Jeffrey Hickey Writes Blogs

May 27

This is what it looks like the very first day our beds got a little over 12 hours of sun. What extends our light to cannabis growing time are the ways the sun peeks between branches from far off trees and still touches my plants. The beds are getting 11 hours of legitimate light, followed by an hour plus of on and off, but it’s these bursts of light that reactivate the internal clocks on each plant, assuring each young lady that we are, indeed, getting enough light to keep them vegetatively growing for the next several weeks. Due to our proximity to trees and a southern hill with trees on top, getting my plants to grow without early flowering has been an annual challenge.

This planting week has been fraught. Growers: do not ever assume you’ll get enough females from your regular seeds. Some years, it’s no problem, but every so often, a potential grow can be impacted by too many plants turning male in the last few days before planting. If you’ve read my blogs, you know about the Sack Festival I had one year, with 64 males out of 70 starts. So I have been somewhat traumatized by this process.

It has also turned me into a smarter starter, by becoming a big fan of feminized seeds. I generally hate sexing, but I’ll do it, in order to take advantage of the best regular seeds that I’m growing. Of the 19 seeds I started this year, 18 opened and appeared to be full of growth. Interestingly, the nine Royal Kush sprouted with such vigor that after I transplanted them, I commented to my wife, “They’re all growing like males.” Turned out that 8 out of 9 were males.

My seeds spend six weeks, or close to it, in the cottage under lights, before I take them outside to their beds. Feminized seeds start two weeks later, and I plant them after growing them for four weeks. The feminized seeds that I’ve let grow for six weeks in the cottage have all tried to flower during that last week. They don’t like being stressed at all. So I plant them early and this prevents them from attempting to flower inside the 3-gallon pot.

I try to picture how many of each cultivar I want to grow. If I only want one plant of a cultivar, I usually start with five seeds. There is a very good chance I’ll get at least one female from that group. But it’s not guaranteed.

This year, I want to grow 2-3 Royal Kush, so I started nine seeds. I began sexing them at three weeks. These seeds are among the most vigorous growers that I’ve ever seen. Watching them uniformly explode between weeks 3-4 got me very excited. Bee said they should have been in beds after week four, but they still hadn’t been sexed. We got all the way to day 35, five full weeks of growing, before any of those nine showed a definitive sign of either gender.

Until . . .

This was the largest male I have ever had to pull. The roots were so developed, no soil dropped to the ground when I pulled the plant out of the pot. I pulled the entire contents of that 3-gallon pot out clean. He would have been a great male to pollinate for seeds.

In 48 hours, seven plants became male, including the largest plant, and the one I deemed as a “spare.” The other two large plants remain female on day 37. I am checking them every hour and holding my breath.

Of the other cultivars with regular seeds, five out of five West Marin Mysteries turned male. Four out of five Fruitcake turned male. Rough year for getting females. I expect that will be different next year, but with regular seeds, you can never know in advance.

May 28

I now have seven gopher cages buried in beds. I’ll do the rest tomorrow, before I start putting in the plants. My back is telling me to stop right now.

Long range weather is still showing some cloudiness over the weekend, so putting these plants in tomorrow gives them a better chance of connecting with the sun, prior to clouding over. Then, there’s a warming trend by mid-next week. This is all good news.

Did my third foliar spray of the season. Every Tuesday is my IPM (Integrated Pest Management) spray of either Grandevo one week, or Venerate the next. We have already noticed a sharp reduction in insect damage for the vegetables we’ve begun growing. 

Very soon, the garden will be full of growing things, my favorite time of the year.

May 29

It’s planting day! Our 400 plus year old buckeye is beginning to flower. This tree, and her mycelium network beneath, are the primary influence on all my grows. This tree rules over the land and everything living within her proximity.

This morning, I’ll bury the remaining gopher cages and then start bringing out plants for transplanting. I’m excited, but I won’t lie. It’s the first time I’ve put my plants in gopher cages. The opening is not terribly wide, so I don’t expect all the plants to be placed softly on their spot. I expect some will be dropped, because there’s no way I can put my hands in with the plant. I can get the plant lined up and then I have to depend on a soft drop into soil. Not ideal, but neither is having gophers.

To be fair, I’m not seeing evidence of gophers in our beds at the moment. So some of our efforts to discourage them appear to have worked. But we’ll know much more when food becomes available in some of the beds. Cayenne pepper sits at the ready, and I’ll probably pour some around the base of each bed. 

