The Low Down on Dirt

The nitty gritty on what the hydroponics industry doesn’t want you to know about organic soil grown high grade. I guarantee the stoniest, most medicinal, best tasting, smoothest smoking; cleanest burning herb you have ever smoked was organically grown in soil. If you haven’t ever had the opportunity to smoke organic soil grown kind bud, now is your chance.

In an industry dominated by sales reps, greed mongers, and propaganda pushing profiteers it can be hard to figure out which medium to grow in and what nutrients or products to use. Many of the products on the market today are designed with fancy labels and special formulas or recipes targeting novice or hobby growers. Often many of the products are overpriced, diluted and have little or no effect on the plants you are growing. Many of the products manufactured for the hydroponics industry in North America and Europe are more than 90% water.

For years the hydroponics companies have been the main sponsors of all of the publication of cannabis cultivation guides, each year since the late 80’s the “newest” literature on cultivating cannabis has become more and more inundated with propaganda from what I would like to call “Big Hydro”. “Big Hydro” is the combination of all the major nutrient companies who, in order to sell more products; have taken control of the cannabis related media stream. What better way for a nutrient company owner to make a bunch of money than to pay his buddy to recommend his product line in his grow “Bible”.

I am not completely opposed hydroponics or aeroponics, they definitely have there time and place. A properly run hydroponic scene can be clean, neat, efficient, and productive. My biggest issue with hydroponics is pollution, can you imagine how many gallons per year are fed to waste right into our municipal sewer systems. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of solution filled with nitrates and phosphates flushed into our lakes, rivers, and oceans each year. What this does to our ecosystem is much worse than many people realize. As we become more conscious of our impact on the world around us, it is good to learn more sustainable practices in all aspects of our lives.

The beauty of organic soil grown cannabis is that the only waste created is plant matter which can be composted, (stems, shade leaves etc.), soil that can be reused, recycled into flower or vegetable gardens, or donated to local community garden projects, and the packaging that the amendments, soils, and substrates come in. The more we are able to source our soils, substrates and amendments in bulk the more we are able to reduce our “plastic footprint” and grow more sustainable ganja. Think about the amount of plastic nutrient bottles that get thrown away each year. Imagine if you were able to substantially decrease your ecological impact while substantially increasing the medicinal quality of your cannabis. This is the goal.

Another point worth considering is the amount of water that you use per year on your ganja. Water is the most precious natural resource that we the people of the world share. Many people in the world don’t have enough clean water to live, however in North America and Europe we are fortunate to have abundant supplies of clean water. This does not mean that we should squander this precious resource unnecessarily. As we suffer from more and more nitrate and phosphate pollution, clean ground water becomes more and more scarce. The more wells we drill and the more pumps that we pump the more the underground aquifers that feed our fresh water springs and rivers are depleted. The more these aquifers are depleted the more likely it is that, in time, our wells will produce less and less water. Eventually the biggest challenge we could face as a people could be drought. Remember the words of Peter Tosh “Tell me, tell me, tell me, watcha gonna do when your well runs dry?” It is better to think ahead. Organic soil grown herb uses a considerable amount less water than herb grown in bulk substrates or “soil-less” media. When positively applied techniques are used, similar yields of superior quality herb can be produced with less environmental impact and for less cost with healthy live organic soil than with bulk substrates, hydroponic mediums, or soil-less mixes.

Many growers don’t understand the difference between soil, substrate, aggregate, soil-less mix, and hydroponic medium. This is where I am going to start. When I was growing up on the west coast, learning to grow from the old timers, we weren’t concerned with nutrient formulas we focused on soil recipes. A good soil recipe and the only thing you need to add is water, and maybe a little soluble seaweed, molasses and some guano during flower. I may sound a bit archaic but people have been growing cannabis organically in soil for longer than the English language has been spoken. It is the natural choice and works well when you understand what the plant needs and how to give it what it wants.

So the difference between soil and substrates, aggregates, soil-less mixes, and hydroponic mediums is quite simple. Soil is a living community of microbial organisms and organic matter. Substrates, aggregates, soil-less mixes and hydroponic media are inert, sterile, and not living. Soil contains nutrients made available to the plants by the beneficial microorganisms that live in the soil; where substrates, aggregates, soil-less mixes and hydroponic media require fertility to be added in solution (e.g. hydroponics). The difference is simple and distinct and yet it is more complicated than it seems. Many bagged “potting soils” are actually bulk substrates and have little or no compost or humic matter in them. Sphagnum peat, hypnum peat, sedge peat, coco chips, coco pith, and redwood pith are all substrates that make up a large majority of “potting soils” although they have good texture and water retaining capacity they have little or no nutritive value. These substrates are often blended with bulk aggregates such as perlite, vermiculite, pumice stone, and lava rock to increase their aeration and porosity (drainage). Often amendments are added to the potting soil to change its ph or texture or to increase its nutrient content, rice hulls, bird and bat guanos, worm castings, oyster shell flour, dolomite lime, alfalfa meal, kelp meal, blood meal, bone meal, feather meal, fish meal, crab shell powder, granite dust, glacial rock dust, greensand, rock phosphate, colliodial phosphate, leonardite, and gypsum to name a few. A lot of growers believe that if they are using an amended bulk substrate then the herb is soil grown. I beg to differ, soil isn’t soil without a substantial amount of humic mater or compost in the mix. Amended coco fiber blended with perlite, red lava, rice hulls and worm castings is still a soil-less mix. To achieve good organic “soil” you will need to have a minimum of 25% organic compost in your soil mixture.

There are many different ways to obtain compost and humic soils. Composted sawdust and wood chips are often sold as “forest compost” in most nurseries and they work well as long as they are thoroughly composted, preferably 20 years or more. Forest compost is often “mined” from old mill sights. There are mountains of sawdust from the timber industry that eventually turn into dank dark compost when left to sit long enough. It is important that all of the carbonic matter is adequately decomposed or it will rob your soil of nitrogen. Alaskan Humic Soil can be purchased through most good nurseries and grow stores as well, it is mined similarly to peat but is much richer and gives a lot of rich organic humic matter to the soil mixture. I do not recommend using more than 10 to 15% humic soil in any soil mix. Another form of compost that can be acquired through any decent nursery is worm compost. Different from worm castings, worm compost consists of the bedding material that the worms are raised in, you can try to contact your local worm farmer and see what they have to offer. Mushroom farms can also be a good resource. Mushroom compost has been used for its rich fertile properties in many a grower’s soil recipe. It is important that you only source your mushroom compost from smaller organic farms. Commercial mushroom farms often treat their compost with specific fungicides to inhibit the growth of other mushrooms that compete with their commercial crop. Unfortunately the use of these fungicides renders the compost useless to farmers and gardeners for reuse because the chemical fungicides inhibit the growth of the healthy fungi necessary for healthy soil biology, always be extremely careful to do adequate research on the origin of your compost. One form of compost that I never recommend is green waste compost. A lot of municipalities are composting their green waste, stay away from any compost containing any green waste, the last thing any medicinal cannabis patient needs is the residue from the miracle grow or round-up that someone was spraying on their lawn or ornamental yard plants ending up in their ganja garden.

Whether you are making your own compost, buying it in bags or in bulk, the most important thing you can understand is that the compost is the backbone of soil. The higher the quality of the compost, the healthier the soil, the healthier the soil, the healthier the plant, the healthier the plant, the danker the herb, period point blank. Learning about what makes good compost is the key to understanding how to grow truly superior quality ganja. Compost should be high in humus and low in un-composted organic matter. “All humus is organic matter but not all organic matter is humus. Raw organic matter consists of the waste products or remains of organisms that have not yet decomposed. Humus is one form of organic matter that has undergone some degree of decomposition. There is no hard and fast dividing line, but a continuum, with fresh undecomposed organic materials-manure, saw dust, corn stubble, kitchen wastes, or insect bodies-at one end and stable humus, which may resist decomposition for hundreds of years at the other.”

