Organic Outdoor Oregon

first diary and not off to a good start since it wasn't planned...the plants are 8 weeks old now and i didnt take photos/keep stats, but will start now. i aim for all natural (just good dirt, water and sun) but will settle for organic. i dont anticipate these needing any nutrients though and hopefully no pests/diseases. germinated three sour nightmare seeds from a hermaphrodite female i grew a few years ago and got one female...it's the shorter one in the photo with three but it's also been transplanted poorly once into some better dirt and the two males weren't. they're just on a 15/9 light schedule to match outdoors arond the third week of May...under a viparspectra "450"

two "dream queen" (i think it's the blue dream x space queen variety) autos are in the first week of flower here and outside when the weather is nice. the tall dark handsome male on the left is dead now...after deciding against orcing it to flower and collect some pollen for one branch of the female...i have enough seeds and new strains to try :)

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it's been cloudy and cold but it's growing...stems mostly though. 14 nodes and 11 blade leafs though is doing fine. autos are entering 3rd week of flower. the soil is pretty hot acidic humus from my compost bin mixed 50/50 with pretty spent potting soil and/or loam from the creek bed. the well water is ph neutral.

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nodes started to alternate at #17 and apical fan leaf blade count dropped from 11 to 9 <shrugs>....so it's 22 nodes and 38 branches. the autos are unremarkable.

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so i harvested the dream queen autos with mostly cloudy trichomes after about 9 weeks of flowering...looks like maybe 2 ounces. maybe could have used more dirt/nutrients but probably wont grow the strain again to find out. the sugar leaves never got very frosty at all and trichromes overall are small and sparse. it'll be something different to try is all. update: i should have made this a harvest week but i don't bother to weigh wet branches and didn't really know any of the other info at the time, and assumed wrongly i could change the week later. anyway the dry weight of the dream queen is 58g...still needs to cure but the smell and taste is mild <shrugs>

trellised from about 3' to 6'...might need more after "the stretch" but it cant hurt

she's a big boned girl ; )

the roots are out beyond the better soil and it started losing a half dozen or so older leafs a day and i thought maybe it could use some nutrients...so i gave her 5 gals. of steeped compost tea. will see if that has any effect...if not she can probably do without a lot of those leafs anyway. the canopy is leveling out nicely.

well the excessive leaf loss got worse before it got better, but she's flowering now and will be losing leafs naturally and i don't like to feed during the stretch so nothing to say or do really. i'll put another layer of trellis up soon.

nothing to report other than added more trellis in case of high winds... next day update: ack ok i mispoke and seem to have one branch affected by a fungus wilt. thought it needed water and it did respond to being watered, but only for a day or two before it drooped again. it's the lowest branch, to the right in the photo above. no signs of stem rot or a boring beatle, but i've not dealt with wilt before and was slow to recognize the issue. so i didnt find any organic fungicide marketed for verticillium wilt which it probably is...ordered some for fusarium wilt but it won't be here for a week. i suspect it's been suffering for some time and probably a good sign that it's still contained to a single branch and hopefully it wont spread further. the single branch may not recover but thats ok. if the branch doesnt show signs of recovery soon i'll chop it, but i dont think the fungus spreads from branch to branch...just soil to branch...so anyway i soaked the soil with diluted hydrogen peroxide was all i could think of for now and will keep an eye on it.

ok so the branch wasn't recovering and i chopped it off...it was the shortest branch on the side that gets the least light and wasnt going to produce much anyway. had an issue with my camera and didnt get a good photo of it but tried to circle where it is in some old photos i've posted here. also another branch is showing the early signs of it but it's not progressing at the moment. my fusarium fungicide has been delayed in the mail and i'm not happy about it. i pulled up the weed barrier fabric thinking dryer and cooler soil and maybe extra oxygen and uv rays will help inhibit it. and under the idea that a healthy plant is less susceptible to disease i gave her a foliar spray of golden tree and i'm making some aerated compost tea with molasses and some 0.5-3-30 MarkNature brand seaweed granules...and crossing my fingers.

the fusarium fungicide arrived and been applied...she will get another treatment this week. it's mycostop biofungicide, omri certified and on the "approved for cannabis" list in oregon, colorado and probably elsewhere. she seems to be holding her own against the disease for now...some of the leafs that have died don't detach readily at the base of the stem like a normal death does, which is also a sign of the disease. but she seems healthy, not stunted, and progressing normally for the third week of flower and lots of budlets in the canopy : ) some type of butterflies i've not noticed here before showed up and the next morning i found one cluster bomb of bud worm eggs so i'm on alert for that...the butterflies that are always here prefer other plants. hopefully these new ones are just migrating thru...

she's not getting a lot of photons thru the smoke and ash from forest fires all around the area. it's been the thickest i've seen in my 65 years here but a wind direction change is in the forecast and should get a bit better soon. she's still showing signs of the wilt disease but no actual wilt so i'll continue to give her the fungicide weekly. other than that, no news is good news.

