Six Ace Monsters Outdoors

Your plants are showing a wheelbarrow load of resiliency for sure.


Sell me your Mini will ya?I've always wanted one.

Slim Pickens said:

Your plants are showing a wheelbarrow load of resiliency for sure.


Sell me your Mini will ya?I've always wanted one.

Click to expand...

Boy, you got that right! I can't believe that these girls endure all my abuse (and the weather's too) and still just look better every week.


Actually, I'm planning to sell the "mini" soon. I recently got her out of storage and started driving her again to get her ready to sell. As always, now that I'm actually driving her, I remember why I own her in the first place - she's a hoot to drive!



But she's not quite a mini! She's the mini's fatter big sister - with a funny American accent.


She's the Austin America, part of the Austin 1100/1300 series, which shared all its running gear and suspension designs with the mini. The 1100s and 1300s wore slightly larger bodies, though they were still ridiculously small by modern standards.


Austin management heard that Americans loved automatic transmissions in the sixties, so they designed one to work with the mini's 1275 engines, retaining the compact layout with the transmission located in the engine's oil pan. (No kidding!)


They thought they'd sell millions! But they only sold a few thousand. You see, Americans only liked automatic transmissions when they were hung behind gargantuan V-8 engines. After the slushbox sucks it's share of the oomph out of the wheezing little four-bangers from across the pond, there wasn't much of those 55 HP left to push the car into traffic.


I acquired this particular car from a friend who couldn't keep it because he was scared of driving such a gutlessly slow car in Colorado traffic. While it is admittedly not a muscle car, I have no such fears from driving it. It isn't as fast as most cars on the road, but it has enough power to make it fun to drive.


It's more fun to drive a slow car fast than to drive a fast car slow!

Funny that I saw that Austin in your pic Ted.Funnier still that I owned a 1950 Austin America when I was 13yrs old,and that car was the same age as I was. My Dad finally got tired of helping me keep it running and sold it.I think in all honesty,he got tired of the neighbors complaining about me racing up and down the driveway.Even at 13 I envisioned myself as quite the driver.

All true.

There is no truer statement that this one you made: "It's more fun to drive a slow car fast than to drive a fast car slow"!Many is the time that I caused my compatriots white knuckles,and many prayers were prayed...but we all made it out alive.Surprisingly.Ha ha ha.

I apologize for playing fast and loose with your thread. carry on.<grin>

My Zamaldelica was making me smile today, so I took her picture to share with the world.


Start with a nice fat stem and cleaned-up innards. Oh, and a sling and some grafting tape, to fix branches that tried to leave the farm. I think she gets the dropping branches from her Malawi side: The Malawi just outside the greenhouse has lost several branches.





How about a nice portrait:





A lovely young flower, begging to grow!





And last, her leaf, to entertain the guys who love to play "Guess the Pheno!".

Since my last update featured Zamaldelica, I'll start with her. After roughly a month of black-boxing, she's well into flower. Oddly, our earlier discussion about how a Zamaldelica will stretch may not apply outside, at least with this pheno. She is about the same size she was when I first started her into flower, and has basically not stretched at all! Oh well, if these colas keep getting fatter, and she doesn't get any taller, I'm content!






You can get a sense of scale from the greenhouse: it's seven feet tall at the peak, and seven feet wide. (2 meters x 2 meters)


And at the other end of the greenhouse, A very Thai-leaning Golden Tiger. She's into flower, the same flowering dates as Zamaldelica next door, but far less flowering thus far. Here you can see a very wispy Golden Tiger in the foreground, and Zamaldelica, with her fat colas forming, in the background.

Yehaw cowboy- Going great guns. Tell me [if i didnt miss it from the thread] are those pots home made or hegelkuture or is that bound around another pot for insulation. They look like the business. And so camo too.

CowboyTed said:

And at the other end of the greenhouse, A very Thai-leaning Golden Tiger. She's into flower, the same flowering dates as Zamaldelica next door, but far less flowering thus far. Here you can see a very wispy Golden Tiger in the foreground, and Zamaldelica, with her fat colas forming, in the background.

View Image

Click to expand...

Great show Cowboy! Got my eye on this GT. How many weeks of flowering you reckon you gained?

Best of luck on this rodeo!
F2F

Flying Monkey said:

Yehaw cowboy- Going great guns. Tell me [if i didnt miss it from the thread] are those pots home made or hegelkuture or is that bound around another pot for insulation. They look like the business. And so camo too.

Click to expand...