“Humus is dark brown, porous, spongy and somewhat gummy, and has a pleasant earthy fragrance. Chemically, it is a mixture of complex compounds, some of which are plant residues that don’t readily decompose, such as waxes and lignins. The rest are gums and starches synthesized by soil organisms, primarily bacteria and fungi, as they consume organic debris. Humus is highly variable in its composition, depending on the nature of the original material and the conditions of its decomposition.

“Humus” is actually more a generic term than a precise one. Its qualities will reflect different origins and composition. Just as wine can vary widely in quality, so can humus. And, just as different wines are suitable for different culinary purposes, the varieties of humus serve varying soil functions.”

Understanding soil tilth and learning how to create soil with the perfect richness and texture is not something that you learn overnight. It can take time to learn how to blend a soil that has adequate drainage and appropriate water retention, that is rich enough to feed the plants but won’t burn younger plants. Balancing the amendments in such a fashion as to make all of the necessary nutrients available in the right proportions without under or overcompensating. I am going to start off with a simple soil recipe and then expand on it conceptually so you can start to develop soil recipes of your own.

1 Part Coco Pith

1 Part Coco Chips

1 Part Coarse Perlite

1 Part Alaskan Humic Soil

2 Parts Worm Castings

2 Parts Parboiled Rice Hulls

2 Parts 5/16 Lava or Pumice Stone

2 Parts Hypnum Peat

3 Parts Dank Humic Compost

This blend is what I am using now for both my indoor and all the nursery work that I am doing in the greenhouse. It has both adequate drainage and appropriate water retention and is rich enough to promote healthy growth and won’t burn small clones or seedlings. It is very important that you use a “triple rinsed” coco with a guaranteed low EC. Salty coco can block potassium uptake and can cause serious problems for your plants as they mature. I use both coco and peat in my recipe. You can substitute sphagnum peat for coco if you don’t have a ready supply of clean coco. The sum of the total parts of my soil blend is15, I use a one-gallon bucket to measure each part. I find it is hard to hand/tarp mix more than15 gallons of soil at a time. I measure my amendments in proportion to the 15 gallons of soil mix, to each batch of soil I add the following amendments:

2 Cups Kelp Meal

2 Cups Alfalfa Meal

2 Cups Dolomite Lime

2 Cups Glacial Rock Dust

2 Cups Oyster Shell Flour

2 Cups Greensand

2 Cups Prilled Rock Phosphate

1 Cup Trace Mineral Additive

½ Cup Gypsum

½ Cup Colliodial (Soft) Phosphate

Sometimes I will also add varying amounts of guanos to my amended mix, it depends on my intention, if I am potting up young seedlings or clones (5 ½ inch to 1 gallon pots) I will leave out the guanos. If I am potting up into 3, 5, 7, or 10 gallon pots I will add a few cups of guano to each 15 gallons of soil, I like 1 cup Mocha Bat, 1 cup Indonesian Bat, and 1 cup High Phosphorus Sea Bird Guano for plants that will be flowered in less than 10 gallon containers. I will add 1 cup Nitro Bat and 1 cup High Nitrogen Sea Bird Guano to soil for Plants that I am planning on planting up for outdoor and for extended vegetive growth, such as mother plants. I never exceed 3 cups of guano per 15 gallons of soil mix.

Because I live in “The Emerald Triangle” all of the above components are readily available. You will have to look to your local nursery and garden supply or go online to find certain products. All of the organic amendments I use have been available commercially from regular nursery supply and garden stores since before hydro stores ever existed. Anywhere people grow roses, tomatoes, melons, corn, beans, or squash organically you should have no trouble finding or ordering all of the bulk amendments I use in my mix, however oftentimes they are sold in 50 pound increments. Although not very expensive, having 10-50lb bags of amendments lying around can be a little cumbersome. Sometimes you can find these amendments in 5lb boxes or in bulk, so that you can purchase the amendments you need in the amount that you want at any given point. Perlite, coco chips and coco pith are available at most grow-stores as are worm castings, Alaskan humic soil, and forest compost. Rice hulls, lava, and pumice stone are used in nurseries worldwide, and should be readily found at garden or farm supply stores. The hypnum peat is something I have been turned on to recently and we are working on bringing to market nationally and internationally. So far as I can tell, hypnum peat is the best medium for growing the beneficial bacteria and fungi necessary for healthy soil that the horticultural world has encountered yet. Better even than sedge peat!

The most important thing to remember about soil is that it is alive, and healthy soil needs all of the necessary organic components to support abundant and diverse life. When you add salt-based synthetic fertilizers to soil or soil-less mediums they toxify the ecosystem of the rhizosphere (the region of soil in the vicinity of plant roots in which the chemistry and microbiology is influenced by their growth, respiration, and nutrient exchange.) and are detrimental to the sensitive ecology of a healthy soil. When we grow organically in soil, we are focused on creating a healthy rhizosphere, where the biology is the dominant force in the uptake of nutrients to the plant, rather than a chemically dominant feeding program where the plants are forced to uptake salt-based nutrients to live. By feeding the biology of the soil we get better uptake of the necessary nutrients for healthy and vigorous plant growth. There is a symbiosis between the beneficial bacteria and fungi and the roots of your plant.

“Plant roots themselves play an important role in soil ecology. The largest numbers and kinds of organisms are found in the upper-most layers of the soil, closer to fresh sources of air, water, and food. True, some biological activity happens even at fairly deep levels, especially where earthworms and other animals burrow, and where deep-rooted plants grow. However, in the area immediately surrounding plant roots, known as the rhizosphere, there are concentrations of ten to as many as one hundred times more organisms than can be found elsewhere in the soil. A soil such as that found under permanent grass sod, totally permeated by fibrous masses of roots, will inevitably have a healthier, more robust microbial population than one with cleanly cultivated row crops.

Most of the important soil biological transformations take place in the rhizosphere, especially nitrogen fixation and mycorrhizal associations. The outer coating of the growing root tip, called the mucigel, is a fascinating substance, a product of both the root and the microcommunity around it. A gelatinous substance secreted by the root, the mucigel is a rich mass of microbes and chemical nutrients that connects the plant directly to the life of the soil.”

In my soil mix the Alaskan humic soil and the dank humic compost make up 1/4th  (25%) of the total composition of the soil, another 1/4th of the mix comes from the hypnum peat and the worm castings, thus ½  (50%) of the soil mix consists of dank, earthy, biologically rich, humic laden, organic matter, 7/16th  (43.75%) of the soil mix consists of inert substrates and aggregates (coco chips, coco fiber, perlite, rice hulls and pumice stone) that help to condition the soils’ porosity and texture, 1/16th  (6.25%) of the soil is dry powdered bulk amendments. The amount of rich humic compost, hypnum peat, and worm castings are in good proportion to the amount of coco, perlite, rice hulls and pumice stone. This gives the soil perfect texture and adequate drainage. The amendments are in the right proportions to one another so that all of the secondary and tertiary micronutrients are available in the necessary amounts; this is what makes the soil a complete soil. The Macronutrients can be adjusted by adding guanos with different N, P, and K (Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium) ratios to suit the specific needs of each phase of growth. Guanos can also be “top dressed” (added to the top of the soil) and watered in, during all phases of growth to increase desired levels of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Some growers use blood meal, bone meal, feather meal and fish meal as top-dresses as they are high in varying levels of N, P, K, while other growers are opposed to using any animal products at all. There is an emerging popularity in what has been dubbed “veganics”, that is, using no animal products what so ever. Growers who want to grow plants without using any animal products use mineral and plant based nutrients. These consist of; enzyme hydrolyzed soy, rock phosphate (mined), potassium sulfate, potassium-magnesium sulfate, copper sulfate, iron sulfate, manganese sulfate, molybdic oxide, zinc sulfate, yucca sapponia, and humic derivatives, as well as many others, all of these aforementioned products are certified-organic and can be used in the place of animal products to increase levels of macro and micro nutrients. I am a big fan of soluble seaweed powders (Ascophyllum nodosum) especially the 1-1-17, as well as soluble humic derivatives from Leonardite.