But if these cages work, it could give us a year or two before we absolutely have to rebuild the beds. Budgetarily speaking, it would be better to wait a year or two before sinking approximately $20,000 into building new beds. 

In addition to the nine Royal Kush seeds, I started five West Marin Mystery seeds, and five out of five turned male. There will be no WMM this year. Having written that, I admit that before writing it, I checked our dispensary to see how much WMM we still had; and especially how much FECO. 

This was particularly important regarding the WMM we grew in 2021 in bed 18, the 2.2 pound beauty we grew with almost three percent terpenes, and that is now the daytime preferred medicine for a stroke victim we know. There is enough of that medicine to last another year. So, we don’t have to grow this cultivar this year. We’ll grow her again next for sure. I’ll start ten seeds next year.

The last regular seed cultivar we started were five from Fruitcake, which we were given. Four of five opened and two of those died after transplant. It happens. The stronger of the two remaining plants turned male. One plant remains that is still not sexed.

So–of the three cultivars we started regular seeds, totaling 19 seeds, three remain. Two Royal Kush and one from Fruitcake.

With literally hours before these plants will go into beds, we’re not yet sure of these three. There could be three females, or I could end up with nothing.

This brings us to the beauty of having feminized seeds in your arsenal. Right now, I have 13 feminized seeds in development. If every regular seed turned male (and they won’t) (but they could), I would still have plants to put into all my beds. I will never not have a plant for a bed again. In the years I end up with extras, those go to local home growers who are friends.

So, feminized seeds are your insurance against not having enough plants to grow. Over time, I purchase more feminized seeds than regular seeds, and consequently, I start fewer regular seeds than I used to.

This is also a conscious choice against the waste of soil caused by male plants. It costs a lot of money to buy good potting soil (I use Fox Farms Ocean Forest), and it irritates me every year at the amount of expensive soil wasted on males. So, I used to start 50-70 regular seeds. I’m down to about 20 now and that works for me. Next year, it will be closer to 25, because of the WMM failure this year. I’ll also be growing regular seeds for Rose, Purple Punch and AK-47.

So, I am currently sexing the remaining three every hour or so while I’m awake. I prefer a less stressful sexing and I do everything I can to achieve that, but if you grow every year, you’re gonna have some weird ones.

We also are attempting to make our beds last another year by burying gopher cages in them and placing the plants inside the cages. Honestly, gophers have never shown much interest in cannabis. They want veggies.  But they can destroy whatever you’ve got growing, so we’re taking precautions. 

The cage goes well down, but the wire should remain several inches above soil surface, to help prevent slugs.

Before planting.

The first five plants are in beds. 

There was nothing easy about most of these transplants. Taking plants out of their 3-gallon containers, flipping them and then placing them gently inside each narrow cage was a challenge. There’s no room for either of my hands to stay on the bottom of the plant and guide them into place. I have to get them over the opening, lower them into the opening, and then let the plant go a couple of inches before it hits the soil. Unless they start falling apart immediately, in which case, I have to reconstruct the roots as best I can and cover everything with fresh soil. 

Of the five plants, three had some crumbling, the worst being the White CBG in bed 19. But I think she’ll be ok. Same with both Hindu Kush and Purple Hindu Kush. They look fine now. But two of the plants did something I’ve never seen before and it makes me very excited about those plants. When I pulled out each of the Royal Kush plants from the 3-gallon pots, they remained 100% intact. The roots were so developed in each pot, the soil was bound. I’ve never had a 3-gallon transplant without any soil spillage. They landed softly, completely wrapped in white. Without doubt, these plants needed to be planted today. They look very happy to be in their final home. 

Royal Kush in bed 18, happy to be home.

Only one hour later, the above Royal Kush, showed pollen sacks. I had sexed her prior to planting her, and now, she’s a he. Once again when I pulled that plant from the bed, it took most of the 3-gallon soil with it. 

To take out a plant that developed pollen sacks after planting was a gut punch, and required a few moments of reevaluation.

The remaining plants in the cottage, with one exception, are four weeks old today. That’s the feminized seeds. I’m giving them an extra day inside before planting. This morning, I observed that the beds holding the remaining plants are about 15-20 minutes behind the first row of beds, in terms of the sun hitting them. That time will be slightly less tomorrow. 

