Bootz garden of slothiness

Jack Herer 2004 cut x Ace of Spades 2014 male



Swazi next round

I have been loving the pollen chucking with the swazi's and we think its about time we started some more legitimate repros of these field worked gems.

So yesterday I spent about 5 hours going through bags and bags of old swazi stashes looking for seeds. I labeled them according to bud shape, rough year of purchase, and smells. Having smoked this stuff my whole life I think I managed to do an OK job of removing the ones with bad smells (metallic, mold, vinegar). Due to the heat where I stay the seeds from 2010 and before I'm not holding much hope that they will sprout.

In the next coming months we are going to step it up a notch and do some larger outdoor selections of the batches of seed that came from promising stashes.

We have smells ranging from sweet, earthy, citrus, anise/licorice, mango/guava, pepper, spices. And bud shapes ranging from thin pencil shaped all bud no leaf - to rounder leafier types - from airy loose structure - to tight dense structure.

If all goes well we will be testing about 100 seeds this January from some of the different lots. If we have bad germination we will keep sprouting until we get enough. There are A LOT of seeds

We also have some more interesting seeds to test. An extremely thin leaved "Durban" that we only managed to smoke one plant of so far but we got an idea of what to expect since we vegged around 30 and narrowed it down to 1 in flower as a test. So far we have found some never-flower plants (12/12 lighting regime), and some auto-flowering (flowers in 18/6 lighting regime).

Another batch that are currently being tested are from northern Polokwane in the Limpopo province of South Africa. So far these look very nice. A similar leaf structure to the swazi types but thin stems and more delicate looking.

To give you an idea of how we will do this:
Each plant will be vegged to about 30cm high and we will remove any runts or bad mutants that don't recover (sometimes small seedlings just take a bit of time).
Then they will be sexed and all the females will have clones taken from them.
Then they will be flowered outdoors for our Southern Hemisphere winter (feb-may).

Clones will be kept from plants that are nice or deserve a second run, and seed groups that yield good plants on average will be sprouted to find males to cross to the good clones. We will use as many fit looking males as possible to make the crosses to try and preserve diversity. We do not mind crossing males and females from different batches, but special care will be taken to avoid seed groups producing plants that are short and thick leaved (indica).

In other news, we are planning some strain hunting missions.

There are three ideas so far:

1. Lesotho - Hardly anyone has strain hunted here that I know of and this country produces a lot! There will be some nice things to find here. It has extremely high elevation with a wide range of temperatures and usually quite dry. Plants here are usually more dense than tropical sativa and are shorter and faster flowering.

2. Swaziland Piggs Peak casino surrounding area - There are a lot of people who have gone here and also there is a lot of contamination with western genetics here, but its close to us and we'd like to stay for a week and see whats around.

3. Transkei - There are some old hippy communities around this area and also some rural cannabis farmers. The weed here is not so contaminated as swaziland and its been a while since I went through. Its a beautiful place.

Intriguing work you're doing with the African lines oldbootz. This thread is a gem. I'm interested to see how your next round of swazi comes out. You must really enjoy that line to have grown it so frequently and worked it into various hybrids. I like the look of that Black n Blue cross. I have a pack of the Blue Digiberry F2s in the fridge. Your seed searching mission sounds like a real adventure. I'll be subbed to catch future updates.

Thanks for the kind words too-dope!

Yes it must be obvious by now how much I like the Swazi type weed. There are a lot of good western and dutch varieties going around the area where I live and even some quite old clones that have been passed around and kept by the different growers, both commercial and private. But my whole life I have been smoking the african sativas that managed to get to my area and when I smoke the western and dutch stuff, more often than not, i am disappointed in the quality of the high. For me when I smoke I want to feel some magic happening. Excited feelings energetic type high, euphoria, warm blanket over my mind type high, introspective clear high, dreamy high, trippy and scary high - these are the things I'm used to and expecting from good weed and have provided me with some of my life's most precious moments. I smoke mostly for stress, anxiety, depression, and for fun. Varieties that give me a bland sedative feeling with not much happening in the head - these are quickly gotten rid of.

Limpopo polokwane:

This was gifted to me by the person who gave me the seeds, its a home grown plant from their back yard. On the smoke it was floral, citrus, earthy and very smooth. Type of high was not too strong, quite sociable high, motivating.



We have 4 seedlings up so far and I have a couple more soaking as I write this

Some interesting news:

CAPE TOWN - A South African company has been given the green light to grow and cultivate marijuana legally in Lesotho.

Somerset West-based Verve Dynamics received its license from the mountain kingdom last week.

The plants will be used for medicinal purposes.

On its website Verve Dynamics is described as a vegan-friendly manufacturer of highly purified botanical extracts.

But it can now add the title of the first official cannabis producer for medical purposes in Africa to its description.

The company's MD Richard Davies has called the move a historic decision, saying this will allow Lesotho to play a significant role in developing the industry.

According to the UN Development Programme, cannabis is Lesotho's third largest source of foreign income.

In 2015, the kingdom's Green Party said local farmers were ditching traditional crops to cultivate dagga as it rakes in higher profits on the black market.

Click to expand...

http://ewn.co.za/2017/09/18/sa-firm-gets-green-light-to-grow-marijuana-in-lesotho

Here are some pics taken by Simon @ Greenhouse seed co, a fellow south african.

Pondoland Limegreens from umzimvubu river valley:



Another pic from Simon showing the size that swazi landrace can reach:

Rather old news. A few people doing a few things in the build up to the change. I can feel it coming! Lovely photos, thanks for sharing!

Ok so the "Swazi next round" plants sat in those pots until they sexed, some of them were getting quite bad root bound problems, but I didn't want to plant any males in the tubs so I waited anyway. A bit of root bound problems sometimes encourage plants to show sex anyway. Once the fems were planted in tubs they started to recover and get nice and green again.

So I have 5 females from that batch in tubs, which should go into flower mid-end February.

Then I planted a bunch of seeds from lots of different seed batches, including some swazi polokwane. So far I have 4 females from that batch in a different tub and a bunch more still sexing.

Newer tub:


Strong female:


Some nice looking males:


Thin leaf swazi polokwane male:

Top Left, Top Middle, Bottom Left: Got planted 4 days ago and have recovered from the root bound pots.

Middle bottom: Got transplanted right before the pic was taken. It should recover too.

Three plants on right side of tub: These are swace (swazi x ace of spades) plants a bit wind damaged.

This tub is doing well

lavender swazi x misty swazi and lavender swazi x anise swazi:

swace:


swazi polokwane males:

hey looks good .

Thanks Mani!

Here is a swazi polokwane female, the leaves are crinkled.

It amazes/dissapoints me i am just now looking at your thread. Great work, obviously. that swazi has my attention. Beautiful plants.

the polokwane is a real beauty . what is the smell o nthis one ?

Hi Mani

We haven't flowered any yet, its coming soon. On the stem rub its smelling very much like the bud that was given to me with the seeds. Its hard to describe the smell exactly with words but earthy, floral, tea would fit the description. The high was light and sociable with no sedation or heart racing effects.

Here is a peak at the tester plants inside. They are looking great!




This ones got a landrace style 90° stem angle

Males:

Anise swazi #2



Polokwane Swazi #3