The recipe I have given you in this article is a complete “stand alone” potting soil and using it you can grow a healthy plant through its entire lifecycle. It doesn’t matter if you intend to grow the plant for 6 weeks or 6 months, this soil mixture has all of the necessary biology and micronutrients and, with the right addition of guanos, will have a sufficient amount of macronutrients for healthy organic growth. You can feed this soil mix nothing but pure water and you will achieve killer kind organic soil grown buds. Now, as anything else in life there is always room for improvement. I want to stress the concept that less is more, and although we want to optimize growth throughout the life cycle of the plant, too much of a good thing can seriously damage yield, potency, and overall quality and terpene production. Big-Hydro wants you to think that you have to phosphate load your plants all through flower production to get good yields, however, most of the time the truth is the exact opposite. Contrary to popular belief, healthy plant growth can be achieved without adding any soluble or liquid fertilizers to an amended organic soil mix. The main thing that I focus on isn’t feeding the plant but feeding the soil. By feeding the fungi and bacteria in the soil you help the living symbiosis between the plants’ roots and the microorganisms that live in a healthy soil to occur, this is what causes your plants to uptake the necessary nutrients that are already present in the soil in the plants’ rhizosphere. Adding too many soluble nutrients often is the cause of poor yields and over dosing your plants with chemical fertilizers not only kills off all of the beneficial fungi and bacteria, it will also kill your plants.

Something to consider when growing in organic soil is the size of the container that you are going to use in relation to the size of the plant that you intend to grow. It is important to give your plant an adequate amount of soil to achieve the potential growth the plant is capable of. I recommend 3 gallons of soil per 1-2 ounces of dried manicured buds you intend to grow, or 45-50 gallons of soil per 1-2 pounds of dried manicured buds you intend to grow.  To grow a 5-pound or larger plant I would suggest 300 gallon or larger container. The more soil you give your plants the more you increase your potential yield, other factors such as temperature, lighting, space, length of season and weather all will affect a plants growth potential as well. A plant that gets all day full sun, tons of water and has upwards of a hundred square feet of canopy space, has a lot more potential to yield over 5-pounds than a plant with limited sun or partial shade and limited water and space. Sometimes it is better to use smaller containers and less soil to grow more, smaller plants. One hundred half-pound plants might yield higher quality medicine than twenty-five two-pound plants.  In the microclimate where I live we have a costal influence, and plants that yield more than 2-3 pounds have a higher percentage of loss to mold than plants that yield 3 pounds or less. My neighbor had a bunch of 5-7 pound plants last year and because of heavy early rains and warm weather for the two weeks to follow he lost 90% of his crop to mold. While my plants averaged between 1 and 3 pounds and I lost maybe 20% of my crop at the most. My favorite plants were around 300 grams and didn’t mold at all. Bigger buds doesn’t necessarily mean better pot, in fact it is often the other way around, some of the best nugs I have ever grown have come from plants between ¼ and ¾ of a pound. If and when cannabis becomes accepted as the godsend that it is, and the political oppression and persecution of the plant and all of the herbsmen and herbswomen who grow it is no longer tolerated by the people of this world, when we no longer face the threat of incarceration for growing or possessing a medicinal herb, given to us with all the other seed bearing plants by the most-high creator, then maybe we will grow as many plants as we should choose in the full sun, in front of god and everyone. I don’t feel like I need my local, state or federal government’s help to figure out how to grow my ganja in my own backyard. Do you?

So the next question is, “What do I use to feed the biology in my soil?” the answer, complex carbohydrates, simple sugars, humic and fulvic acids, seaweed extracts and various protein hydrolysates. For optimal biological activity during the vegetive stage of growth your goal is to increase the fungal count of your soil, when you switch over to the floral stage of growth your goal is to increase the bacterial count of your soil. Compost tea has become the popular way to increase soil biology. Many farms have invested in relatively expensive commercial compost tea brewers and many growers are very happy with the results. There is a lot of information on the Internet about making brewers and brewing compost tea. I personally prefer to use shelf stable biological liquid inoculants to rapidly increase the biology in my soil. I prefer the liquid inoculants to brewed compost teas because I know which species and in what quantities I am introducing the beneficial bacteria and fungi to my soil medium. I combine the inoculants with a liquid substrate that helps to activate the soil food web. The products I use for the inoculants are available through commercial organic agricultural channels and are called Bio S I and Bio S I Select. So far these are the best biological inoculants I have found. The Bio S I Select is for vegetive growth and has a higher fungal count. The Bio S I is used for bloom or fruit set and has a higher bacterial count. Compost tea has a lot of potential for variables and can actually be detrimental to the health of your rhizosphere. If you don’t keep your brewer clean enough it can become contaminated with anaerobic bacteria, which is counter productive to healthy soil. Whole batches of compost tea can go anaerobic and it isn’t always easy to tell. If you have a microscope and have had some training in identifying different micro-organisms than you can put a drop of compost tea on a slide and see the balance of different organisms in the tea. If you aren’t familiar with what healthy tea looks like under a scope I recommend the shelf stable liquid inoculants. If you don’t have access to liquid inoculants and aren’t able to figure out compost tea brewing from what you can glean from the Internet, don’t worry, all of the dank humic compost, humic soils and worm castings you added to the soil are teaming with healthy biology. You can use any number of readily available organic sweeteners to help to feed the already prolific fungi and bacteria in your soil. My favorite food for the rhizosphere is yucca extract. It is available through organic agricultural suppliers. The brand name of yucca I use is Therm X 70. Molasses, sorghum, agave, rice syrup and dextrose all work as well; even corn syrup could be used if you don’t have a farm supply or health food store near by. It is important not to over apply simple sugars because they can ferment and create alcohol in you soil, which will kill beneficial bacteria. I recommend 2-3 mils per gallon of water of yucca, molasses, sorghum, agave or rice syrup once a week throughout the life cycle of the plant. 10 mils per gallon of water of 7% humic acid once weekly throughout the vegetive cycle will help to keep the fungal count high, as well as regular application of fish emulsion and soluble seaweed extract. Fish emulsion and soluble seaweed extract are both considered plant foods and have N P K that the plant can use, but more importantly they will feed the rhizosphere and make the existing nutrients in the soil more available because of the heightened biological activity.

At this point you should understand the difference between a living soil and a bulk substrate, you should be able to see the difference between healthy biological uptake of nutrients and force-feeding your plants chemical salts. You should be clear about the difference between hydroponics and organic soil growing. Now that we have a solid understanding of what it takes to grow ganja in organic soil with pure clear water and a little guano, seaweed, fish emulsion and molasses, I am going to up the anti and take it to the next level. I believe it is necessary to create a healthy living organic soil to grow medicinal or connoisseur grade cannabis. You can have the best genetics in the world and they will never turn out 5 star herbs unless you have a true mastery of organic cultivation practices. The flavor and terpene production of chemically grown ganja just doesn’t compete with organics. So once you have mastered the living soil technique, and have reinvented or replicated my soil recipe enough times that you have a thorough understanding of soil tilth and texture, and know how to get the biology of your medium pumping by feeding the microbes in the soil, then and only then are you ready to revisit the liquid nutrient techniques propagandized by “Big Hydro”.

