now. Everybody else on the patio has reached the flushing stage so this is the only girl I'm actually giving nutrients to. Makes life a little simpler. She's probably a couple weeks behind the other girls but that's about how she started out. September 16 > Mother Nature decided to give my girls a bath this morning before dawn. About 5/8 inch of rain - first we've had in my locale since spring. I basically went around to all 3 girls on the patio and shook every branch to shake off the excess water. Now I"M covered in water. I've never had any girls receive this much rain before. Shouldn't be a problem as the sun came out before noon and the wind will be up this afternoon... so the girls are mostly dry again by early afternoon. But quite the bath. Thanks Mom... I think that's all of that we'll need. 😳

Not too far away now. Some of the fan leaves are starting to turn purple at the outer edges. Haven't detected any amber in the trichomes so she looks like she'll be the last of the girls on my patio to finish. We actually got some more water this morning... but only a drizzle. Plenty however to get the girls nice and wet so we went through the shaking process again. Suns out this afternoon and the wind will come up again. No problem. Will probably flush this girl within a week. September 24 > After looking at trichomes yesterday I decided it was time to flush this baby so we did that this morning. She's really starting to turn purple all over, but mainly on the lower colas (which is all except one I suppose in this case).

Had something of a close call today... a near wilting event as the temperature soared to 100 and I wasn't paying proper attention. Actually I was up at dawn to harvest another large girl and she wiped me out after 4 hours in the heat and then lunch and a nap. When I revived I went outside and almost freaked out - you can tell almost instantaneously looking at one of your girls if she's wilting if you've been paying attention for that many months and this girl was crying out. Fortunately I was there to wet her whistle because she would NOT have lasted until morning. She's fine now... the pictures I took today were AFTER she recovered from that event. But it was a serious heat stress event for the girl. I flushed her yesterday morning and in the process removed her water retention tray. Shouldn't have mattered. On the bright side I only have one girl left alive to care for and that makes life easier. September 29 > Things have really cooled down at night the last few days... approaching the high 40's. Fall is officially here. Time to start thinking about turning on the heat in the house. Those temps have really brought on the purple for this girl. Gave her the last drink of water today... almost seems she's stopped drinking anyway. She knows what time it is.

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. 😎