i just closed down a failed SCROG breeding program with a bunch of great strains. well the breeding part went well this time actually, but the "concentrating all growth on buds" top down & bottom up pruning left my gals with too little fan leaf for making babies and they eventually died off leaving just bud leaf. i knew i didn't like the sound of "get rid of any leaf that's below another one or and bud in the shade because it'll be popcorn blah blah blah" SCROG method. if you get rid of too many leaves, your plant won't have enough growth energy. from now on, i'm just going to let my gals stretch out & overlap at least one layer as i'm going to keep breeding.
to add to the stress my gals were going through trying to make a hundred or so babies each with nothing but bud leaf on many strains, i forgot to turn my fan on one night when i took it off 24h and heat stressed the heck out of the shortened cola sticks as well as the taller stretchy plants. the malawi gold in particular took it bad and eventually many of the plants developed what i'd be inclined to call "hot spot burns" that turned fan leaves and leaf tips calico.
i have plenty of beans to test next grow all knocked up by my last surviving joey weed C99 x A11 male plant. the winner of the best buzz award including "time pressure" is jack's cleaner 2 by TGA subcool. that and high quality seeds haze x skunk are in a close tie for favorite doable bud. the haze skunk was grown under a halide and the cleaner under a sodium in a rushed last minute grow, but that JC2 is awesome. the tops i took when this one burned were trippy! i recall a stone under the buzz, but not a KO. the really fun part was it's touchy feely buzz that reminded me of awesome buzzing but hideous tasting diesel based (an abomination! fuck oil to the hell it vomits from!) onyx by short stuff but it gave me the weirdest "body effect" i've ever had. even weirder than the lighter than air effect you get from columbian gold. when i was stroking either my chest, neck or leg & grooving on the touchy feely buzz that's cool enough in itself, i got the sensation that colors were rippling out of wherever i was touching in waves of invisible tie dye colors that made me laugh my ass off when i took it all in. oh that is a fun buzz and i'm getting more and that 9 week wonder is going to spray some ladies next grow. i might have found a life partner with JC2 if it only gets better than what i sampled.
haze skunk by HQS isn't shabby either. it's not quite as trippy and leans more towards clear headed motivation with little more than lead eye for stone. it's yucky cigar wrapper cheesy taste isn't a favorite of mine at all, but i like it better than diesel any day, i hated whatever diesel i scored once too. it's a vile unnatural taste to me. deal with it if your a tailpipe sucker! LOL this grow, i decided to try their thai skunk. it was good, but not as potent or long lasting as haze skunk which is the most potent & long lasting NAMED sativa dominant strain i've ever smoked to this day. i smoked someone's bud i couldn't score at any price (why i despise greed weed indicas!) that i'm positive had trippy columbian gold in it if it wasn't pure as it had that familiar minty weedy pine taste that brought right back to the 80s followed by the light giddy feeling you get in your stomach when you know you're gonna be gettin' high right quick and eventually mild room spinning get me the fuck out of here with this dude who won't stop playing fucking heavy metal guitar hero paranoia that was familar too. the haze skunk wasn't that trippy or visual, but it was way stickier and potent too with a longer lasting buzz, high ceilings and little tolerance building so that the buzz didn't turn to pure stone after a month of wake & bake needing a week's clense to get high again and actually started building up in my system giving me a mild 24/7 perma buzz with low grade nausea (probably partly due to dieting on that manna) that was easy to tune out in favor of euphoric motivation. for that nice of a buzz, i'll put up with a disgusting, but mild flavor any day just as i would getting dry heaves from disgusting licorice tasting durban poison for that decent high if that was all there was. i'd smoke some right now if i could.
i also grew some nice enough black label seeds' masterkush. they're supposedly a sister company to high quality according to something i read, but they at least use the same kind of annoying lose your seeds & destroy the packaging while you're at it plastic domes wedged between 2 layers of cardboard style packs. the masterkush buzz didn't impress me as it was mid stony, but it's a fast flowering and compact SOG plant with mild odor whose buzz is no worse than skunk #1. it's a good strain for cash croppers who don't mind breeding to get enough seeds for a grow or PC cabinet stealth grows. the keeper pheno i'm going to use had cool bright dark red seed pods that faded to a brownish color after a few days. the seeds themselves were actually red stained at their bases a little too when i first popped them out before pan frying the bud. it's a much better strain for shrinking & speeding up big tropicals without polluting them with the afghanicrap that dominates 99.999999% of street weed in most markets outside cali. both HQS & BLS are good value breeders in my book and the haze skunk is a deal of the century for what it does. i like it's cool alternating popcorn bud every inch or two branching pattern. it'd be awesome SCROGged. i want to put it head to head with jack right between my halide and sodium and see what's what.