My planters are homemade, just willow sticks woven into a wire mesh ring, so that the empty ring is roughly three feet in diameter and two feet tall. Then I fill it with my soil mix, so that the dirt is held in place by a loose mesh of wire and willow sticks. It has no floor to the planter, so the roots can continue growing down into the soil below it.


The planters function as "smart pots", allowing moisture to escape through the sides of the pot, so that the "pot" air-prunes the root system.





As you can see, my planter is also oddly "alive." Those who propagate their cannabis by cloning will appreciate why they are alive: I used willow branches to make the planters, and some of the branches were not dead when I collected them. You'll find that willow clones pop roots much more easily than Cannabis does: when you weave a live willow stick into a planter, then set it on moist soil, the willow will grow roots, and then you have a living planter!



These planters made of woven sticks fit my larger garden theme: my entire garden is built from "sticks and stones" I collect on our property - mostly so that the garden costs me nothing but time to build. As an added benefit, if I quit gardening, the entire garden will rot and settle into the ground in a decade, and leave little trace that the ground was ever disturbed. I don't like leaving permanent scars on the landscape if I can avoid it.


These planters would certainly be good stealth planters for a guerilla grow. Thankfully that's not necessary for me: I live in Colorado, so my grow is legal.




Here are some of the other garden beds, so you can see the odd character this building style lends to my garden. People often say that it reminds them of something a Hobbit might build:





(that five-foot tall cannabis plant on the left is my Snow Moon, which is probably entering the "stretch" as I'm sure it's about to start flowering. It's the only indica in the garden, so I would expect it to start flowering first.)








Even the garden gate is made from "found" materials. The previous owners left a huge pile of old lumber with nice "barnwood" patina, so I plucked out some of the straight pieces to build a new gate that looks old:

F2F said:

Great show Cowboy! Got my eye on this GT. How many weeks of flowering you reckon you gained?


Best of luck on this rodeo!
F2F

Click to expand...

It's hard to know how much this forced-flowering may cut from the normal outdoor flowering schedule. GT takes 11 to 14 weeks to finish indoors, if I recall correctly. Normally I would assume that starting her into flower in mid July would give me roughly a month headstart, so that she should finish in late October instead of late November. But Cannabis isn't quite that perfectly predictable. There are some elements in play outdoors that don't usually play into the finishing time indoors, so outdoor plants don't follow a precise flowering schedule. Part of the reason I'm sharing this grow is so that others might have a better idea about predicting finishing times for forced-flower grows with these Ace varieties.



On the subject of unpredictable flowering, I have one of @JAMMAL's Angry Jamaican seedlings growing in a pot in the garden. Angry Jamaican is a cross between Ace Malawi and Cannabiogen's Caribe strain. It's a fourteen week finisher indoors, and JAMMAL gave me some seeds to grow outdoors, because he's curious when she might finish outdoors.



Since she got a later start than the other plants, I decided to keep her in a pot, and then finish her indoors. To my surprise, she started flowering and stretching obviously yesterday, so it seems she'll be finishing outdoors after all. Sadly, when the rest of the garden starts flowering, having Angry Jamaican in the garden in flower would exceed my plant limit (six in flower) so she'll finish at my buddy's house instead of mine. It turns out that having her in a pot was a good idea after all, even if her flowering schedule screwed up my plans.

Beautiful amigo- those raised beds with the heavy branch tops. Looks like a green hobbit paradise.

Hey Cowboy Ted that is some spectacular open vastness, out there in Colorado ranch country. The construction of those raised garden beds reminds me of the stone walls that crisscross the English countryside, all hand-constructed from carefully selected materials that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle having few if any structural lines that line up dead straight.

I imagine that the sunsets can be a sight to behold while vaping under Colorado skies. With weed legit in the state, the icing on the cake for any home owner must be that peace of mind knowing connoisseur-grade buddage can be grown right beside one's abode, openly, and even proudly ha ha.

Those of us residing under harsh weed prohibition laws, where one is forced to sneak and skulk around to buy or grow weed, are literally green with envy over the sight of true freedom, as enjoyed in sane, civilized societies.

This bud's fer you sir.

The garden is looking productive, particularly the two plants inside the greenhouse, because they are both in flower now.


Zamaldelica looks like this:






and she's sporting colas like this:






Turn around in the greenhouse, and have a look at Golden Tiger, the other plant I've been black-boxing:





You can see her curtain, made of B&W, attached to the side pole. I started draping that curtain around her each night starting in mid-July, and I ended about a week ago. A month of 12/12 and they are both well into flower, and I've seen no signs of re-vegging. Both girls are happily growing bigger flowers. (Zamaldelica's are the more impressive, I'm sure you'll agree!)

