Arrgh, my LSF has come back with a vengence. Unfortunately I broke my small 50W aquarium pump and had to wait for a new one to arrive, which came yesterday, so I ended up not being able to brew up a batch of Plant Magic Essence until last night, meaning the LSF was allowed to go untreated for a while. Some of the bonsai plants in the tray look really vigorous and completely unaffected by the LSF so I'm going to label them as potential keepers since they have expressed a degree of resistance to the disease. Instead of spraying the plants, I just dipped the whole lot in the Essence, completely submerging them so it should hopefully stop it from getting worse.
I got myself a really heavy duty carbon steel garden fork to completely dig up next year's guerrilla spot. I need to get some wood so I can construct a raised bed. Raised beds are great because they heat up more than the native soil underneath and this means you can plant about two weeks earlier than you would be able to otherwise in spring. Especially if you tilt the thing so it's on a slight incline facing the south. That's a little trick I learned last year. So next April I'll be planting on under coke bottle cloches into 50/50 topsoil (loam)/peat moss or compost raised beds and will grow monsters. I'll also use just a small sprinkling of fertilizer and will use some actively aerated compost tea (AACT) well before planting time to get the beneficial soil bacteria to go crazy with growth. The mulch I use will be a really thick layer of cocoa shells which should seal the moisture in and reduce watering.
As for training next year I'm going to try a novel technique outlined in Robert C. Clarke's Marijuana botany, which involves training the plant along a fence positioned so that the plant is along one flat plane facing the south-east. I'm also going to experiment with other techniques as well. If I start them in April like I said then come harvest time the plants could be as tall as 15 feet high! I really want to try and avoid mould at harvest time as much as I can next year too. The choice of strains is very important for this. I'll be growing a couple of landrace strains from the himalayas where during their flowering period they have to endure almost non-stop rain, meaning they've been adapated to not become mouldy under these conditions, making them perfect for the UK. I'll also be trying PM Essence too, since it has a beneficial bateria that prevents botrytis mould supposedly. I'll make sure the top the plants quite a few number of times so that there are lots of smaller colas instead of one donkey-dick large one, which should mean they get more air exposed to them and will be less susceptible to mould, and even if one does succumb, the others might be fine.
The other strains I'm going to be doing are - Dutch Passion Frisian Dew, Female Seeds Purple Maroc, Female Seeds Easy Sativa (one of the only sativa leaning hybrids that is great for the UK climate and which yields really well), Dutch Passion Voodoo (if I can get the bloody seeds!), Female Seeds outdoor grapruit and a couple of others. I really want to try Dutch Passion Passion #1. I won't pop all the seeds from each pack though, to keep numbers more manageable and allow me to grow the same strains the next year without having to keep clones, however I will keep clones anyway in case I find a really good keeper that I want to grow the next year. The biggest mistake people make in growing most often is not taking a clone and finding when they've harvested it that it's the best weed they've ever smoked, only to realize they can never grow it again unless they rejuvinate it, which is hard, time-consuming and often not worth it.
. If i can handle this one atleast a bit (aka the plant doesnt die) im going to buy some northern ligts auto seeds i think. :'D
