The Time Machine Part I - Oaxaca, 1976

[bobblehead]

impressive cab! I was thinking to myself "high tech? pshhh...", but your construction is very clean and stealth. Very nice. I've always wanted to take a trip to Oaxaca, and hopefully find some real Oaxacan Highland seeds! You've got my attention.

 

[love?]

Sorry to hear about your troubles but I'm glad to hear you're making the best of a bad situation by starting an interesting and novel project like this!

I've always wondered whether some people mimic the climate of the mountains of Colombia and Peru so that they can grow some coca, as I've heard the plant requires a very particular climate to thrive (though I'm totally unaware whether or not this is true). This project kinda reminded me of that hehe. Except that growing Mexican cannabis strains is much cooler than growing coca IMO. Especially these Oaxacan/Acapulco varieties seem so legendary, unfortunately have not had the chance to try any myself yet.

What will you be growing in, soil? I assume you're going to want to mimic the Mexican earth somehow too, have you got any plans for that yet? How about fertilizing?

Anyway, the best of luck to you and your project.

 

[sativagrower87]

yeh another interesting grow! subscribed... they are definitely gonna like MH + UVB lights.
good vibes for you and your plants

 

[indifferent]

Thanks for the kind words guys, going through some rough times personally so this grow is something positive to focus on.

Some good thoughts about soil and nutrition love, I haven't put any thought into mimicking the soil of Oaxaca, I have zero money and almost zero medium, I managed to scrape together enough coco and diatomite to fill 6 1.5 litre pots, so the HOGs have been planted in those. I will probably have to plant the others in soil as they have germed and are still in towels. That's if i can fidn a few quid to buy a sack of soil that is. I need to plant them tomorrow, so I might end up collecting soil from the forest under the centuries old trees where it's dark, rich and full of humates.

I'd give my right nut for a sack of Canna coco right now, I have tons of bottles of nutes sat here but no bloody medium!

 

[indifferent]

Well, I managed to get 4 HOGs, 3 Jamaicans and 6 Blockheads planted out, those were the only seeds I had to hand.

All the tubes I fitted as supplemental lighting are working now, but I have something of a problem - heat. The box runs 22-24C with just the 400W running, but it climbs to 36-37C when I turn on all the visible light tubes! When I turned on the UV tubes as well it hit 40-42C!

So, I need to address this problem ASAP. I obviously can't have everything switched on at once, so I need to work out a schedule that maintains the temps in the 30-32C range at most and no hotter.

Hmm, this is gonna take some time to figure out methinks!

For the time being I'm just running the 400W halide as the seedlings have only just broken the surface.

 

[indifferent]

All 4 HOGs and all 3 Jamaicans have sprouted above the soil, just got the 400W halide running for now. I gave them a couple of mistings with seaweed, Phyt-Amin and Superthrive. The Blockheads are a day behind so they should appear tomorrow. Once everything is sprouted I will switch to 12/12, so it's basically 12/12 from seed but with a day or two of 24/0 to begin with. I would use the tubes until they start flowering I think, that gives me time to work out the heat issues.

Wish I had a camera, it's pretty boring without pics!

On a side note, the last 4 Blockheads had to be planted in a 50/50 mix of perlite and worm castings cos I have no coco left and there is nowhere near here to buy any, hope it works!

 

[indifferent]

Well, i figured out why my temps are so high - my damn fan has died, it must have been slowly dying over the last couple of days, hence the temps were so high. The fan doesn't run at all now, and it was very warm to the touch, so I expect it overheated. I guess sticking it in a wooden box tightly packed with acoustic foam to silence it wasn't the best of ideas, although you would think the airflow through the fan would have kept it cool. It's a Ruck so hopefully it has some warranty on it. I don't have any of the packaging or paperwork and can't remember where I bought it, so probably, I'll have to get a new one. Be at least a month before I can afford one, so I;m shit out of luck, gonna have to shut my grow down till I get a new fan, fuckity fuck fuck fuck, my luck just never seems to change!

 

[indifferent]

The hydro store are replacing my fan next week, so it;s not a total disaster! Temps are 36-40C in there so everything is growing slooooowly, and I'm misting them with seaweed, superthrive and phyt-amin every 2 hours as humidity is 20% and I;m worried about my seedlings in such heat!

Two of the Blockhead's have sprouted out of the coco now, the other four in the 50/50 perlite/wormcasts are taking their time to appear, making me a little nervous about em, but I keep misting the surface so it is nice and moist and keeping my fingers crossed.

I also have an unexpected mystery 'volunteer' sprout. In the pot of one of the Jamaicans a second seedling has appeared, it's not a twin as it's in the corner, 4cm or so from the Jamaican seedling. This must be a seed that has fallen from a plant and remained in the coco. Christ knows what it might be, I didn't even think I had used this coco before! I don't have any medium left otherwise I would have removed it and put it in it's own pot.