Outside the greenhouse, the rest of the girls are generally healthy. They will all go into flower naturally, since they normally finish a little quicker than the girls inside the greenhouse. Those two needed a head start.


Outside, Bangi Haze x Ehitopian has had a growth spurt, and it became clear that a new cage would be needed for support. She's on the right in this photo, while Snow Moon is on the left, in the background.






She hasn't started flowering yet, so I left the new cage oversize a bit, so she can "grow into it" during the stretch.


Snow Moon has also had a generous growth spurt, and got a new cage two days ago. She's happily found peace with the cage, and is thriving still. She has five main branches that are all over six feet tall!

Panama also got a new cage, her first, and it was a bit overdue.






She's a bit difficult to make out, through all the flowers, but if you look closely, you can just make out the top wires of her cage.


She's been through some stress lately. She slowly tipped backward as she grew, and recently, two of her branches died, while the rest of the plant appears healthy.


Someone suggested that cannabis plants sometimes drop branches like this when a plant leans over and experiences a "crown shift", which is the likely culprit in this case.


While I added cages to the other plants for support of new growth, this one got the new cage for support, generally. She hadn't had a recent growth spurt, but then she also has never had any kind of cage, and I'm wishing I had provided one, so we could have avoided the "crown shift" and the loss of two lovely, big lower branches.


I also added a sturdy stake, and fastened the main stem to it. Between the stake and the cage, she should be held firmly in place, and start to thrive again.


Here's her impressive stem!

Sadly, I'm continuing the tradition in this thread: posting an update after a weather event. This time? Another hail storm.


I wasn't at home for the storm, so my entire garden went unprotected. I only saw the aftermath. Happily, all my cannabis plants appear to have weathered the storm well. Not so for my beans, tomatoes, chard, kale, peppers and melons. Their big leaves took a shredding.


I think you'll agree that there's little damage to our dear lady Snow Moon, who continues to thrive, and is now in bloom. In fact, the first week in September appears to be the magic week when the whole garden goes into flower. Snow Moon, Malawi, Panama and Bangi Haze x Ethiopian are all in flower now.


Here are some new pics:


Snow Moon:





Malawi in a loose cage, anticipating some stretch:





Next is Panama, a bit hard to see behind her flower pals. Zoom in on those Chard leaves at the bottom to see what much of the rest of the garden looks like.





And next, the disappointment: Zamaldelica appears to be re-vegging. A few days ago, she started to shoot out single leaves from the tops of the colas, and they are now three-blade fan leaves. It will be interesting to see when she starts back into flower (since the rest of the garden just went into flower)


Here she is from across the greenhouse, and then a close-up of the colas with new growth.

Next up is Bangi Haze x Ethiopian. She's in flower, and stretching. I gave her a loose cage to stretch into as well.






And finally, Golden Tiger. She's in flower, and stretching. Soon she'll outgrow the greenhouse:

You have a very good idea here, but I think the black box phase where you control their light exposure will need to continue long past the initial flowering onset and should probably only stop once the natural length of the day is roughly 12/12.

I've never attempted what you are doing but I have re-vegged plants and it doesn't take long for their hormones to go back into veg phase. It's usually a matter of just a couple of weeks before you can tell the plant is shifting gears. Sativas in particular are very quick to reveg.

You are going to get some absolutely insane bud structures from these reveged plants once they start flowering again. They will be like big pom pom hydra buds.

I wish you luck with a late first freeze this year.

Fantastic garden, amazing plants.

Good luck with the revegging plant. I did this deliberately to 2 AK 4??? plants a few months ago, just to see, they went 3 weeks under 20/4 after 6 weeks of flower. It took another couple of weeks before it reflowered and the result was not good, the first flush of buds didn't develop much and stayed fluffy in a sorta mangy way, the second flower set didn't do much better, looked very similar and overall yield was low, wayyy low. The smoke and taste was OK, not noticeable different from the other normally flowered plants.

This was inside, maybe outside will give more joy lol, I got some pics somewhere I think if anyone's interested, but the buds do look kinda normal in the pics, the usual deceptively photogenic look, but scratch the make-up..... Hopefully yours will do better!

subbed

Wow some very nice plants. Great job
subbed for the rest of the show.

Peace GG