To be quite honest, I want everyone who reads this article to know that I am a firm believer in the use of liquid nutrients. To get the kind of explosive growth that I am looking for, I use 16 different organic liquids in conjunction with my amended organic soil mix. I know I said my soil is a “stand-alone” and it is. It doesn’t need anything but pure water to achieve healthy happy plants and dank organic buds, but to optimize growth potential and maximize yields I augment the complete organic soil with a liquid fertility program. So far I have named three of the liquid products that I use, Bio S I, Bio S I Select, and Therm X 70. In addition to these three products I use 13 other liquid fertility products and they are as follows:

7% Humic acid from “Bio-Flora”

5% Calcium Dextro-lac from “AgroK”

3% Magnesium Dextro-lac from “AgroK”

0-0-6 Potassium Dextro-lac from “AgroK”

6-0-0 Vegan Nitrogen from “Sunburst”

3-0-0 Vegan Nitrogen from “Biolink”

3-3-3 Plus Micro from “Biolink”

0-5-5 from “Biolink”

Micro from “Biolink”

Soil Food Web Activator from “Biolink”

Pound It from “AUO”

Foundation 21 from “AUO”

Symbex from “AgroK”

All of these products are vegan except the Symbex, which contains whey, and all are OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute) listed except for the Sunburst 6-0-0 Vegan Nitrogen, which is organic, and was listed until last year when OMRI changed its guidelines. It is the same product as the Biolink Vegan 3-0-0 only twice as strong. They are both derived from hydrolyzed soy protein. I have used these products both for soil, soil-less and hydro mixes. They definitely fall under the “Veganics” guidelines as they consist only of plant and mineral based derivations. I feel that I am able to achieve the same aggressive growth that people like about Chemy Hydro setups, only using all vegan and organic methods. All of the liquid products I use come from commercial organic agriculture and are priced accordingly. All of the liquid products I use are dripper and T-tape friendly, in other words they won’t clog your drippers and they will run clean through any kind of emitter. The biology that occurs naturally in a healthy soil can be added using the liquid inoculants to any medium including rock wool or hydroton. The most important thing is that the biology is able to come in contact with the roots of your plants. So even if you can’t switch to soil, there is still hope for you, you can still switch to vegan organics.

Because these products are formulated for organic agriculture the application rates on the bottles often read something like 1 liter per acre. Some have a root drench suggestion but none are specific to cannabis cultivation, hydroponics, or even for aggressive annual plant growth. Often the suggested use is geared toward spinach farmers growing in fields. I have spent the past couple years working with this nutrient program and I have come up with a few good formulas. I am going to give you the soil-less formula that I use for indoor Sour Diesel based on a 21 day vegetive period and a 63 day bloom period and let you decide how to modify the formula for amended organic soil, outdoor, light dep, greenhouse, and whatever strains you are working with. Every strain likes something different, I figure the diesel is a good mid-point in the spectrum that everyone can agree on. I will also give a formula for the pre-vegetive phase; this is the 1-3 weeks from when the clone is cut until it is planted in the container it is going to be flowered in. All of the measurements are in milliliters per gallon, and as with any other liquid nutrients always add the liquid nutrients to a full reservoir, never combine the liquid nutrients in their concentrated forms.

Pre Vegetive Phase:

10 mls. Foundation 21 (aminos)

10 mls. 3-3-3 plus micro

Vegetative Phase Week 1:

60 mls. Soil food web activator

6 mls. Bio S I Select

10 mls. 3-0-0

10 mls. 3-3-3 plus micro

5 mls. 0-0-6

10 mls. Foundation 21

10 mls. Symbex (omit for veganics)

10 mls. Pound It

10 mls. 7% Humic acid

10 mls. 5% Calcium

2 mls. 3% Magnesium

3 mls. Therm X 70

Vegetative Phase Week 2:

10 mls. 6-0-0

15 mls. 3-3-3 plus micro

10 mls. 0-5-5

10 mls. 0-0-6

10 mls. Micro

10 mls. Pound It

10 mls. 7% Humic acid

10 mls. 5% Calcium

2 mls. 3% Magnesium

3 mls. Therm X 70

Vegetative Phase Week 3:

10 mls. 6-0-0

15 mls. 3-3-3 plus micro

10 mls. Pound It

10 mls. 7% Humic acid

10 mls. 5% Calcium

2 mls. 3% Magnesium

3 mls. Therm X 70

Bloom Phase Week 1:

60 mls. Soil food web activator

6 mls. Bio S I

15 mls. 0-5-5

10 mls. 0-0-6

10 mls. Micro

10 mls. Foundation 21

10 mls. 5% Calcium

2 mls. 3% Magnesium

3 mls. Therm X 70

Bloom Phase Week 2:

15 mls. 0-5-5

10 mls. Micro

10 mls. Foundation 21

10 mls. 5% Calcium

2 mls. 3% Magnesium

3 mls. Therm X 70

Bloom Phase Week 3:

5 mls. 3-0-0

15 mls. 0-5-5

10 mls. Micro

10 mls. Symbex (omit for veganics)

10 mls. 5% Calcium

2 mls. 3% Magnesium

3 mls. Therm X 70

Bloom Phase Week 4:

60 mls. Soil food web activator

10 mils Bio S I

10 mls. 3-0-0

10 mls 0-5-5

10 mls. Micro

10 mls. Foundation 21

10 mls. 5% Calcium

2 mls. 3% Magnesium

3 mls. Therm X 70

Bloom Phase Week 5:

10 mls. 3-3-3 plus micro

10 mls. 0-5-5

10 mls. 0-0-6

15 mls. Micro

10 mls. Foundation 21

10 mls. 5% Calcium

2 mls. 3% Magnesium

3 mls. Therm X 70

Bloom Phase Week 6:

10 mls. 0-5-5

10 mls. 0-0-6

15 mls. Micro

10 mls. Foundation 21

10 mls. Symbex (omit for veganics)

10 mls. 5% Calcium

2 mls. 3% Magnesium

3 mls. Yucca

Bloom Phase Week 7:

60 mls. Soil food web activator

5 mls. 0-5-5

10 mls. 0-0-6

10 mls. Micro

10 mls. 5% Calcium

2 mls. 3% Magnesium

3 mls. Yucca

Bloom Phase Week 8:

5 mls. 0-0-6

10 mls. Foundation 21

10 mls. 5% Calcium

2 mls. 3% Magnesium

6 mls. Yucca

Bloom Phase Week 9:

10 mls. Yucca

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So there you have it, “Emerald Mountain” Organic Soil and Soil-less Veganics made simple. Now you have no excuse to grow chemical laden beaster schwag any longer. I dare anyone who thinks chemically grown herb is better to do a side by side test with their favorite strain and see which herb comes out better. If you are able to run a controlled, un-biased, scientific experiment I think you will be happy with the results from my methodology. If you run the fully amended organic soil blend with the organic liquid fertigation program indoors, you will need to cut back the nutrient application rates by 30-50% from the recommended soil-less formula, outdoors the soil-less formula will work with the amended soil as long as you are able to give the plants plenty of water between feedings. Indoors I also recommend plenty of water in between feedings, I like to “feed, water, water, feed, water, water, chill” over the coarse of each week. If you are running a flood and drain, recirculating, or constant drip system you might want to tone down the soil-less formula a little, or not, who knows, maybe you can feed at full strength 4 times a day and get insane results, I have never tried. The main thing to remain aware of is; as long as you have plenty of healthy microorganisms living in the rhizosphere of your plants’ roots the nutrient exchange that your plants need for optimum growth, will naturally occur. The more you feed and activate the biology of the rhizosphere the more your plants will be able uptake the necessary organic nutrition for healthy vigorous growth. With these concepts at your fingertips you should be able to surpass any of your previous harvests in both quality and yield. Good luck and happy harvesting!

