Jeffrey Hickey Writes Blogs

First and foremost, I just mailed in my ballot. Proud to have voted.

It has become Autumn here, all-of-a-sudden style, with hints and hues toward winter. There’s been a sudden, general reduction in certain insects, while experiencing frantic behavior from others, because they know the cold is coming and the cold means . . . the end of their time.

Interesting how the same temperature now feels cooler than it did during summer. And not just because of the wind chill. I’m wearing socks and shoes again, not sandals. 

All of the plants are down. As it always does, once it started, it happened pretty fast. This is the time of year, where the rubber meets the road for outdoor growers. Business must be handled with care and skill. Decisions are made promptly, and acted upon immediately. Procrastination is not a word for these moments.

Multiple rainy days were suddenly in the forecast. Not lots of rain, but some consistent rain. That is not sustainable for flowering cannabis, so the plant harvest proceeded with some deliberate haste. 

Rainbow Kush came down Thursday. S. Thai came down Friday. 

But Saturday morning, when I walked outside and it was misting, I knew that everything needed to come down that day. I texted Bee and informed them that Saturday would see the end of cannabis plants for this season.

The heaviness of the weather cannot be overstated. At one point, the temperature was 68 degrees (20 degrees celsius) and 94% humidity. It was sticky outside. Highly congested cannabis does not do well in those conditions. I knew there would be some mold to deal with.

Started at 8:30 in the morning, and by 4:30, every remaining plant had been harvested, fan leaves removed, mold plucked, and every bud washed. We even cut down the two tiny plants we had outside the bed fence, and they got washed whole.

Here’s Fruitcake, getting the chunk and dunk.

Literally, as the last plant came down, as Bee cut down the aviary ACDC and I washed Royal Kush from bed 18, the light mist turned to actual rain. Harvest was ending as the rain began. The timing could not have been more perfect. Sorry there’s no picture to capture the moment, but we were too busy and too present to interrupt the flow. It was a beautiful feeling. A sincere tip of the hat to the growing gods.

Soon, it will be time for bed clean up and winter preparation. As tired as we are at this stage, now is the best time to do the clean up and winter prep. (By now, I mean tomorrow) For me, before I can truly kick back and chill with my harvest, I have to finish the work. That means gathering all the used plant tape that has either been discarded, or is still clinging to cages. If a pathogen touched the plant tape, it’s still on the plant tape. Remove and throw out.

The tap root graveyard.

It also means sweeping up all the old plant material, stems, dried leaves, mulch, discarded moldy flowers, anything and everything that doesn’t belong in a soon to be refreshed growing medium. Pathogens cling to whatever remains, so remove all debris. There will be fresh mulch for next season.

It means gathering and storing all those wonderful new plant clips and yellow ties that will be a permanent part of this grow going forward. It means gathering the outdoor tools and protecting them over winter. All tomato cages should be separated, folded and stored. 

It’s time to scrub all the buckets used for washing, because after five plants in a day, they are filthy.

This will also be the time to remove all the other plants I’ve had growing, because I want to solarize all of the beds, not just the cannabis beds. I’ll keep the tomato plants in the ground until there are either no more tomatoes, or the plants have simply gone over. We’ve yet to have a frost. I’m still picking fresh tomatoes every day. But their season will end soon, and all plants should be pulled, with the same clean up treatment applied for each of the 22 beds.

The good news is that with all the plants down, the chance to get this work done, and to start solarizing, will be sooner than the first week of November. Whenever you can solarize is a good idea, but at the end of a long grow, before it freezes, and we can still get some decent heat, is the perfect time for me to solarize. Both heat and freezing cold serve to solarize growing mediums. A bit of both is fine.

It’s crowded in the drying room. We are using every available means for hanging and this is the most packed the room has been in years. The lines are full, the hanging rack is full, even one of our little red cages is in there, covered with the S. Thai plant, because it was small and there’s no more room on the lines. 

You’ll notice in the above photo that we’re using the hanging rack for flowers. If you, as a home grower, are looking for something easy to consolidate your drying, these racks are versatile. You can see above how I can hang large flowers from multiple levels, all around the rack. The trays in the center are for any popcorn, or lesser flowers that you don’t have room to hang. Anything resting on the rack will have a pressed side, so if that’s an issue, you’ll have to turn them every few hours the first couple of days. But other than that (and that is minor), you can dry an entire plant hanging from this rack. One other very cool benefit–With fans blowing in the room, this rack will gently sway and turn in the breeze, allowing the buds to get air circulation from every direction.

