Jeffrey Hickey Writes Blogs

The White CBG

Friday, August 9 is when all of my remaining plants began to flower.

The supplemental outdoor lighting has been off for thirteen days, and plants began flowering en masse.  By the end of yesterday, everything could be called flowering. I’ve never had a day where all my plants started to flower at once, but as a farmer, not much surprises me anymore. In fact, I was wondering if something like this might happen as a result of turning off the supplemental outdoor lighting. And that’s what happened. The day the lights were turned out, every plant went into the flowering process. It took 13 days to manifest. 

The first sign I notice when the flowering process begins are the tightening of the tops. Where there had once been vegetative growth coming out every which way, now the new growth is clustered together on top. If you move your head from side to side on a sunny day, you can see the sparkles of trichomes beginning to form on the leaves. 

There’s been lots of judicious pruning, and training has been limited by however much or little flexibility still remains in the plants. Once flowering begins, the plants will quickly move towards hardening into wood. But in the meantime, we’re on the lookout for any growth that needs pruning. It’s time to eliminate the growth that’s leading to nothing. All focus is on the pending flowers.

Trains are moving into the aisles.

I also have some unusual activity on both of the White CBG plants, which are hemp. I’ve never seen this before, but the plant is having very different stages of flowering. Both plants have flowers nearly ready to harvest, and other stalks that look to have only begun the flowering process. 

This is one of the White CBG plants. Note the difference in color from the top boughs to the bottom. The top is dark, and the flowers are well into their second month of development. Meanwhile, down below, there is a light green vegetative bough that looks to be about a week or two into the flowering process. 

I have no explanation for this odd growing behavior. It’s hemp and I haven’t grown a lot of it. I wonder if the increase in mycorrhizae is part of this. I’ll suspect that more if this kind of flowering shows up on the cannabis, too.  But so far, I’m seeing the early flowering cannabis to be uniform on each plant. It’s just starting, to be sure, but it’s obvious. The most logical explanation is that the roots were stressed when the transplant took place. The plant started to flower almost immediately. So perhaps the most developed flowers were from roots not stressed or damaged, and the newer flowers are from the roots that finally recovered to whatever degree.

After seeing this, I did an immediate foliar spray of Stargus on every plant that just started flowering. That spray will be every Thursday going forward, but I did not want to wait six days before hitting them with their first Stargus dose. I’m going to push Stargus this year and allow some of my stocky plants to remain fairly crowded. I want to know how crowded it can be before Stargus loses effectiveness. 

The more developed White CBG flower.

The younger flower (from the same plant).

Have not seen this before, but we’ll roll with it. This just means we’ll have a staged harvest on both of the CBG plants. We’ll take down what is ready and leave the rest to mature. Given that these plants will be harvested many weeks before all the others, we can harvest them in whatever manner that we prefer. This might even be a great opportunity to experiment a bit with the CBG, by harvesting flowers at different stages of development, to see if we can find the optimum time to harvest CBG, via testing.

I have read that if you want to get the maximum amount of CBG out of the plant, you should harvest her up to three weeks early. With both of our CBG plants showing the same staged harvest potential, this seems like a relatively easy way to test this. We’ll just have to make sure we label our samples correctly for the lab.

Discovering that every plant is flowering allowed me the opportunity to begin my Thursday foliar spray of Stargus. (If you don’t know what Stargus is, read my blog titled, “Know Your Bats and Spray Your Stargus.”) 

I want to soak each stalk with Stargus and begin the critical mold prevention and protection. The single greatest threat my plants face every year is mold. Before I started using Stargus, we could expect to lose up to a quarter of our crop to botrytis. 

Now, we lose a few flowers, but nothing massive. Anything widespread has to be systemic within a given plant. Stargus cannot stop systemic mold. But anything external, Stargus will stop. It’s the single most incredible and impactful foliar spray that I do. And Stargus can be sprayed at any time of day, with no negative impact on the plant, nor any bad interaction with other foliar sprays.

Also, and this is important, use Stargus exactly as directed. You won’t need extra. Just one complete spray a week while they flower. The truth is, most of the good that Stargus does is within those first few weeks. After that, the flowers develop and after about four-five weeks, you probably don’t have to spray anymore. Though I have sprayed it every Thursday until the week before I harvest a plant.

So . . . I’m busy. I’ve got flowering plants to attend and inspect. The next two months are crunch time. I’ll be writing about this grow until the harvest is complete and the test results have been returned. Looking forward to sharing those results and what they mean.

But folks, before I sign off today, I’ve got to acknowledge the change in the energy.

Several blogs ago, I wrote about my desire to change the energy in the world. Turns out, a lot of other people are thinking about the same thing. I’d imagine that some of you are reading this and nodding your heads. 

I couldn’t blog for days. I just needed to kick back and feel it.

I feel it when I’m outside. I feel it when I’m talking with people, any people. They’re feeling it, too. We’re talking about it together. I sincerely hope that wherever you live, you are noticing that the horrid, ugly weight we’ve all been carrying around for the last eight years is finally lifting. 

LOL, perhaps this is why all of my remaining plants decided to flower on the same day.

I feel it in every task I do. Yesterday, one of our sons came home to cut up some downed trees, and it was such a joy to join him and carry that cut wood and stack it, and sweat, and breathe hard. Neighbors said they could hear me giggling a bit while I carried heavy loads, and it lifted their spirits.

This thing we’re feeling is a chain reaction. It’s the breaking of a bad cycle. It doesn’t mean things will be perfect, but things are definitely going to be different, and I’m sensing, ultimately, a lot better.

So I ask again, to please vote. Whomever you vote for, please make your vote. This is our duty as citizens, and this year, more than any I’ve ever known in my life, we all desperately need your vote. Our country depends on active participation, and not dreaded resignation. 

Anyway, I’m digging the new energy, and there’s no frigging way I’m going back. 

I end today’s blog with a picture of ACDC in the aviary. She tried to flower early and I stripped her. She was sad and confused for about ten days. But look at this wild ruderalis now:

Looking forward to these flowers. They had a lot of stress. But I expect them to end up strong and powerful, perhaps more powerful than if they hadn’t faced such stress.

Just like my country,

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