 

[Suomi-Prkl]

hello indifferent!

very cool thread you got going, just found it! i like the experimentings style, your cab looks very neat!

i just actually got home from a month long trip to mexico and just so happens oaxaca highlands was an area we covered some. now surely a long time has passed from your cut to these days, but since i happened to score some weed, hash and seeds i thought i posted them here also.

we got this stuff from a small mountain village called san jose del pacifico about 200 km south of the city of oaxaca, a town renown for it's psycedelic shrooms and also weed.

got in touch with a local fella and he guided us to even higher ground where a buddy of him was living and growing in the nearby mountains. didnt get to meet the grower though but scored some nice stuff, go plenty of seeds too. here's a few pics of oaxaca state and the weed in april 2010.



weed and hash, 1 kilo of this weed was needed to produce 50g of that black pollen right there. totally clear up high, almost no body at all. pretty normal weed aromas, poorly dried but decently potent. the hash was exceptional.



all the best to your time machine project, i'll be watching with interest!

and oh yeah, chicas latinas! me gusto!

 

[indifferent]

Welcome to my humble thread and many thanks for that wonderful pictorial contribution.

That weed looks rather good compared to most of what I saw during my travels in Mexico a few years ago, and the hash looks very special indeed. I can only imagine how nice hash made from high altitude tropical plants must be, especially as 50g is only 5% of a kilo, that indicates to me you did a nice job of the hash making and got a clean hash without any contaminants. How did you make it, dry sift with a screen?

Glad to hear you managed to get some seeds too, only way to know if they are of a proper Oaxacan highland heirloom line or not is to grow em. They did a pretty good job of spraying everything with Paraquat etc back in the late 70s so most if not all of the original Mexican genepool is gone, but given the regged nature of the Sierra Madre and the number of remote valleys, I wouldn't be at all surprised if some Oaxacan heirlooms survive to this day.

Of course, we all know that huge quantities of commercial seed have been imported into Mexico since the early 80s so there is a chance that you have something that was originally grown from commercial seed years ago or a hybrid of local heirloom and commercial import, like I say, you never know till you grow!

 

[Suomi-Prkl]

hello!

the hash wasnt made by me/us. it was made by the farmer, and it was said to be dryshifted and manually pressed.

yep prolly lots of import stuff around, and i totally agree about growing them out!

a friend of mine who was staying in mexico had some other weed too from the north, prolly grown by gangs, and it was inferior to what we got from san jose.

something raw about both of these stuff we smoked. definately they didnt look or smoke like most commercial offerings today. small and very humble amount of resin plus the almost total lack of body stone made it a lot different to what i usually grow/smoke. of course the high altitude growing environment has to play huge part about the quality of the high.

 

[ijimunot]

You cant imagine how I would like o be your best friend with Oaxacan in your garden. I lived in the DC area in the 70s. I scored a kilo of Oaxacan for $160 that was twice as much as I was used to paying for cannabis. The kilo was wrapped in news paper from the state of Oaxaca. I paid that much because it was a very special occasion. My brother and I sat up all night cleaned and rolled the whole kilo in those brand new Zigzag papers with glue on them. Revolutionary idea rice paper and glue.
We took four brown grocery bags of joints and gave them away to DC for the first NORMAL rally. What a liberating day we thought that was. Damn I miss the Sativas from those days.
I have been mixing my lights since day one of growing indoors for veg and flower. I have a 1000w of mixed CFL tubes in a 3x4 closet. I will have to add a couple of UV tubes and see what I get. Thanks for the education.

 

[indifferent]

Hi Suomi-Prkl

As you say, it certainly sounds like you scored something rather good. I have no idea what a commercial strain grown in Oaxaca would turn out like, and if the commercial genes were introduced a couple of decades ago they would by now have altered a great deal through adaptation to the climate of Oaxaca. I suppose it is possible that commercial genes grown there for a while would become uplifting, no stone, all high type plants after adapting to the environment, but it is perhaps more likely that the stuff you smoked was really a local sativa, those we know would produce those kind of effects. Because you got off the beaten track and made hookups with locals and obviously made it apparent to them that you were not just a typical tourist but a man in search of truly great smoke, then i expect you got the best they had to offer, and looking at that hash, I would say for definite they gave you the best shit they had! Thanks very much for showing us that Oaxaca still has some special smokes, I must go there myself one day, I travelled around the Yucatan Peninsula and down into Tabasco, but didn't make it as far as Oaxaca or the Sierra Madres, wish I had now!

