My very 1st grow.. very ghetto to start!

Wow. Read this whole log this afternoon. Lots of great info! I'm starting 7 bagseed and hope to be as lucky.

What the hell happened to you man?
Hope all is well, get back in here and update us!!

FINALLY!! I dunno what the FUCK has been going on between RIU and tor (internet anonymity tool), but it has been nearly impossible to access this site over their network for the past month or so. I apologize to anyone who thinks I disappeared intentionally or anything, but there's no way I'd post about growing weed over anything other than tor (plus other measures).

Now to get down to business. Here's a nice, organized list of all the news since I vanished.

• I harvested the rest of the plant, although I didn't get much. Turns out that she did turn hermie.
• It was almost impossible to spot the damn bananas because they were so small. I expected them to be around the size of the calyxes when they were 10x smaller; like microscopic! I still can't believe no one was able to tell the plant was a hermie by looking at my pics.
• Although most of the calyxes were pollinated, they were also swelling due to maturity as well. I think I pulled her just in time, when she was nice and mature and before seed production really peaked. The calyxes that turned colors and swelled all had tiny little baby seeds inside, and some of the calyx walls hardened up into a shell.
• The trichs on those pollinated calyxes got really dark amber, although the bud still gets me high. The rest of the trichs are 'normal amber', just like I wanted them to be. I guess it took 14-15 weeks because of the lack of lights, P deficiency, and God knows what else. The high is better than before, but not perfect. It gets me real high, but it's a weird high and not the uplifting body buzz I get from Sour Diesel and other local strains. It's also a creeping high, so that plus the hermie tendency and 'pine sol' smell backs up my assumption that the strain was trainwreck or some variant of it.
• The top branch buds were mostly intact, although the lower stuff was contaminated with pollen pods. It looked like the pods somehow "took over" the calyxes and came up through them!
• I can't get an accurate harvest weight because so much of the plant was picked early, although I'd say I got about 6g of dry buds from the whole thing. I always smoke around the same amount every day and know about how long this stuff has lasted me and will continue to last me, so that value is actually pretty accurate.
• The water cured bud came out fine. It did filter out most of the taste and smell leaving the potency intact, but for some reason the bud had a sulfur-like taste upon smoking. It probably has something to do with the pre-seed calyxes or poor grow conditions. The same taste is present in the jar cured stuff too, although the regular taste seems to mask it up.
• All the bud from this last harvest was hung and air dried for a few days, then put into an airtight glass jar which is opened once a day (or whenever I need to smoke). Since this stuff is so airy and light, it only took 4 days to dry the whole second half of the plant.
• The curing process is also moving along quicker than expected. I think it's been in the jar for a little over a week and it tastes and feels like decently expensive commercial shit. There's still a little harshness and sulfur taste to it, but it's completely tolerable, especially when you bong it. It tends to get too dry because it's so damn fluffy, so I let it chill in the bathroom once in a while when I take a hot shower. Works like a charm!

About half of the plant that was left over from the first harvest is now sitting around along with all the trim I saved, waiting to be converted to hash. It's gotta be a quick and easy method, as I don't have much time to do it. Right now, it looks like it's down to either blender hash or iso hash. Decisions, decisions

How's that PC grow goin PH? I'm gonna try to read the thread, assuming this actually posts when I hit submit and I can still access RIU after

Going good man. Nice to see you back and well done. I'm off to the Sprint store to knock some fuckin heads so i will keep this short. In true stoner fashion I scrapped the PC case in favor of a better one, details on that will come soon on the same thread. Glad you made it back to update I was wondering what happened to you. Take care man see ya later.

Just finished a batch of iso. It wasn't that tough, but it is quite a bit harder than it looks. I used a regular paper coffee filter so I had to wait forever for the solution to filter through. I thought I could just stand there with a filter on top of a metal screen strainer, and hold it above the evaporation pan as I poured the solution. Bad idea. I got impatient and ended up overflowing the filter, getting plant scraps all inside the pan. As a result, the original plant matter had to sit in the iso for much longer than anticipated while I scrambled to find a glass jar to re-filter the solution.

In a nutshell, the simplest way to make iso hash without special equipment is to use a glass jar when originally filtering the solution. Just put the filter/strainer on the top of whatever jar it fits snugly into, and pour away. When all the liquid is filtered, pour it onto the evaporation dish.

The "hash" is now dry, so I went ahead and sampled a little. It's black, and tastes like concentrated fan leaf ass, but it's potent as fuck. A tiny ball like 3mm wide was as strong as the sour diesel based hash (actual hash) I had a week ago. I think I actually had some sort of iso type "hash" last summer; it looked and tasted very, very similar but was not as potent for some reason.

Later tonight I will scrape the rest of it and report on the weight. I dunno how much source material went into it, maybe a little under an oz.







EDIT: That plant section in the first pic had twice as many buds before I took the pic. I took off any material that was too leafy or had pollen sacks and used it in the hash. There were lots of nice sugar leaves in that trim too.. mmmm

If you are looking for a cheap HPS light that will do what you want as far as growth you can get a 250 watt HPS with bulb from home depot with bulb for like $55 it is a street light and it worked well for my very first grow. You will need to put a plug and wire on it but well worth the money.