hey al glad to see you back. how was fiji, awesome i can imagine. i've alawys wanted to go there, but anywho glad your back.
Thanks
Fiji was great, but next time I'm not staying at a resort, gonna stay with some locals I got to know and love. I was rather wary of travelling to a place which is in the middle of a military coup, and quite reasonably so had I went to Suva. I flew in to Nadi and immediately off of the big island, over to Vanua Levu, where the political temperature regarding foreigners is a bit lower. The people by and large support the coup leaders. Their objection to the last govt was it seems to have a bias toward big money interests and economically disfavours native Fijians.
Former PM Laisenia Qarase certainly did have a stink of corruption around him and foreigners absolutely do dominate Fiji's tourism industry and property ownership, in many cases either not employing or drastically underpaying native Fijian employees. Foreigners, both residents and visitors, also tend not to respect traditional land owners' rights, tromping about & fishing in places which are of special cultural significance to the people, with no regard whatsoever for the sensitivities of the native peoples. I can see why the native Fijian people are peeved.
hate to hit you up like this,
heh, hit away, it's kinda why I'm here.
i have some indicas and sativas in pots of soil they have been flowering for approximately 10 wks(when i started 12/12). now i'm not worried about the sativas, yet. but the trichs on the indicas are only about 80-85% cloudy, but the hairs are about 60% brown, and the trichs are pretty much the same on the sativa, but her hairs are only about 25% orange.
I'd say it's harvest time. 10wks is about right for soil.
Hey Al, how long to you keep a mum?
It varies. Some keep producing vigorous new growth for 3 mos or more, some are never terribly good producers or the woody part of their mainstem gets too tall, forcing fresh growth to be a bit too high up, meaning it gets too close to the light in the 14 days between cutting batches of clones.
I don't feel bad about disposing of poorly productive or badly formed mums quite frequently. I have space for 10 mums in the veg tray. At any given time, 6-8 of them will be good producing plants and the others have been relatively recently introduced to the mum area and are vegging up to a productive size.
Any feelings about the genetics falling off from clones of clones of clones?
Yeah, it doesn't happen. You can cut the tails off successive generations of lab rats before they breed but never produce rats born tailless. Why? Because you haven't altered the rat's DNA, which exists in every cell in the creature. Similar thing happening with taking cuttings from plants. No change has been made to the DNA.
A cutting is genetically identical to the mother plant. However, a plant propagated by cuttings will be more faithful to the source plant DNA than your modified lab rat, which is reproducing through sexual means. Sexual reproduction is a good way to introduce errors or mutations into DNA.
I've been propagating Sweet Tooth #4 by cuttings from beans sprouted in 2002. If the DNA is going to start changing on me, it is certainly taking its own sweet time about it.
*Somewhere* You mentioned that 5.5mm stalks are best for cutting, but woody stalks take longer to root. Now I have yet, in my early experience, to see a stalk in the 5mm range that wasn't woody.
Here's some >10mm stems that are not woody.
mums just after cuts and 14 days later- lower growth does get woody, new material is fresh & pliant
I've had about the same success % of woody vs non woody.
(been playing a lot lately. Its fun. Though some might think I'm nuts for killing viable females.)
When you're proficient enough to get good results frequently enough to supply the needs for production and yet have leftovers, you are in a fine position to experiment. I grow an awful lot more vegetative material than totally necessary so I can choose the largest and most vigorous tissues for cuttings. Every harvest, between trimmings from flowering plants and waste from cutting clones, I put at least one solidly packed 9L bucket of plant trimmings in the compost, maybe 3-4kg of chopped up plant matter. You can bet my compost worms are some of the happiest invertebrates on (or rather,
in) earth.
Is it normal for the pH to want to climb a little bit all the time? or should it stabilize and say at like 5.8 for a couple of days? My pH is always wandering up. It can be 5.8 just before a flood, but an hour after the flood it is 5.9. The pH goes up fairly consistently .1 or .2 per flood. Is that normal? Am I being repetitive?
