Another trip into the fields. Holidays are best to do this trip. With the exception of a few hana wai men all the cane fields are deserted. Unlike last Friday, where everybody was working, and we attracted some attention, yesterday we had the place to ourselves. The four security guards on duty were all in their little shack watching football. So they left us alone, and we left them alone.

What we are doing, I call advance work. We stashed gas, opened up areas we will later plant in, and cut fence and built a hidden drop gate, in case an emergency escape is needed. We may never use it, but it gives us one more way out if all others are cut off. Now we are ready to drop starts, just as soon as they are big enough. After we were done we even had time to head down to the beach, and hop into the ocean and wash off the mud. All in all a real easy day.

At the house the starts are doing as well as can be expected. Partner harvested a 5 gallon bucket of time release fertilizer, from work, and I hit everything with it. Lost a corner of a tray of starts when one of the mutts pissed in it.

Of my two biggest plants in the gulch (the ones in the pictures above) one went male, and the other fagged. Needless to sat they are no longer with us.

There is one male left. I'll let it live for another week, The girls in the gulch are just starting to bud, so I will let nature take it's course. If you polinate your girls real young, all the seeds should be at the base of your buds, easy to dig out, but the tops will be unseeded and very smokable.

Before I take the male, I will gather as much pollen as I can in a paper envelope. That goes in the freezer. There it will last long enough to make seeds from the other strains I choose to cross it with. The first cross is with itself. Always. As long as I have the pollen in the freezer, I can pick and choose my crosses. All I need is the male from each strain with the best traits I am looking for. Some of the traits I look for in a male is size, branch development, compound flowers, and overall health. I am working with 6 different strains, so in the end, I should have 36 different crosses. When the buds mature we will taste test all of them....that should be fun.

Then I pick the best of the best. Those will be my long season crop. In theory this should be easy. But it isn't. I simply do not have the room to keep everything from itself. That's one reason I am heading to the cane. I can grow my males there. Then I can bring pollen back and hit the females here.
That way I choose what gets crossed, not the wind.

Last year I did not have enough seeds. I planted what I had, and I lost a lot of potential yield. This year I can start hundreds of seeds, and only put the best in my legal holes. The rest go to the cane. They will be my gravy.

Now some pics....

1) First batch. This is the perfect age to breed. Crack it now, and the seeds will all be mature, easy to get, and it will not screw up the rest of the plant.

2) First batch. This male is the one I let grow. It has a week or less to live.

3) Second batch. These are suppose to be femed. So I put them in real small. I wish they would hurry up and show me if it worked. If it did work we have thousands of these seeds. So it probably didn't

4) Third batch. These go under lights every night. Another two weeks and I will put them in my bottom holes.

5) Batches 4,5,and 6. Look at all the time release I dumped on them! In a month or so... out to the fields they go.