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The 2023 grow was the most difficult I’ve had to date. Many factors contributed to this, as both humans and nature conspired to achieve a maelstrom of sorts in my life. That said, it all ended pretty well, and my objective for this grow was achieved.

The objective for this grow was to replenish the nearly empty CBD portion of our home dispensary. The reason we were running so low was because several of the CBD seeds that I’ve grown in the last few years turned out to be CBD duds. As in, no CBD showed up in the tests. This has become a rather serious, repeat problem. If you buy CBD seeds, you are expecting to get CBD. Instead, for example, I grew an alleged Ringo’s Gift that shouldn’t have more than 1% THC, but it had 22% THC and less than 0.03% CBD. Ringo’s Gift is not supposed to get you stoned. There were others that tested this way, and the discouraging part is the seeds all came from different sources. It appears a lot of folks out there don’t care what kind of seeds they are selling. So I didn’t know who to trust anymore. I’ve grown CBD duds for Harlequin, Sour Tsunami, Ringo’s Gift and ACDC. So this is at least fairly rampant in the growing community, from my perspective. Not many others test everything like I do, so if you grew some CBD recently and did not notice any pain relief that you were expecting, this could be why. As a strategy going forward, I will not purchase CBD seeds unless the breeder can provide me with a current test score, so I’ll know that I’m getting what I want, before I buy the seeds. I suggest you do the same.

Thankfully, I still had a few Harle-Tsu seeds that I knew had CBD in them, and I found one source of new CBD strains that I trusted would have medicine and that was the CBD Trifecta from Humboldt Seeds. They had three new cultivars that had verified test results, so I decided to give them a shot. The three new cultivars I grew were Love Lucy, Honey Tsu, and Harley Spice. All three are legitimate CBD cultivars and I have the tests to prove it. Of the three, I would be inclined to grow Love Lucy and Honey Tsu again. I probably will next year. Additionally, I grew hemp this year for the first time, two cultivars, Sour Electra and the White CBG, both from Oregon CBD.

I was encouraged by the lineup I ended up growing. I had four Harle Tsu, two White CBG, and one each of Sour Electra, Love Lucy, Honey Tsu, and Harley Spice. Everything in the cottage looked good to go. It was a relief to grow with confidence this year, that these plants would have the medicine my dispensary needed.

Everything was planted on June 1, a glorious sunny day. I considered it a perfect day for transitioning from inside the cottage to outside in the beds.

Then, one of the thickest and longest lasting marine layers (fog and overcast) that I’ve ever lived through descended upon our part of the world. For the next 16 days, my plants never saw the sun. Not even a silhouette. During this time, I could have done any foliar spray I wanted at any time of the day, because those plants were in no danger of seeing the sun. 

As a grower, it was discouraging. As a human, it was a bit frightening. It was June and it was dark. It was definitely not normal, and the only way we’ll know if this is something we can expect to return, or an anomaly, will be whether it happens again and how soon.

If it was discouraging for me, it was crystal clear to the plants what they needed to do. They’d just come from a timer controlled indoor lighting situation and now they were getting no sun at all.

So, of course most of them tried to flower. By most, I mean everything but the two White CBG tried to flower. I could have just let them flower, of course, but that would not have significantly helped our dispensary situation, so I got on my knees and went to work, removing flowers from every plant. But unlike previous years when I would immediately brew a high nitrogen tea to force them back to veg growth, these plants did not need nitrogen. I had filled those beds for weeks prior to planting with compost teas rich in California Brown Bat guano, that I’d captured and dried the previous year. The beds were full of nitrogen and ready to explode.

What they needed was the sun. All they needed was the sun. Without the sun, this grow was looking lost.

Finally, the sun started peeking through the clouds and began contacting the plants. Such a tease. However, as soon as they saw the sun, they returned to veg growing without any prompting by a compost tea. However, the sun remained on and off for a couple more weeks, and did not really become a normal summer sun until the end of June. In this overhead photo taken at the end of June, the plants are not even half the size I would expect by that time.

Note the diminished hue. Even this was in only partial sun.

From that discouraging point forward, the grow went very well. I understood that my plants were not going to grow the way I had wanted. They were going to be smaller, no matter what. So then the focus became on making whatever flowers we were going to harvest the most potent possible. I was curious about how potent we could make the plants after such a poor start. I needn’t have worried.

Honey Tsu continued a proud tradition of huge flowers grown in bed 18. 

And Love Lucy turned out to be a beautiful and powerful lady.

So we went from the discouraging June to the explosive July, when the girls did their best making up for lost time. 

On the pathogen and pest front, 2023 marks two straight years where our IPM program and the Stargus effect were proven to be the most effective strategies for pests and mold, respectively, that we’ve ever used.