due to the forest fire smoke, temps and sunlight have been less than favorable but she's grown and probably not much worse than being under a fall rainstorm. however, the smoke particles have been creating a dense fog that lasts thru most of the day and there's been no wind and i'm blaming that for some powdery mildew i found where leaves were touching. so i trimmed that out and did a foliar spray of milk for it and then remembered you need sunlight to activate that or something so did a foliar with hydrogen peroxide. i shoulda put a fan out there maybe and i might try to make a trip to town and get some better fungicide for pwm. also, i found another small egg drop that had it been white instead of yellow i might not have spotted with all the ash thats collected. the ash is mostly just sticking to the sugar leafs but i dont smoke those so i'm not too concerned about it. at least the fire near me was trees and not a housing subdivision like some others. rain is in the forecast and she'll probably go under cover now till harvest update: got the halfass hillbilly greenhouse up...bigger and different design than i've done before and took some trial and error and cussing at old too sticky masking tape tearing holes in the film that had to be patched and working alone but we got a decent rainfall and its not leaking and only needs to last a month or so. big box fan on the ground blowing up and a little fan blowing air across the top from the opposite corner.

i bought some monterey brand bacillus amy. for powdery mildew and put another little fan in an upper corner to help dry off the morning dew and that's working to keep the pwm in check now. buds are starting to stack on some weight...

well i was hoping she could make it thru a week without any "drama" and then yesterday i found, and removed, a number of small patches of bud rot. they were all in the dead air above and to the sides of the box fan, on relatively low, horizontal growing colas where dew collected. i feel stupid because i knew she was staying wetter there from heavy dew, but hasn't been rained on, so wasn't worried about rot...had more fans and didn't take any action...live and learn. added/moved a fan and did a foliar of the bacillus amy. for it. the odds are good that i didnt spot every patch of it so that's something i'll be on the watch for now thru harvest & wet trim a couple or three weeks from now. other than that i cant complain 😎 she got aerated compost tea w/molasses and seaweed granules today...last feeding.

so i'm mixing the bacillus amy. at full strength and applying every 3-4 days and playing a daily game of whack-a-mole with a few patches of bud rot...and feeling like i'm risking a sudden widespread outbreak of it that will require an emergency harvest. probably only snipped about 1/3rd an ounce worth so far so its not a lot relative to what i hope to harvest. bud trichomes are about 50-60% cloudy...sorry i dont have a way to photograph them at a useful resolution. her mother was harvested on an oct 14th (three years ago) a bit early, but i and everyone else really liked the smoke so if she can make it to the 14th a week from now in decent shape i'll probably be happy and she'll probably be chopped. headed for another stretch of rain here and constant high humidity before then though... oh btw and fyi the bacillus amy. is on the "approved for cannabis" list in oregon too and can be applied up to the day of harvest i spent a few hours cutting fan leaves mostly to lessen the work load come harvest time. i may need to wash them after wet trim, there's a lot of crap on them this year from dis, dat and d'other. Peace and well wishes to all...down the home stretch now. 😀

well i started losing ground to the blasted mold and harvested a few days ago. i've never had bud rot so early and most everyone i've heard of locally had a similar experience. and people with much better setups than mine who thought they were safe got it too...the year of diseases i guess . it's not apparent in the photo's i've posted since the forest fire ash but the plant is filthy and looks worse in person than the photos i posted here now. ash, soot, dirt, bug crap etc. i guess collected mostly on leafs but under my little field microscope the buds looked pretty dirty too...so i did a quick trim and then washed in lemon juice and baking soda and hung to drip dry outside for awhile before moving to the drying room...checking for mold at every step. i let one of the wash buckets settle overnight and was surprised at the amount of fine dirt. i took every branch down and checked for mold with a flashlight after one day of drying and again after two days. and i kept the drying room warmer and dryer than botrytis likes for the first two days...70-75f and 50-55%rh...and am feeling pretty confident it's no longer an issue. i probably only lost a few ounces to mold(dry weight)...what a hassle though. i'll post the dry weight in a week or two and anything else that comes to mind...sampled some that got clipped when the mold showed a couple weeks ago but it's not been dried and cured properly. update: ok so a week to dry till the buds snap off cleanly by hand (except the thicker stemmed tops). i was going to need another dozen canning jars and was going to have to settle for regular mouths at an inflated covid price, and not looking forward to burping so many jars daily for weeks. and it was cheaper to buy some food grade 5 gal. buckets so that;s what i'm using to cure in and have an empty one to pour into and help mix the mass daily. 3 ounces in jars that got snipped early due to mold, 20 and 17 ounces in the buckets from day one and day two of harvest. now then...stuff i'd do differently this grow in retrospect: either have provided more good compost humus to the bed or start giving nutrients when the leaf blade count dropped from 11 to 7 after node 22 some of the compost wasnt ready and maybe the source of the wilt disease i got...it was winter time compost and maybe hadnt got hot enough long enough to kill things...so i made more over the summer do some pre-emptive fungicide application do some insecticide application...it got eaten up a lot, mostly by leafhoppers this year, and weakens the plant somewhat and more prone to other diseases erm that about covers it i think other than the build a greenhouse thing! Peace, out. : )