P.S. All of the liquid nutrients, amendments, soils and substrates mentioned in this article are available through almost every hydro store and garden supply in Northern California, and although they may not stock the products I have mentioned, if they carry “pro-mix” they can get them for you. Don’t take no for an answer, if they value you as a customer they will make an effort to order or stock the products you ask for. Peace!!

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Variety is the Spice of Life

I am interested to reconsider breeding strategies and their affect on the cannabis seed market. I have been saving and breeding medicinal cannabis seeds in California for over a dozen years and been growing ganja in the Pacific Northwest for just over 18 years. I will be the first to say that a healthy vigorous clone is hard to beat. Nothing is better for commercial cannabis cultivation than the productivity of a known variety and a good feeding schedule in the right medium and right environment. Anyone can figure out how to grow one or two strains to perfection, some may even be growing 10 or more strains to perfection, and for some this may be satisfying. But what if it is not? What if growing the same clone the same way getting the same product over and over again gets boring? I understand all too well, that greenhouse after greenhouse of Headband and OG Kush makes someone barrels full of money and keeps the market full of produce that the public desires. This is good, but is it really doing anything to improve the medicinal quality of cannabis in the industry? Don't get me wrong, having a quality product with known quantities of terpenes and cannabinoids is essential for commercial production of medicine for the patients so that they can get the same effect every time they medicate, but what if OG Kush just isn't the best medicine for your condition? Over the years I have spoken with many other growers and breeders. It seems when I was younger all of the old timers still grew from seed. Each year they would make new seed from the previous year's stock. It seemed like the conversation was often based around selection and breeding and less about bragging on how much weight they pulled or which chemicals they used. Now days it seems like breeding is becoming a lost art, even the old timers are looking for that clone that the market will consume and wondering about what "formula" they need to feed to get the best results. In these changing times and shifting markets I don't blame anyone for trying to stay ahead of the game, I know that my mortgage payment hasn't gone away and the cost of living goes up on the daily. Growers are looking to the consumers to find out what they should grow, in a more and more saturated market where it is harder and harder make a living, commercial production seems to have become more and more prevalent. So what about those of us who would rather grow from seed? For the past few seasons I have been growing all of my medicine from seed, even my indoor. Personally I like seed plants much better than clones. I like to see differences from plant to plant. All of the ganja I grow is chronic, it is all organic, and it is all from seed. The past few years in the Emerald Triangle we have been subject to changing weather patterns, I have talked to more than a few growers who are having problems with clones for their full-term outdoor gardens. The late spring and early summer rains have been causing a lot of the clone plants to trigger early and start to flower when they should be in full vegetive growth. It can often take weeks, even months for a plant to revert from floral to vegetive growth. I know of more than one grower's collective that was pulling up flowering clones and replanting with seed starts this spring. This can be really detrimental to yields. Why not just start from seed? A lot of growers are convinced that they have to grow certain strains or their product will have little value in the commercial market. Everyone wants name brand weed, and if it isn't one of a top few brands than you might end up sitting on it until late summer or early fall. So the real question is how do we get a consistent chronic product from seed that meets the needs of the consumer market while holding all of the vigor and yield of a seed plant? I read Marijuana Botany by Robert C. Clark for the first time when I was fifteen years old. This book changed my life and my perspective on cannabis and cannabis breeding, one of the only books of it's kind published to date, it still reigns as the old school guide for cannabis breeding, however the old school unfortunately is being laid to rest to as an emerging new school dominates the industry. So where is the middle ground?? I propose that there exists a middle road or path where the old school meets the new school and any grower who truly loves what they do will find their niche in this evolving market. The first idea I would like to introduce is that anyone who grows from seed has the potential to breed. Seed saving is as old as agriculture. Indigenous people all over the world have been saving seed from crop to crop since we made the shift from hunter-gatherers to farmers. Luther Burbank's strategy of select the best and discard the rest actually works quite well for cannabis, as simple as it might sound. So what I would like to promote isn't my brand of seed but the consciousness that everyone should be growing and saving as much seed as possible right now, and not just cannabis. Who knows what the future holds, the more sustainable and self sufficient we are, the better off we will be. The most important thing I can stress about growing and saving seed is knowing that your stock is solid and the germplasm you are starting out with hasn't been altered in some fashion to make the progeny (offspring) sterile. I personally shy away from feminized seed, especially for breeding. I think feminized seed has the potential to irrevocably alter the gene pool of cannabis in a negative way. Can you imagine if all of the offspring in subsequent generations tended towards hermaphroditism? We don't know what the long term effects of using chemicals to alter the sex of plant to create feminized seed does to the DNA of the plant. So far I have heard only negative reports about clones and seeds produced from feminized lines. I would suggest that feminized seed is good for one thing and one thing only, to grow a population of plants for the purpose of commercial production. I would not propagate them in any fashion, however the xx chromosome linkage seems to fix recessive traits more readily than xy chromosome linkage. It is what I have heard some old school breeders refer to as "top crossing" using stress induced hermaphrodite pollen from a mother plant to pollinate the offspring of that mother to bring out desirable recessive traits in the next generation. These plants are then cloned and even used for further breeding, often without problems in subsequent generations. It is important to remember that cannabis has the potential to be both dioecious (having the male and female reproductive organs in separate individuals) and monoecious (having both the male and female reproductive organs in the same individual; hermaphrodite) and one must be careful when inducing hermaphroditism, or sex reversal, not to end up with whole populations of plants that herm out. So let's say that you're fed up with growing clones. You're sick and tired of all the problems that can occur, be it mites, powdery mildew, photo-period sensitivity, week or unstable genetics or mislabeled stock. Last year a friend of mine planted his whole garden in clones he thought were Blue Dream and turned out to be Chem Dawg. He was going for high yielding and easy to grow and he got low yielding and finicky. Needless to say he was bummed. Not that Chem Dawg isn't killer, but it was this grower's first outdoor garden and it didn't come out the way he had hoped. So where do you start? Where do you get good old fashion male/female seed of a popular variety and how do you know that the seed you buy is going to be a good place start? This is a good question, once you have found a strain you like, doing seed increases is not too complicated. What I recommend is doing some research on the Internet or checking in with other growers or dispensaries and seeing what they recommend. There is a lot of good information, miss-information and propaganda out there, sometimes it is hard to separate the good from the bad. I will do my best to keep it simple and not lead you astray.