Hi ijimunot

Thanks for that lovely little story, you know it's Oaxacan Gold when it comes in Oaxacan newspaper! If you need/want any more info on UV lighting, please ask, it's a topic i have studied in very great depth and I have a very good knowledge of what types of UV lighting are available, I spent a lot of time researching UV lighting and the different types of UV fluorescent light on the market today.

When I get my seed collection back I know I have some more Oaxacan beans, they are ones that the cutting I have made all by herself, she throws a few nanners around 10 weeks and finishes in 14, so often has a few seeds, not many, I think I got 6 or 7 in 45g of bud last time I ran her, which to me is acceptable if the buds are good enough. I would be delighted to send em to ya so you can relive a small part of your youth. I have Colombian Gold and Panama Red seeds too, the lumbo I have grown many times before and it yields big, takes 14 weeks and is very nice indeed, has the proper spice, sandalwood and incense palette a highland lumbo gold should and a lovely, daydreamy mellow high. The Panama are a recent acquisition, 30-something year old seeds from a friend who quit smoking when his first child was born, but he hung onto these seeds and now I have em, there are about 70 of them so fingers crossed I can get some to germ!

Oh the thought of being able to make some crosses later this year such as Panama Red x Highland Oaxacan Gold and Colombian Gold x Highland Oaxacan Gold just excites me, not least because I can then make a load of oldtimers very happy by spreading the old school genes around.

 

[indifferent]

Phew, finally things are getting back on track. My replacement Ruck fan arrived today and is installed and working. Also, turns out my ballast was fixable, the cap had blown, which is weird as it's 6 months old. Luckily I had an old 250 ballast and stole the cap from that to fix my 400. The 400W MH bulb that was in the cool tube when the cap blew is fucked, it has a bulge in the glass, looks like it's overheated, maybe the bulb caused the cap to fail?

Anyways, I put the old 400W HPS bulb back in after replacing the cap and it works fine.

Even better news, with the 400 burning and all the fluoros tubes lit, the temps are steady at 29-32C (I have two thermometers in there) with the room temp of the room it is in being 19-20C so my prior concerns about temps being too high was all down to that failing Ruck fan, now I have a nice new one in there, all is fine.

I need to buy a new 400W MH bulb though, not at all pleased the one I had failed after less than a week!

 

[Hrpuffnkush]

For anyone who doesn't know the two latino ladies I refer too, feast your eyes:

You mean you find these in the jungle with the Sativas too?

 

[indifferent]

Hehe, if I did, i'd still be in the jungle and nowhere near this keyboard! lol

 

[sativagrower87]

indifferent, so how its going on now?

 

[elmanito]

Damn, love those old Mexican genetics, but have some growing right now from the Sierra Madre

Maximum of UV in Holland in the summer at 1 pm is 7, maybe 8.An UV index of 16 is extremely high, but that's the reason that indoor strains never can compete with those high mountain strains.HPS light doesn't contain any UV-light and sure you get high, but the high is different than from those high mountain strains.

I know some are doing research with the plasma light which has a high conc of UV A, B,C, but the spectra is not right at this moment for flowering.

Namaste

 

[indifferent]

Well, it's going still. Had no end of problems. First my fan failed, then my bulb failed, then my ballast failed.

However, I'm nothing if not persistent and I got the fan replaced, repaired the ballast by replacing the capacitor with one from an old 250w ballast (I could smell the capacitor was going, and on visual inspection, it was visibly leaking).

I then had an issue where the 4-5 hours the dead halide bulb had been running without a fan had melted the insulation on the wiring of the cooltube. Well, not so much melted as burnt to a crisp, it was black and when I touched it, the insulation just fell away. I only discovered this when I replaced the dead bulb after repairing the ballast, turned it on and got a shower of sparks from the cooltube. I had to strip it down completely and replace the wiring.

Since then I've continued to work on installing all the equipment to enable full simulation of dawn/dusk and to mimic the high UV levels of midday. I have three central heating timers, one for the Visible fluoro lighting, one for the UVA fluoros and one for the UVB fluoros. Here are some pics of the timer setup.

PS. Would love to see how that Astur Mexican turns out, I have been thinking of buying that strain myself as it's pretty cheap. I was stupid enough to not buy the Sinaloan strain that Kannabia used to sell, then they went all feminised and withdrew that strain from sale.

 

[elmanito]

PS. Would love to see how that Astur Mexican turns out, I have been thinking of buying that strain myself as it's pretty cheap. I was stupid enough to not buy the Sinaloan strain that Kannabia used to sell, then they went all feminised and withdrew that strain from sale.

It's indeed a pity they stopped selling the old strains like the Colombian they had.A lot of seedbanks go only the money nowadays.

One of the Oaxacan seedlings

Namaste