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Welcome to my beds, Rosé.

It’s Saturday, May 17, and currently I have 10 out of 12 beds filled. There is also a 25 gallon smart pot sitting outside the beds, amongst the lavender, where we grew a small Fruitcake last year. We’re going to grow a larger plant (hopefully) this year, to continue testing whether lavender protects cannabis from wild deer. 

I still need three more plants. Monday is the six week point, so I have to believe the remaining starts in the cottage are going to show sex soon.

Had a number of plants turn male and several others showed me nothing of any kind, except for crossed stipules. Last year, I learned that crossed stipules might be a sign of females, but not guaranteed. In fact, I ran into one of my favorite confusing lines from last year, “Crossed stipules don’t guarantee it’s a female, but no one I know has ever had a male plant with crossed stipules.”

So I ask all of you, have any of you seen a male plant with crossed stipules?

This morning, I planted the cross stipule plants and I’ll keep an eye on them through Monday, though I’m not very worried. The plants look female.

After consultation with Bee, we decided to pull Queen Special 1 and put something else in bed 18. She was recovering as well as she could, but this was not going to be the best plant we could have in that bed this year. Aphids really worked her over. The bed deserved something healthier, and the cultivar needed to be grown better from the start. She will have her day here, but not this year. We put our largest Fruitcake in that bed,  because both Bee and I want to see what that historically great bed does with a plant as interesting and complex as Fruitcake. We’re growing two Fruitcake this year, and we’ll test both, so we’ll have some great data on that plant after this grow.

The strain that is holding out the longest is S. Thai. Where we once had 11 starts, we are down to four, and one of them is almost certainly male. The three that remain all look viable, two in particular seem likely to show pistils soon. I have to remember that this plant from Thailand that we know so little about, is definitely a sativa dominant hybrid. As such, some predominantly sativa plants have been known to not show pistils until after six weeks. In some cases, long after six weeks. I know one grower who says that she didn’t see pistils on one plant until July. The S. Thai we grew last year showed her pistils two days after six weeks. So clearly, the only thing required from me right now is patience. I am tempted, however, to plant the two I deem most likely and then keep my eyes on them. We’re very close to being entirely outside. And with each day of delay and more males showing up, I am glad that I have one more feminized sprout in the cottage. She looks better than any of the remaining pretenders, and she’s a cultivar (Apple Crumble) that I’ve never grown. Decisions remain, but I am quite relieved that the majority of plants are in beds and growing.

Inside the aviary, in addition to fruits and veggies, there’s a foxglove breakout.

Of all the things I do as a grower, the activity I enjoy the least is transplanting.

I have grappled at length with transplanting. I am working on ways of avoiding it completely, which is possible with feminized seeds, but not with regular seeds. The good news about regular seeds is they don’t mind a little stress. In fact, stress is often a great benefactor toward the eventual potency of the medicine. They like to be stressed and if stressed properly, the medicine they produce will be stronger.

All that said, you can also significantly damage your cannabis through poor transplants.

For ten years, I’ve been trying to find the best way/time to transplant all plants, but especially feminized plants. I’ve had more than my share of perfect transplants, and there is a definite method to accomplish this. But I’ve also had disastrous transplants where the plant never fully recovered, or just immediately and irreversibly started to flower.

Feminized plants are sensitive. I love them, but if you don’t start them just so, they can be temperamental. Over the years, I have noticed that feminized plants do not like being in 3-gallon pots for more than five weeks, or they will feel crowded and start to flower. This year, I planted most of my feminized when they were only a couple of weeks old. I had one feminized Royal Kush in the cottage and I took her out to the beds on day 33, two days prior to five weeks. She was satisfactorily bound to not spill a drop of soil in the transplant. She landed softly and intact. She was growing almost immediately.

But that wasn’t the case last year, when I attempted to transplant both CBG plants I grew, or Hawaiian Dream. In all three cases, the soil mostly fell from the plant, leaving an exposed root to have to clumsily and unnaturally reconnect with the soil. They did, but both plants flowered early and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

Knowing when your plant is at the perfect binding point comes from experience. Some plants, you just know, are well bound, but others are slower in development and it takes the roots longer to bind the soil.

Another thing–during the transplant, do the actual removal of the plant relatively close to where you’re going to put her. Don’t be standing up and have a long way to go to put her down. Make it a shorter distance to the soil.

This year, there was only one that I’d call a difficult transplant and that was the first Fruitcake, in bed 21. The problem wasn’t the binding, or lack thereof. First, I dug the hole about an inch too deep, so that made the transfer through the tight opening of the gopher root cage more challenging. In addition, I clipped the edge of the mass on that gopher cage on the way down, which caused a soil avalanche of sorts. The plant seems fine now, but if the same drop had occurred to a feminized plant, I’d be checking her two or three times a day for flowering.

A couple other observations about Royal Kush: I started two, put one in the ground after two weeks and kept the other inside in a 3-gallon pot for almost five weeks. Same cultivar, but the differences between the two are noticeable. The plant put in the bed after two weeks is more elongated, with each branch growing without restrictions from a pot. The plant is growing exactly as the seed intended.

The other Royal Kush is growing beautifully, but it came out more compressed, from having been in that pot, even if for only three weeks, so it’s taking the first couple of weeks to stretch out and grow as close as possible to her intended form.

On the calendar, it says that today is Monday, May 19, planting day, and as such the last two beds were filled with two S. Thai. The cloth pot outside the fence will wait as I’m leaning toward letting a late feminized start in the cottage have a go at the Smart Pot. 

By the way, I received a question that deserves a quick follow up. Someone asked me, “You always use horsetail in every tea. Why?”

Horsetail is full of silica. Silica is considered a biostimulant. It’s not considered essential for growing (except, perhaps, by me), but using silica regularly improves the overall health and strength of your plants. Silica is a viscous fluid. As such, if you have root entanglement issues, silica will help unbind them. Silica also improves the strength in walls, leaves, stems, stalks, so that water and compost teas rich with nutrients may flow more easily through the plant and thereby stimulate more growth. Having used this in my teas for many years, I strongly endorse the use of pure horsetail in your compost teas. I don’t buy bottled silica, so I don’t know how that works in comparison, but it would be worth finding out. Silica is great for plants, and I have found no better source for it than the small cut pieces of horsetail plants.

And finally, six weeks old and very healthy seems like the perfect time to begin stress training. This is year two with these plant clips and I can tell already, we’re gonna need more of them.

Deep inside Rosé hidden under her canopy, the stress work has begun.

The final bed configuration: 

Bed 11: Cherry Punch

Bed 12: S. Thai

Bed 13: Royal Kush

Bed 14: West Marin Mystery

Bed 15: Cherry Punch

Bed 16: Honey Tsu

Bed 17: Rosé

Bed 18: Fruitcake

Bed 19: S. Thai

Bed 20: Royal Kush

Bed 21: Fruitcake

Bed 22: Purple Punch

Cloth Bag: To Be Determined, but probably Apple Crumble

For the first time in ten years, my beds are full on May 19, over a month before Solstice. And at 7:05 p.m, the sun broke through the farthest away tree and lit my plants one more time for the day. They are now getting 14 hours of sun, more or less, just as they were getting 14 hours of light inside the cottage before planting. No early flowering plants so far, and I don’t expect any. Away we go.

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Or contact me directly with your idea (good seeds are always welcome–and if I grow them, I will get the flowers tested and share with you the results.

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