These minutes matter in my beds. They literally could be the difference between a plant growing vegetatively, or going to early flower. They will be getting slightly over 12 hours of sun, closer to 12:30 than 12. But they’ll never get so much as 13 hours. Because of the trees that surround us that I cannot chop down, we barely get enough light to grow, and we always have a problem with early flowering..

That’s why I have to be so precise every year, when we start seeds, when we start feminized seeds, and when we plant. There is very little margin for error.

Three and possibly four plants will go in tomorrow, but we’re holding out plants for one bed and another for the aviary. Those plants are still inside the cottage growing and in some cases, sexing. A decision will be made in the next week on which plant will fill bed 17.

May 30

Well, I decided to do something about the lack of early morning sun. This is my 9th grow and there has only been one year without a plant trying to flower early. I’ve speculated on many reasons why this has been so, and have largely accepted it as one of my garden realities. The amount of light I get is marginal for growing. I also had it in the back of my mind that the goal in transitioning from cottage to outside, is to keep the amount of time they get light to be approximately equal. I needed more light in the beds. The difference between 13 hours and 15 minutes of light in the cottage and barely 12 hours outside, could be the shock that causes so many early flowering attempts.

A few years ago, Bee and I began brainstorming potential solutions to the early morning light/not getting 12 hours dilemma. Was there some way of bringing indoor light to the outside? It would not have to be much. Just enough to wake up the plants and trick them into thinking they’re getting the sun for over 12 hours. I did not want some large, garish outdoor lighting that would disturb the mornings of my neighbors. I needed something small and powerful.

I did some research on outdoor lighting. I found a potential solution. It’s not much, but this might be a game changer for me:

Two small, 150 watt full spectrum LED lights, attached to a timer, are now running from 5:40–7:30 am. They stop almost the exact moment all the plants in the middle row begin to get sun. 

The purpose of these lights is not to cause growth, but to simply fool these plants into thinking the sun is on them. 

So far, I’m seeing veg growth on the plants and no one is showing a flowering sign. If this works, it will change my grows forever.

Btw, don’t be scared about plants trying to flower early. If you read my blog titled Compost Teas, you can find how to turn early flowering plants back to vegetative growing.

No more males were found today.

May 31

Fruitcake was planted, so eight are now in beds. Hawaiian Dream is three weeks old and growing like crazy in the cottage. She will go into bed 18 in a week. Because we lost the one giant Royal Kush, we’re going to grow Hawaiian Dream in a bed and not the ground. We are still planning on growing one plant in the ground as an experiment. That will either be a White CBG, an ACDC, or a surprise unknown cultivar for which we were given some late seeds from Thailand. We’ll see. No males found today. 

June 1

Bottoms of tomato cages are now in the ground, around each plant. Next layer of cage will go on once branches start reaching the rungs of the tomato cages. Training will begin around that time, too. We wonder if this will be another year where we have to attach a third part to the tomato cages. I suspect we might for Hawaiian Dream. Only six plants remain in the cottage and the three possible plants from Thailand have potentially two more weeks of sexing.

I also made a decision to start a feminized Royal Kush seed. It’s a little late, but our goal this year was to grow 2-3 Royal Kush. We’ve only got one. By starting the seed on May 28, she’ll have about nine to ten weeks to vegetatively grow before flowering commences. She won’t grow as large as a plant I started six weeks earlier, but she can still grow large enough for our needs. I will not have a grow victimized by male regular seeds again.

Of the eight plants in beds so far, six are from feminized seeds and two are from regular seeds. It’s been exactly six weeks since I started seeds. Those two that are growing, they never showed either a female sign or a male sign as to their gender. But at six weeks, they’re girls.

So, three more plants will be placed in beds over the next two weeks. While lights are still on in the cottage, my wife is going to get a few more veggies and herbs started, like basil, because those things grow best around here, later in the summer.

This morning, I poured my first ever compost tea that had been made using our own mycorrhizae. We have long suspected that we have the magical substance growing wild around our 400 year old buckeye, and we were right:

This is the real deal. It brewed in my tea for 50 hours prior to pouring. What does mycorrhizae do? Well, it’s the ultimate soil builder for the future, but for the immediate, this should allow all of my plants to uptake approximately 30-40 percent more nutrients from the tea. It also minimizes any potential water stress. I’ve used powdered mycorrhizae for years. I’m humbled and overjoyed to be using the real thing, right out of the ground.

The 2024 grow is on. Progress and problems will be noted in the months ahead. 

Happy Growing, everyone. Feel free to ask questions.

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