My Lovely Buds

[Elevator Man]

I've been documenting a grow thread of all my mother plants over the last few months here: http://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=33057

I finally harvested them all on the 15th-17th of this month, and here are some shots of the best buds, dried out and curing nicely.

Northern Lights X Big Bud:






CrissCross:






G13:






Mystery Strain:






Purple and Green Flo:






Green Flo:

 

[motaco]

Those are all very pretty. Congrats man. You nl BB looks much nicer than alot of them I've seen. Must've gotten a good pheno.

 

[SEEDYNONO]

great looking nugs!

how do you dry your harvest? do you chop the plants on the wet side or dry side? buds looks great.. i can never get mine to get all the chlorophyl out of the leaves.. i think i may try chopping wet and hope slower dry time helps with that.

 

[Elevator Man]

I usually do the first trim immediately - all shade leaves with visible stalks, and bud leaves with no resin are cut off and discarded. Then I trim them again to get all the bud leaf with resin attached - just to the bud line.
After about five days hanging, they're dry enough to be manicured again, and removed from the branches. After another couple of days air-drying, I give them one final manicure, just to really get them tight, and put them in the jars. They've only been in the jars for five days so far.
You don't need to be that fussy, but as I'm making bubblehash, there's now an extra incentive to get those buds trimmed right down.

The NL X BB is a great pheno - I had to wrestle it from the clutches of some tight hippy I know, and it was the worst-looking clone I've ever got. It took me a month just to get it to grow new leaves. But it's a great plant - smells similar to my 'mystery' strain, but softer and sweeter and less fuel-like - more earthy/yeasty. And it's not too couchy either, although it's usually the last one of the night for me.
My only complaint (and it's hardly a complaint), is that when you do it SCROG-style, it can't really cope with the number of buds. I think it prefers to do a few very large colas rather than lots of smaller ones. However, they were all perfectly done, and are rock-hard.

The mystery strain I'm becoming more and more convinced is some kind of diesel/kush offshoot, rather than an NL variant - now I've read up and seen a lot more pics of the diesel family, it looks very familar, apart from the faster flower time of mine - 8 weeks maximum. Also it's been around here since around '91, but it's so long ago, the two guys I know who got it have no idea of its origins any more. Shame that - but I'm still using that one as the basis for my first cross - it's so perfect it hardly needs any improvement at all.

 

[Renovatio]

god damn, you bastard those are amazing

 

[narniachronic]

amazing looking buds!! keep up the great work.

 

[robin]

They are making my mouth water,how did it smoke??

 

[JimmynitZ]

Lovely indeed! :smile:

 

[Elevator Man]

I'm just on the NL X BB and Mystery strain as a combo - delicious! They are similar in taste/smell, and more narcotic than the others. They've taken a while in the jars to really settle down, but the taste and strength of all the varieties are really improving now. The CrissCross is like a spicy/peppery/tangerine smell, whilst the G13 is a kind of weird mix of grapefruit/toffee and meat! The Flo is like apple jam and incense. A bit off-the-wall with the descriptions, but that's what comes into my head...

I don't know about anyone else (I rarely read anyone posting about it), but does anyone 'cocktail' weeds together when smoked? I always find myself mixing them up - with five to choose from there's a lot of permutations!
But as I'm planning to cross Flo with my mystery strain, I've been smoking the two in combination, to try and get a rough idea of what the taste/high might be like - a bit crude, but it's a good enough excuse!

 

[robin]

excellent idea lol,i have seven weeks to wait yet,but counting the days oh and hope my buds end up looking something like yours.

 

[SEEDYNONO]

I don't know about anyone else (I rarely read anyone posting about it), but does anyone 'cocktail' weeds together when smoked? I always find myself mixing them up - with five to choose from there's a lot of permutations!
But as I'm planning to cross Flo with my mystery strain, I've been smoking the two in combination, to try and get a rough idea of what the taste/high might be like - a bit crude, but it's a good enough excuse!

haha i do that a lot too! mix them up together. i've been smoking a mix of cush (i bought.. was fedexed to me from cali) and blue moon rocks (the best nugs from my last harvest) fairly often. i find the instant rush i get through my body to be most intensified when they are mixed together in one puff. if i smoke a bowl of each one after the other i still get to the same plateau level but i don't get the mind numbing instant effect feeling as i do when i mix em. and then whenever i want to conserve a good strain i can't just smoke the less exciting stuff because it is so boring so i mix a tiny bit of the good in with it. things can get crazy when you mix.

i used to smoke mexican brick 'schwagg' in blunts when i was young and poor and i would mix in a half gram to gram of 'dro' (as we called anything decent.. some canadian stuff and some local danks made up this catagory). because i rarely could afford a whole blunt full of dro.. well not when i smoked 2 blunts a day.. haha.

 

[Elevator Man]

I think I've just about tried every combo now - apart from the obvious killer, which is all six together! The sixth being my final purple outdoor Flo, which is drying. I ran out of my indoor one last week, and so I've been unable to do the six-weed spliff yet. This weekend...

 

[SEEDYNONO]

haha yeah i've had upwards of 10 strains mixed together at times. always more fun to find something to do with smoking other than the norm.. get people talking or whatever.. 'that one night.. with the 10 strain blunt'

so the yield on that purple flo pheno that you ran inside was dismal?

about 1/2 of the green one or less?

its going to be hard to pick girls i think i've already got 5 with female preflowers showing up.. if i don't find a hermie or two. its going to be hard to weigh the benefits of keeping the best smoking/tasting and most potent phenos vs. the higher yielding ones given the space. with the blue moon rocks i ran i had two similar phenos that both smelled similar but one was a tad better.. but it was less vigorous and healthy and only yielded half what the other one had. so if i had to choose one to run again it'd be the thicker one that yielded more.. because the smokes were close enough not to miss the slightly tastier one.

you've still got two new phenos to run and try out too, huh?

 

[Elevator Man]

Yeah, I've got two phenos on about 12 days flower now. One is really small and stocky, with very small (but very neat and perfect) leaves. The other is more of what I had before, except it looks like a combo of the purple and the green! Purple stems, symmetrical growth, but with slightly wonky leaves and a more sativa look to them too. I imagine that pollenating both of these with both my Flo males will give me a fair selection of all these phenos, and more, without losing any of the Flo quality high.

I wouldn't say the yield was dismal on the purple one - it just didn't seem to like indoors much. The outdoor version was much bushier and healthy-looking, although again ,the yield is not great. But the smoke is amazing, so I don't mind.
The outdoor one will be dry by the weekend, so I'll let you know how it smokes. Pics up later or tomorrow - and there's some beauties...