Also, these racks can be used to help dry other things in your drying room, like flowers, or all the bat guano I capture. They are versatile and easy to clean/disinfect.

One last note about the room:  Please excuse the debris and clutter. It’s the end of a long grow. Stuff is everywhere. Clean up will be as soon as the plants are all inside for trimming and storage.

Before I close this blog, here’s a review of what just came down.

Hindu Kush, a couple of days before harvest. She was the longest growing plant this year. She almost made six full months. Next year, we’ll have many plants that grow six months, because we’ll start them a few weeks earlier.

It was a true pleasure for me to grow Hindu Kush. I’d grown her from a clone before, and she’d grown to nearly half the size of this one plant. This particular seed was genetically the strongest that I grew this year. She had the most pathogenic resistance, and grew with the greatest consistency. She had one small inner branch impacted by bacterial wilt, caused by a Western Cucumber beetle, but that was quickly removed and it fortunately did not impact the rest of the plant. As growers, we all have our favorites, and this plant is one of mine.

This is Rainbow Kush, before fan leaf removal and washing.

And here is Rainbow Kush, after fan leaf removal and washing.

This week also marks the successful end of the experiment to see if we can grow cannabis outside our bed fence, with nothing but the smell of lavender to protect the small plants.

It worked! I have claimed this would work for my students since the 2020 Isolation Grow Blog, but I finally grew the stones to test it. Honestly, it worked better than I anticipated. The closest deer scat to the plants was about eight feet, and that happened only once. The plants were never threatened. To the best of our knowledge, they were not even sniffed. Birds were around them, but birds were around cannabis in the beds. I don’t know if I’ll ever grow a large plant in this spot for real, because I have too many other legitimate spots without the risk. But it’s great to know that I can, and it’s even better now to teach this, because I’ve actually done it.

I would still suggest building a fence around your garden, but if you’ve got lavender established in your garden, you can safely plant cannabis next to that lavender. (Providing the cannabis gets enough sun).

We look forward to attempting to grow this cultivar, Fruitcake, again next year. We’d really like to see larger versions of those flowers.

Aviary ACDC is a completely different phenotype than we grew in bed 16. Providing, of course, that the plant in bed 16 is actually ACDC. I’ll find out when I get test results. But this plant represents our first serious attempt to grow in our native soil, under the protection of the aviary dome. The upside to that spot is the native soil, after twenty years of duck fertilization. It is primed to grow. The downside is the dramatic loss of sun through the flowering process. Because of its location, she has fought more late season pathogens than any of the plants in beds. I wish she had not tried to flower early, because she would have grown very tall, probably ten feet or more. But as it was, in two and one half months, she grew plenty.

Next year, we will grow in this spot again, but we’ll grow a feminized seed directly into the ground and we’ll start her three weeks earlier than this year. We’ll be utilizing supplemental outdoor lighting again. However, in the case of the aviary plant only, we will turn off her supplemental lighting and trigger her flowering response much earlier than we did this year. Our hope would be to generate a late September harvest for this one plant. It will be our next attempt of this experiment. Next year, in this spot, we’ll grow Giant White Haze. The reason for that choice is that she grows large and half of her lineage is White Widow, which grows very well here.

And then, there was the feminized seed experiment, of starting one directly into the growing medium, no transplanting at all. This is Royal Kush in bed 18.

We wish we’d had one more month of veg time for her. Next year, we’ll get our wish. She is still significantly taller and less crowded than the non-feminized seed we grew in bed 21. We’ll see how both of them test and then decide which one we’ll grow again.

Next year, the plan is to grow twelve plants and have seven of them be feminized seeds directly into the soil, with no transplants. This could dramatically change my grow. That is what I anticipate. 

The Royal Kush in bed 18 was a dream to deal with. No problems, no restrictions, and no root damage or stress from transplanting. This is a distinct advantage when dealing with feminized seeds, which are highly sensitive to stress. By planting them directly, there’s no stress at all. And it shows on the plant and flowers. 

I want to do this with much larger cultivars. We will do this next year.

Meanwhile, after we clean up the beds, we will trim. We might pause to solarize, or we might solarize after we trim. To be determined. 

But once trimming is done, we will prepare samples for testing. We will submit those tests, and then I will write a blog explaining the results.

Happy Harvesting, Everyone!

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