Breeding Strategies

There are many styles of breeding that you can practice, it is not as simple as it may seem. Like I said before I am interested to reconsider breeding strategies and their affect on the cannabis seed market. Many companies out there would have you believe that stability is king, that uniformity is a necessity. Many breeders strive to create "in bread lines" (IBL's). I agree that if you buy a package of ten seeds and you are expecting a certain strain you want the seeds to express the traits that are expected from that strain. Let's take Northern Lights 5 as an example, NL5 is a stable, true breeding line and shows little or no variance in it's offspring, it has been used as a progenitor (parent) to a lot of other strains, there are some that say Headband is a Northern Lights/Diesel cross. Many of the strains in today's marketplace are poly-hybridized and only exist in clone form. The Sour or New York Diesel is a perfect example, many breeders (myself included) have so loved the Diesel that they have tried to re-create it in seed form. The literature out there would have you believe that you can take any clone and "cube" it, that is take a clone and cross it with a male of similar taxonomy and then back-cross to the mother a couple times and voila, you have a population of seeds that are just like the mother. I am afraid it is not that simple, an IBL like northern lights which has true breeding dominant traits will probably cube easily, and in 3 or 4 generations most of the progeny will show all of the traits of the parent strain, however a highly recessive poly-hybrid strain like the Sour Diesel (13 different distinct traits) has a 1 in 64,000 chance of getting the allele alignment or "linkage" to occur for all of the traits to be expressed. If you have ever grown the true Sour/New York Diesel, and those who have know, it only comes from clone. So the question remains, how do you get your favorite clone strain to grow from seed? Especially a strain with highly recessive characteristics like Diesel. The answer; develop strategies that are conducive to achieving the linkage necessary for the expression of the desired traits in subsequent generations. In the old school you would start with two P1 strains, say a pure Afghani and a pure Thai you cross them together and you have an F1 (first filial generation) cross. You take your two favorite F1's and cross them together and you have your F2 generation. You select your best F2's and cross them together and you have your F3, F3xF3=F4 and so on down the line. This is what is commonly referred to as line breeding, and is a typical old school breeding strategy. Most of the traits that are fixed through line breeding are dominant and eventually you end up with a pure IBL like northern lights. The old school mentality lent it's self to creation of stabilized hybrids that became true-breeding strains. These true breeding strains eventually began to suffer from inbreeding depression so they were then bread with other hybrids which in turn created poly-hybrids, strains with more than one set of progenitors. Some of the 4 way strains were quite good, the original skunk strains from "Sam the Skunk Man" and other breeders from Rob Clark's day, were made of 4 way crosses like Lemon Thai/Afghani x Oaxacan/Nepalese. Eventually the names were shortened to "4 way Skunk" or "Skunk" and the old school landrace strains started to disappear. These 4 way hybrids were crossed and stabilized into strains like The Original Haze, Big Bud, Northern Lights 5, and Skunk 1, California Orange and some of the other first name brand strains that were emerging in the early 80's that didn't carry the name of their landrace of origin. It wasn't long before the names like Black Afghani, Panama Red, Columbian Gold, Gurerro Green, Purple Burmese, and High Mountain Michoucan were only in stories told by the uncles and fathers of my generation and the name brands of unknown origin's were the new sought after commodity.

