I started planning my outdoor grow a whole year ago....but nothing ever goes how you plan it seems.
The plan was to make my own feminized seeds over the winter indoors, get the seedlings vegging in April and plant out at the end of May. I live in northern Ontario btw.
I have 2 strains to play with. The first is a sativa that I grew out from bagseed and then cloned.
The second strain is Northern Lights X Mountain Tundra. I bought these seeds from my hydro shop for 60 bucks for 10. A really nice strain that flowers early and branches out a LOT during veg. A nice indoor indica.
So, after doing some research, I decided to use the colloidal silver method to make my feminized seeds. Do you think I could find any 99% pure silver anywhere? The jewlers in my town didnt have any for sale and the pawn shops didn't have any pure silver coins or bullion either. The best I could do was pre 1969 Canadian quarters that are 80% silver and 20% copper. This actually worked since copper isn't toxic to plants. I wouldn't try this with coins that contain any nickel since nickel is a very toxic metal.
2 weeks before flower I began spraying the lower half of a sativa and the lower half of the best plant from my indica strain with the silver solution I made. Well, the silver solution worked in making the female plants produce pollen. In fact, it worked too well...EVERYTHING in my grow room got totally seeded! The plan was to hand pollenate only certain plants so as to keep track of what plant was what. In the end it was a big cluster fuck and I ended up with hundreds of seeds with all different phenotypes.
So, I get my seeds started in cups in April. I start scouting for a nice place using Google maps. I have a motorcycle, but I don't have a car, so I needed a friend to drive me out to the bush with my plants. No one could help me out. The guy who planned on helping me lost his license.
So, I end up taking my plants and all my shit out to the bush on my bike. I used bungi cords to tie my shovel to the side of the bike and I put all my cups with my plants into a blue coleman cooler that I bungie corded onto the luggage rack on the back of my bike. What a sight...I should have taken a picture!
I decided to go with a mix of coco and natural topsoil for my holes. You can easily carry 5 or 6 bricks of coco in a backpack. Because I was on a bike, coco bricks were the only choice I had really.
Well, I get out to my grow site, and I open up my cooler, and it looked as if someone threw the dam thing down several flights of stairs. I had a cooler full of empty cups, and a mash of plants and soil. Fuck. I dig my holes and plant what I could and went home.
I go back out to the site a few days later, and ALL the leaves were stripped off my plants. SLUGS! They were all over what leaves were left and you can see their slime trails around the plants.
It's a good thing I had lots of seeds and made more seedlings than I thought I would need. So I worked on making a holder for my cups so I don't have another disaster like last time. I cut a piece of styrofoam to fit in the bottom of my cooler and cut holes in it to hold my cups. I pinned the cups in place with paper clips then screwed the styrofoam to the cooler. Nothing was going to move this time!
I get back out to my grow site and open my cooler, and cluster fuck again! All the cups were still perfectly in place, but all the plants and soil was everywhere! fuck! But at least I didn't have to dig any holes this time. I just used the holes I already had and this time i put some "Slug Bait" around to kill those slimy cocksuckers.
So, I go home and check the weather... WTF? FROST warning? June and freaking frost warning? I go back out to my spot a few days later and everything was dead! The frost killed them all. Crap!
I figure the 3rd time is the charm and i load up with more seedlings and head out to my spot. Just as i'm finishing up, I can hear a truck coming up the road. It stops, two doors close, and I can hear people talking. I creep through the bush to see where they stopped, and some asshole is building a house right there! Way way too close for comfort. Google maps satellite view must be at least a year out of date for my area cuz there was no house on the freaking map there!
I pack up all my stuff and jump on my bike and start it up so I can get the hell out of there. No doubt they heard me fire up my rattle rocket. I could hear the guy yelling at me through the bush,"Hey! Hey you!". I twisted the throttle and didn't look back!
I still have more seedlings, and it's still not too late to get some going I figure....just need to find a new spot now!
But I'm not even sure if it's worth the effort cuz I think my seeds are going to suck. Three weeks ago I decided to force flower some of my seedlings indoors early just to see if they would all be female. Sadly, out of 6 seeds, 2 are male, 2 are female and 2 are hermies with both white hairs and balls. Crap!
I hope you all are having better luck this spring than I am!