Specifically, for the second straight year, my pre-dawn foliar spraying was as follows for the year:

Monday–Regalia

Tuesday–Alternating weeks of Venerate and Grandevo

Wednesday–Regalia

Thursday–Stargus (once a week during flowering)

Friday–Regalia

Saturday and Sunday–No spray.  There were three BT sprays, which meant no Regalia for the week, because the two don’t interact well. During those weeks, I would hand pick any powdery mildew I found, which was rare, or be ready with spot spraying some Neem if necessary. It was not necessary. By spraying Regalia as often as I do, the periodic week off for BT does not cause an outbreak of powdery mildew. The spraying of Venerate and Grandevo completely eliminated thrips, aphids, mites, and many others while putting a serious damper on my old nemesis, the Western Cucumber Beetle. All of them could be found nearby on the borage, where they belong. Between beneficial plants and the weekly spray, our predatory insects got a little bored this summer. Our plants were pristine, with nary a bite mark on them except on old fan leaves. 

Borage, my Queen of companion plants.

For the second straight year, we had barely any mold, and the majority of mold we had came from inside one of the Harle-Tsu, so it was a systemic issue, and nothing we could prevent by using Stargus. Thankfully, that systemic issue was confined to one branch, not the entire plant. Otherwise, there was barely any mold. 

If you have not read my previous blog titled Know Your Bats and Spray your Stargus, read it, for more information on Stargus. It’s a miracle, folks, to grow outdoors and not lose chunks of flowers to mold. In the last two years, we have retained over 95% of the flowers we’ve grown. Rarely do we lose an entire flower to mold anymore. Those days are over.

All of the above products, Regalia, Venerate, Grandevo and Stargus are made by Pro Farm, formerly Marrone Bio Innovations. I am not paid by that company to promote their products. (not yet, I muse hopefully) I use them because they are better than anything else I’ve tried to date. They are organic, easy to apply, do not harm the plants in any way, and are pretty much foolproof, if you use them exactly as directed. Except for Regalia. You can use that as often as you need. 

So the grow proceeded with smaller plants in general, but as with any CBD type plant, the key is what’s inside the flower. For the season, we had four CBD plants that measured out at 25:1 ratios of CBD to THC. This is pretty much knocking it out of the park, in terms of growing highly medicinal, non-psychoactive cannabis. This is exactly what my wife (who doesn’t like getting stoned) has requested from the start. She wants to be high functioning, not high. 

The highest amount of THC was 6.57% in Honey Tsu. But of all the remaining CBD plants, the one with the highest amount of THC was ironically Sour Electra, the hemp cultivar. It only had 0.72%, so it wasn’t much, but all the others were between 0.30 and 0.50. Even concentrated, none of those plants would get you high. But they all had excellent terpene portfolios and have already proven to be effective medicine against pain.

The biggest surprise this year (besides the weather) was the White CBG, which many of you who have followed my blog since 2020 know is something I’ve desired in our dispensary. I wanted to start finding out what it can do. It is certainly helpful that we grew one of those plants to 22% CBG. Karen has been working that into her pain meds and especially, at night. So far, so good. Karen has slept better since taking CBG at night, which would indicate less night stress for her. We know that CBG is an antispasmodic, but we’re beginning to suspect she’s also an anti-inflammatory agent. We’re going to grow her again, probably several years in a row. And she’s pretty to look at, too.

The White CBG

Harle-Tsu at dawn.

The 2023 grow was a challenge for me. I lost my job on my birthday at the end of March. It was a complete shock and surprise. Nice knowing you.

It was difficult to move on for a while after that happened; especially since I had to start seeds on April 20. The motivation was not the same as previous years.

I wonder sometimes, if the weather we had was a direct reflection of the mood I was in, dark and dour. 

We also lost all the rest of our pets this year. Charlie, Wilma and Daffy, rest in peace. We are without pets for the first time since Karen and I met, 42 years ago. It’s a strange feeling, but we’re breathing and listening in the quiet right now, and in that silence, clues have formed as to what is probably coming next. Those who have known me as long or longer than Karen have always been surprised that I have never been a dog owner. I think it’s time for that to change. Some rescue is waiting for me out there right now.

So this last year was tough. But as it always does, the growing of the plant, once we got to grow, eventually healed me and set me back to task. The rote process of harvest was especially helpful, taking down plant after plant by myself became a zen like healing exercise, though my wrists ached. In a good way.

I have reacquired the Isolation Grow Blog and it has a new home, here at WordPress. All future blogs will be here as well. 

And I’m developing a Patreon Home Grow Lab for sometime this year. I need to get back to what I was loving: teaching students how to grow and then make medicine.

I’m very excited to be on my own doing this, and quite liberated from the difficulties from last year. I can now actually meet more of my online students. I think it would be great to interact with the Home Grow students I’ve taught in the online program. I’ll keep you posted.

The 2024 grow starts in just a few weeks. A varied grow, it will feature Royal Kush in abundance, The West Marin Mystery, Rainbow Kush, ACDC, Night Nurse, Hawaiian Dream, Hindu Kush, and possibly AK47 and maybe a surprise. I will be planting in our beds as always, but for the first time, I’m going to grow one plant directly in the soil, in our aviary. This will be a Hawaiian Dream plant, which allegedly grows 10-12 feet, so I’m going to start her at ground level and we’ll see how tall she gets. Also there will be more White CBG. 

Looking forward to it and especially looking forward to connecting with some of you once more, either through the blog, or when I’m doing Lab classes again. I have missed teaching you, and I look forward to helping you again. 

The hand of my child, Bee, with one of their friends.

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