Pure Truth by Emerald Mountain

If you have a strain you like and you are currently growing it from clone, one thing you can do is try to track it down online and see if any seed companies offer it in seed form. Always be careful to try to determine that the seeds are male/female (non-feminized) and not sterilized. Believe it or not it seems that more than one company out there has taken on the Monsanto attitude and is releasing seed that have been altered in some fashion to sterilize the male pollen. I want to set the record straight, this kind of greed driven bullshit has no place in the cannabis world. It is one thing for a breeder or grower to want to protect his or her hard work and keep back private stock from the public market, but intentionally releasing seed into the public domain that have been genetically tampered with to create some kind of terminator gene is just plain wrong and all I can hope is that these seed companies will be driven out of business by other companies of higher integrity. All of the seeds that I produce are grown using biodynamic and organic standards and all of the seeds are from non-feminized and non-GMO lines. I have been very careful to only acquire germplasm from reputable sources to ensure that I don't end up breeding unwanted traits into my lines that I can't get out. It is my intention for the seeds to be grown and reproduced by the grower for generations to come. Each grower will find the traits that they like, and eventually they will have a stable cultivar that is acclimatized to their microclimate and bioregion. If you have a strain you like and you can't find seeds or you know that it only exists in clone form then you need to come up with a strategy to breed with that clone until you get a population of seeds that adequately expresses the desired traits of the strain so that you feel comfortable letting the clone go and just growing the strain from seed. Until you have stabilized your seed line, be careful to always keep a healthy mom and remember that from generation to generation certain traits will become fixed and certain traits will become lost. Good notes and proper labeling are a seed savers best friend. The first thing you need to think about is picking a male. It is very important to pick a strain of similar parentage so that you get the linkage that will cause desired traits to stabilize. If you are starting with an Indica dominant strain you should be looking for a strain that is also Indica dominant for your male. Similarities in the taxonomy are what are most important. The male is going to lend some of its traits to the offspring, so finding a male with the most similar progenitors as well as the most similar traits to the mother is important. The size, shape and serration of the leaf are some of the best indicators of genetic compatibility. I was taught to count the serrations on a leaf and compare number from one leaf to another. If you find a male with similar size shape and number of serrations per leaf blade to the mother they will probably breed well together no matter what the name brand is. A good thing to remember is that all of the hybrids in today's market come from indigenous landrace strains and those indigenous landraces are all related. When you start combining hybrids with one another you can end up with expressions that were not apparent in either of the parent plants. It is important to grow a small population of the seed out to make sure that the parents were genetically compatible and you got the linkage for the traits you were looking for. If you cross two strains together and most of the traits you desire don't carry over in the next generation then you ought to consider a different male. If you have tried crossing several different males to a female clone strain and still aren't getting the desired expressions, it may be that the female has too many recessive traits that are easily overpowered by some of the common IBL's in the commercial market. Sometimes you have to breed to a dissimilar male and then back breed to the mother to get the linkage and expressions you desire. One of the most important things to remember along the way is that "variety is the spice of life" and really your end goal in any breeding project shouldn't be to re-create a strain that already exists, it should be to create a strain that you like better than any you have grown before. So we have touched in on cubing as well as line breeding, both are simple strategies and will work to fix dominant traits, eventually both will suffer from inbreeding depression, even though all of the seeds grow out the same and the strain is really "stable" it may not be as good as it used to be. For some uniformity is more important than pristine quality. Some people want their plants to all be the same and those people are happy with good enough herb that all harvests at the same time and smells the same looks the same and gets you medicated in the same way. Even more than personal opinion the commercial market dictates that you have a uniform product or it is harder to market. Again we have to look at our breeding strategy and what our desired outcome is, what is it that we are trying to accomplish? When we start to see variation in a population, what are we selecting for? Often breeders who are commercially oriented have selected select for higher yield, heavy feeding, early ripening, mold resistance, easy to trim, believe it or not some breeders have even selected for low odor?? The last thing I want is pot that doesn't smell, I want herb that one little bud double bagged zipped up in my coat pocket stinks up the whole room the moment I walk in. I select for plants that the herb smells so strong that when you crack a jar open to roll a joint people come from the other room to see what is going on. One of the biggest problems that has occurred with the herb in the in the past 20 years is the idea that "bigger is better" has been promoted throughout the industry, many varieties have been bread for these commercial qualities and a lot of potency, flavor, pungency, and diversity of cannabinoids and terpenes have been lost. Now I would like to complicate the situation and add some concepts that go beyond basic cubing or line breeding. I am going to describe the technique and strategy that I am using on the Royal Kush breeding project. I have been working on the Royal Kush for a little over 5 years now and I am going to do my best to describe what I've done and where I am going with it from here. Many breeders aren't open to discussing their progenitors or their techniques. Personally I want other growers and breeders to use my genetics and techniques. I want people to grow and reproduce my strains and get them out there to the world. All of the seed that I have let into the market is for growing and breeding. The more people understand about the strategies and techniques I used the better they will be able to surpass me and produce a product superior to mine, hopefully they are open and honest about what they did and how they did it and we as a race can keep pushing up the bar as far as the industry standard for heady herb is concerned. So I started out with a Sour Diesel clone of reputable stock. I was looking for a good male to cross it with, I wanted something early, hearty and with better structure but still potent and frosty. I started asking around and came upon a seed line from an older grower I know. He said it was called the Salmon Creek Rock Bud. I asked if it was pure or "true breeding". He said it had been pure bread in Southern Humboldt since 1979 and that it was a Pre-Soviet Highland Afghani and was as pure as it comes. We talked about the strain's characteristics for a while and I said that it sounded just right. He went into the greenhouse and came back out with a plant in a 2-gallon pot and said, "Here you go, this is the male you want." I thanked him and took plant and put it in the truck and drove home. The next day I took my best Sour Diesel plant and the Afghani male and put them together in a 20 gallon pot and my partner and I lifted it up into the crook of an oak tree far enough away from our sinsemellia patch and let nature take it's course. That fall we split up the crop and split up the seeds and called it a season. As soon as the seeds were dry I fired up my indoor scene and cracked a couple hundred of them, I was eager to see what they would express, I wondered if the skunky petrol flavor of the Diesel would carry over in the F1 generation or would it be overpowered by the fruity spicy Afghani. Almost all of the seeds germinated (90 percent or better) and when I sexed the plants at about 2ft I ended up with about half males and half females. At that point I was really more interested in the males than I was in the females I put all of the females in a room to flower and I looked over each and every male with a keen eye and a keen nose. What I look for in a male is hard to describe, it has to have good structure, it needs to be vigorous, it has to have a resinous stem and pungent stem smell, it needs to have leaves that look like the mother I am breeding to or other female plants I have grown in the past that I liked, It isn't one specific thing that I am looking for but a combination of many traits that make a good pick. The most important thing to me is the smell; it has to lend itself to the flavor I am trying to create. In this case I picked 40 males out of around a hundred specimens. "Why so many?" you may ask. Well lets say that I wasn't trying to isolate or in-breed, but do the opposite, I was trying to create as many different phenotypes to choose from as possible, I was practicing what is called a "crux" or "shotgun" strategy. I took 40 Diesel/Afghani males all of which had a dank diesely smell and characteristics that resembled the Sour Diesel and I put them together in a room with all of my favorite clone strains at the time. I had Purple Kush, Purple Erkle, Granddady Purps, The Biggest Darkest Purple, LA Kush (aka Headband), Sour Diesel, SuperDawg (Amhurst Super Skunk/Chem Dawg), and The South Jetty Trainwreck. At the time these were the best and most coveted clones in Humboldt, the OG craze hadn't made it's way up to the triangle yet and these cuts were hands down the best game in town. So I flipped back the lights (6x600w) and let nature run it's course and in a couple months I had more seeds than I knew what to do with. So I started planting them a couple hundred of each strain at a time and looking for pre-floral traits that I liked. I have a background in organic farming and I have read a lot of Luther Burbank and other plant breeders like Carol Deppe, and John Jeavons work and what all of the information I have gleaned over the years has lead me to believe is, that it is ideal to start with large populations of plants and select the best plants for your trials, increasing your odds of finding "the one". So for the next couple years, several of my partners and I spent a lot of time trialing different phenos, looking for "the one". Can you imagine room after room after room of dissimilar plants? We were running the Diesel Afghani crosses, Maui Super Dawg crosses and LA Kush x Mazari Sharif/Purple Hawaiian Thai. Talk about genetic incompatibility, the Kush Mazari or KMZ as it was labeled was a disaster. I got the Mazari/Hawaiian seed from an old-timer outdoor grower who told me they were killer. He gave me some of the hash and it knocked my socks off. I took two hits of the Purple Mazari hash and I was stoned to the bone for a solid 24hrs, and I was a heavy smoker at the time. I took the seeds and grew them out and it was the most indica dominant plant I had ever seen. I picked my two favorite males and crossed them into the LA Kush ( Headband), I don't know what went wrong, something between the Purple Thai in the Mazari and some latent Thai genetics in the LA Kush (Headband), but the plants went bananas, literally. They would flower for four weeks looking killer and then grow straight male branches out of the side of the forming buds, neither of the parent plants hermed out at all, but when crossed… It was ugly. It took us a month or two to make sure that we had killed off all of the clones and moms of the notorious KMZ. After 18 months we had whittled down from a massive population of plants to about 100 moms and now were only trialing the phenos we liked. We liked the DDA (Diesel/Diesel Afi) a lot, so many phenos and diesel-like flavors, with hints of licorice, lemon and spice. So many slight variations, however none were hitting all the characteristics of the Sour Diesel. The KDA (La Kush/Diesel Afi) had at least 7 distinct expressions that were world class a couple that were super chronic and straight yielders, the KDA#33 I would like back, if any one out there has it. The MSD (Maui/Super Dawg) had a bunch that were good but only two that were phenomenal, and the PKDA (Purple Kush/Diesel Afi) had a lot of variation some good, and some not so good. There was this one cut that was just epic, the PKDA#8. By the end of year two we were down to ten moms from some ridiculous number of plants that I don't even want to mention. Our collective was running 10-20k in veg and up to 50k in flower at any given point devoted to the breeding endeavors. And after it was all said and done there were two clones that were unique and different and worthy of introducing into the Northern California medical market, the PKDA#8 and the MSD#12 and they ended up being dubbed The Royal Kush and The Truth. We started circulating clones of both The Royal and The Truth amongst our collective members. There was a strict policy at first, "tight homies only" I didn't want my genetics in the hands of some new school carpet sogger. The last thing I wanted was product going into the market bearing our name that wasn't grown to our standards and didn't have our seal of approval. Everyone who was given the clones loved them both, it was so nice to have some new flavors that were on the same level as the rest of the upper echelon strains. The Royal is still to this day the favorite smoke of some of heaviest puffers I know in the tri-county area, and The Truth clone is still the staple of more than one medical garden in the emerald triangle. Back Breeding The Truth was simple. I grew out a couple hundred seeds picked out the three best males and backcrossed to the clone. I grew out a couple hundred of the F1 backcross and the first generation showed all of the traits I liked to be true breeding. Again I picked my three favorite males and backed them to the mom, and again a high percentage showed all of the traits that I was looking for. The mother plant was showing dominance and the males were showing good linkage of traits and a simple cubing strategy was working. I cubed to the mom two more times each time with three males and then released the seed to the public. I feel that the F4 backcross is fairly stable yet there is still enough variation to select for traits desirable to each individual grower. I found that the characteristics of the Maui had started to dominate the characteristics of the Super Dawg and it was time to stop inbreeding and start hybridizing again so I crossed it into The Pure Kush, The OG Kush, The Headband, and The Diesel Afghani. So far I have been really happy with the results, the Super Dawg in the Truth seems to link really well with all of the Chem family of genetics. Breeding The Royal was not so simple. I took the PKDA#8 clone that we had given the name Royal Kush and I went into my seed bank and got a few hundred of the original PKDA F1 seeds and cracked them looking for a few potential fathers. There was really a lot of variance in the F1 generation where some hybrids have very little variance in the F1 population. I would attribute this variance to the fact that it is a poly-hybrid of a poly-hybrid, even though the Highland Afghani and The Purple Kush were true breeding stable IBL's, the Sour Diesel is not only poly-hybridized but there is also some speculation that there was some polyploidy induced in the progenitors. This could be a part of why it is so hard to stabilize, a mentor of mine, who was a part of the original New York Diesel crew believes that it has more sets of chromosomes than most other strains and that is why some of the traits get lost, they aren't able to link to anything. He says that they were using colchicine on some of the progenitors, which he claims were Big Bud, Northern Lights, and Skunk. I sifted through the phenos and I eventually found 7 males that I thought might link well. I used seven different males because I knew if I only picked one and I didn't get the linkage I was looking for then I had to start over at the F1 again. I grew out the seven males with a room full of Royal clones and open pollinated the whole room. When I was selecting for traits in the males the main traits I was looking for were similar stem smell, similar plant structure, similar leaf structure, and vigor. Like I said before, the key to picking a good male isn't based of one trait or another it is the sum of all the parts. I have to like everything about the plant and it has to remind me of the mother in every way, especially the stem smell. When I rub the stem of the male and smell it and then I rub the stem of the female and smell it I want them to be as close to identical as possible.