i was really impressed with the jon sinclair sativa trans love freebie i got. i recall the buzz was "generic" mostly clear headed euphoria with motivation buzz i'm going to call "fruity haze" which many of the strains i tested shared. this one had a really odd silicone worm lure note to it's odor in early flowering that faded to a more fruity note later. if the buzz was familiar, the growth pattern wasn't! as soon as i flipped it, it stopped stretching and exploded resin faster than anything else except the autoflowering kush. oh that strain is cabinet magic and might just boot cindy & apollo out of my "ultimate indoor thai" quest if it's flowering time is as speedy as it's getting into it time. it left everything else in the dust and gave me a nice flat top with 8 or so nuggets of fun
i have mixed opinions on DNA genetics gear. the highest odor in the grow novelty flavor was interesting enough, but it was probably the stoniest plant in the grow. it wasn't bad really, i just have no use for any couchlock if it can be avoided. their sweet haze though was way more my speed and was the finest smoking fruity haze in the grow. it was just a little fruitier and stickier than the others even if it was a stretcher. it reminded me of short stuff's delicious grape tasting (under halides anyways... didn't get grape out of 2x grape SCH x C99 under my sodium for some reason... maybe the different soil mix?) i only got one little gram from my SCH freebie, but a member here said they thought the buzz was too short to be notable. i don't recall duration, but i liked the textbook haze classy buzz & taste a bunch. i also like DNA's nice lemon skunk freebie i tested last year. it had both a better flavor and buzz than skunk #1 and surprised me. their gear has clear personalities and nice quality to back it. i might buy something from them in the future. all 3 strains were clearly above average, even stony but delicious smelling sour cream. med users with a sweet tooth would eat that up.
on the fruity haze & jack's front, rokerij's bargain basement amnesia haze more than held it's own against very similar kannabia thai fantasy, CH9's jack, & female seeds' auto jack. the only loser really in the sweet haze camp was greenhouse seeds' super (really?) lemon haze. LOL it lived down to greenhouse's reputation. it took 4-5 nodes for it to stop mutating and grow straight and it ended up the absolute slowest flowering strain in the grow. it proved to be too much trouble and slow where trans love was right up it's alley in a fraction of the time and sweet haze was doing it better. i didn't get a hermie out of anything though so greenhouse dodged them balls in my grow.
barney's farm LSD was a lot like a cross between masterkush and a fruity haze with a nasty KO creeper stone. i could have done without the hints of catpiss pheno haze in early flowering even if it faded to a more floral grape later, but it was one of the sexiest plants i've ever seen and was a little over half the height of short pheno C99 it was groiwing with with tons of sticky resin. not my kind of buzz. their laughing buddha sounds more my speed, but i've tried to get it to pop twice to no avail. the second time, it snapped itself in half wedged in a peat pellet's hole.
mandala's out of circulation until 2013 8 miles high is a top 5 strain for me for now. it had a really classy haze type buzz with a totally energy neutral buzz with no race or stone, but with plenty of playful euphoria that's happy watching a movie, but loves dancing too. i'd really like to see that one reach it's full potential as i screwed up what i intended to be a cloning project by scamming my nodes for this awesome 24/7 friendly mellow buzz that's just right. it's a bargain too.
you can't get joey weed beans anymore, but his 45 day C99 was nice! it wasn't really psychoactive, but more clearheaded and euphoric with an extra dose or racy motivation not unlike super racy & euphoric kali mist. i like trippier highs, but his C99 is great for activities and the slightly grape hints are nice too. it's buzz isn't happy chilling out though making it too specific a strain for anything but activities.
serious seeds' ORIGINAL crushed red pepper tasting kali mist was way above awesome even if the new spice hater fruitier version shares the same buzz. an insane can't sit still with as much nearly shroom level euphoria buzz should be expected from a $100+ strain that takes 17 weeks to finish. the original flavor was a favorite. i'd expect the 2.0 to be bland and leaning into fruity haze territory, but it's the speediest strain out there i'd bet and no matter what you're doing, you're grinning & humming.
holy smoke seeds' malawi gold looks promising. it's faster flowering and less of an uppity crossdressing diva than highland thai and i really liked what was hinted at in the early bud i took when it was the hardest hit heat stressed strain. i could see that stuff morphing into a trippy monster once those tops start plumping. i'll be really keen to knock that shit up with JC2 as both strains are trippy & lemony and a perfect match as malawi is the trippy heavyweight in theory while JC2 is the sprinter of the two and trippy enough in it's own right.
the one breeder i have no love at all for personally has to be vancouver island seedbank (or was it really kindseed's fault?) when i got nothing for my $62 worth of burmese but mutant aborts. i've had bad luck with barney & greenhouse, but 1:3 kicks 0:10s ass.
hope this helps you find some gear that's just your style or at the right price or a top choice for fems etc. i really wanted to see who to believe on rokerij reporting. one smoke report really praised their amnesia haze while another report elsewhere implied they were cheap schwag. the biggest insult i can toss at their gear is that "it's merely average in a field of way the fuck better than stone street beasters gear that's more expensive". that's pretty good in my book.