Royal Kush 7 by Emerald Mountain

The next step was to grow out a couple hundred of the F1 and a few hundred of the F2 seeds. I start selecting before I see the first set of true leaves; the Indica dominance of the highland afghani is prevalent and distinctly different than that of the Royal Kush. The Royal favors the leaf structure of the Purple Kush and is long bladed with jagged serrations. The Highland Afghani looks more like the Diesel but slightly more broad, your classic five-finger Indica leaf. In growing through the F1 generation of females I found that the broad leaf phenos leaned toward the spice of the Afghani and the slender jagged leaves leaned toward the Kush. The first thing I do is start pulling all of the plants that I know aren't what I am looking for. If they look more like strawberry leaves than ganja leaves then I know they are not what I want. I can eliminate 25-50% of my population before the first set of true leaves (five fingers) emerges. I have learned that you can tell a lot about a plant by the spike leaves (the first leaflet to emerge after the cotyledon leaves). You can count the serrations and learn to judge the shape and structure of the leaf within a week of germination. I do a lot of my selection when the seedlings are small and easy to deal with. I get rid of any week or warbled sprouts and I am fairly heavy handed in my discernment. I want to go from a population of 500 to a population of 100 or less before the third set of true leaves appear. Now I want to take the ninety or so unsexed seedlings that are the best picks and pot them up and watch them grow, I usually go up to 2 gallon or 5 gallon containers at this time. I make sure that all the plants are getting even light and even watering and spaced well. I want to see the truest expression of the genotype possible; I don't want the environment to alter the expressions. Once the plants are about 2ft high and they start to show sex I start separating males and females and as strange as it may sound I start chopping females. Sometimes I will throw them in a flower room or breeding room if they seem promising, but really what I am after is the perfect group of males. At this point in the game I am looking closely at all of the taxonomical expressions and checking all the different stem smells and taking mental notes of the variety of smells and leaf structures and how they correspond to one another. My goal is to select down to the ten top males out of a population of five hundred or more plants. Once I have found the ten males from both the F1 and F2 generation I go back to the breeding room and fill it with the chosen males and the Royal Kush clones, Flip them to 12/12 and let them go. Because my interest is in producing breeding stock and not commercial seed stock for distribution I open pollinate once for several weeks, and I put the males and the females into flower at the same time. My biggest concern is that the primor meridia (the first pistils to emerge at each node along the apical and lateral meristems) get pollinated by the first pollen that drops, don't ask me why, it is just an ancient Chinese secret passed on to me by the dancing wu li masters. When I want to maximize seed production I pollinate twice, once in the third week and once in the sixth week of flower production and I flower two sets of males each ahead of the point of pollination by about five or six weeks, that means I put my first set of males into flower three weeks before the females and the second set of males into flower at the same time as the mother stock. This ensures peak pollen production at the time of pollination. I open pollinate the ripe dust cloud dropping males to the fluorescent peaking pistillate females for 24-48hrs and then remove the males until the first seeds have set and the second set of pistils is fluorescing and ready for pollination. I then bring in the second set of males at peak pollen production and let them make their contribution also. Then the second set of seeds is allowed to ripen, around four weeks from the second pollination the seeds are ready to harvest. So now I have a population of seeds that include the Female PKDA#8 (Royal Kush) and males from PKDA F1 and PKDA F2 (Royal Kush/PKDA F1). For ease of operation I am going to call the Royal Kush clone the P1 the first back cross the F1 and the subsequent back crosses F2, F3, F4 etc. Every time I repeat the selection process described above I increase the number of generations included in the population I am starting with. I take 100 seeds of the F1, 100 seeds of the F2, 200 seeds of the F3, 200 seeds of the F4 etc. select my males and back cross to the P1 clone strain which in this case is the Royal Kush. I select away from all of the traits that I didn't like and in each of the subsequent generations I get a higher percentage of the traits that I do like. I still get some throw backs to the old school Afghani and I don't know if it will ever breed completely true to the Royal Kush phenotype. I have run this multi generational back cross strategy for seven generations now (no joke, it took some time and patience) and I released what I call the Royal Kush 7. It is not a true breeding IBL and I did not intend for it to be. There are a lot of phenotypes that come through that are really close if not exactly like the mother, there is some variance so you the grower can choose the traits you like and continue selecting for your personal taste as well as your environment and climate. I am hoping to see new phenotypes from the seed population in circulation soon. Even though a lot of folks are still killing it with the original clone it is at least 5 years and who knows how many generations of clones from the original seed plant. I don't care how good someone is at keeping mothers and cutting clones (I have cut more clones than I can count, literally) eventually the strain starts to loose it's vigor. I guess you can try hormone therapy on your 20-year-old clone strain to keep it alive or you can crack seeds and grow out plants and look for "the one" that stokes you, the grower. The Royal Kush 7 is at a perfect place for any good grower to pick up some of the seed and start doing seed increases and line breeding with it. It should be easy enough at this point to pick a clone and start cubing it to males of the similar expressions and start a multi-generational backcross project of your own or just go with the tried and true old school methodology of picking your best female and crossing it to the best male. If you are sick of growing clones and not afraid of a little hard work you should be able to stabilize a seed line from this stock fairly quickly with or without the original clone. Once I have a chance to work on it more I will do my best to let out a more stable version myself, still it is important for all the old school (minimum 20 years experience) growers to remember their roots, freshen up their gene-pool and start growing from seed again. The Pure Kush, OG Kush, and Headband all seem to breed fairly well when crossed with pure stable Afghani strains. So break out your film canisters* and start weaving that old school skunk back into the watered down Kush strains that all the city folk are raving about.

Royal Kush 7 nugshot

In conclusion, The Royal Kush is an indica dominant hybrid of a pure old school southern Humboldt Purple Kush, the real Sour Diesel, and a pre-soviet Highland Afghani. It has a truly medicinal, very stoney, sedative and deeply meditative high, with a cerebral psychedelic quality. The Royal does well indoor, outdoor, light dep, and greenhouse, she is mold resistant and has an earthy flavor, deep kushy bouquet with overtones of petrol, skunk, and grape, trichome laden, limey to olive green with hints of lavender to dark purple in color, medium yield, 63 day flowering period, outdoor harvest early to mid October. We've used selected males from six different generations of Royal Kush stock and folded them repeatedly back into the mother. We have been working to create a diversified gene pool within the Royal Kush Line to further the genetic potential rather than line breeding it to lock in traits. We have seven generations of cubed (bred back into the mother) crosses, each generation having males from the subsequent generations. For example P1 (the original selection) crossed by the F1, then the P1 x F1 & F2, then the P1 x F1, F2 & F3, then the P1 x F1, F2, F3, & F4, and so on down the line. Each of the males that we select exhibit the traits that we are looking to pass on to the progeny. We do not recommend these seeds for novice growers. We here at Emerald Mountain Seed Company developed these seeds for our customers to grow out and produce excellent medicinal herbs, with the intention of isolating original high quality mothers as well as providing a good solid outdoor stock. Good luck and happy harvesting. *(A film canister is a small plastic container that film used to come in, and a lot of old time dope growers used to keep their stash in them. Film is something that was used in cameras before the world went digital.)

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