Personal Stuff Greetings! It's Milson again.
I think it's probably time for a perpetual thread because I am growing perpetually (until my death) and at this rate things are going to be blending together in a way that makes threads going grow by grow kind of incoherent since grows will be blending together.
I am still going to finish the thread for my
Cheese, Chemdog, Kali China, Sweet Zombie, Zamaldelica x Kali China grow, but after that the rest will be here until I decide to start a new thread if I do.
I have undergone the most radical developmental growth period of my life since college in the last six months, and I think this site, this hobby, and this plant have a lot to do with it. I have a tendency toward agnostic spirituality and philosophy, along with a lot of more quantitative pursuits as I bounce up and down densities of information trying to better grasp my world.
And it's my world that I am trying to grasp. Hence the title. I'm too dumb to understand the world at large in any way that doesn't make me just get frustrated and angry, so I am going to stop trying to do that and just focus on what I can grasp. Since I started doing that in May, I am down 45 pounds (coming up on college Milson!), my relationship with my wife has gotten a lot stronger, I am less angry, my cholesterol is down 100 points, my BP is down, I am making a lot more money (during
flu! I work as a freelancer/self-employed/business owner working on apps, so there is a direct correlation between my productivity and how much money I make, which is nice), and in general I am just happier.
Milson and Cannabis For those that don't know, I have a card as a medical grower to manage nerve pain stemming from some lower back issues. In high enough doses, especially when mixing multiple strains (yeah I am listening!) in edibles along with smoke and some hash, the pain melts down to just about nothing unless I have a very strong attack, and even then it gets managed a hell of a lot better. I have not been able to get a good method going for distillate, as I am stuck at the bubble hash phase for now as I get better at that...but bubble is pretty damn nice.
I am also aiming to help my father, who has Parkinson's. His initial reviews of my hash I made him were "the effects are good but I don't like smoking it." He does have my edibles though and it is helping him more than he will admit. I have made those for him with mixes and straight. Predictably, he finds the mixes better for pain too, but he hates the high if I make them too strong. I still can't get him to just get over being high for a while, but ya know. We are making progress.
Personality-wise, I am basically teetering on the edge of crazy. I think.
Anyway, that's enough background for now! Let's get to good stuff!
Thoughts on the near future of my growing and strain selection I am going dad hunting.
I have no interest in finding a keeper mother plant and running a bunch of clones of her. Variety is useful to me and besides that, this hobby is in part showing me the flows of life, and I want to honor that by keeping the flows going and not adopting an attitude of scarcity if it is not warranted. So I think I am going to do what it looks like a lot of breeders I admire do: find a good dad and go from there. It seems like finding a good dad is the hard part that separates good breeders from people just making crosses. I don't think I will be breeding until I have more space, but I can start the process of getting a feel for identifying good dads now. First step is to just make a damn cross and grow them out, right! Let's keep things simple.
In my first effort to find a dad, I am popping 5 x
Black Widow from Nirvana and 6 x ((Nevil's
Haze x Original
Haze) x Original
Haze) from
@agseedco. These are old school genetics that are still more tamed than pure landrace stuff (re the
haze...obviously
black widow is very tamed), so they seem like a good starter spot. I think growing the
haze is going to be a huge challenge for me, but holy crap do I like a good
haze. A lot of people do. They are not the best for pain relief but for daytime smoke they are great. I am pretty confident I will do okay with the
black widow, so I should get some smoke out of this run regardless, and frankly I am thinking I can figure out the
haze too.
My interest in going old school is, to be honest, because I can grasp it better. I just don't know what a lot of this newer stuff is and so I cannot imagine trying to breed with it. Not saying it would be bad. I just don't get it. I really like Diesel strains and so that was another consideration, but I am trying this route for now.
The Plan The plan is to grow these out and sex them while waiting on my last round to finish their flowering. Keep clones of the dads and destroy the seed plants once the clones have rooted. Bonsai the dad clones to keep them short so I can have them legally. Try all the moms. Decide if either strain seems like a good dad (the answer will very hopefully be yes). Grow out the dads from the strain I want, collecting pollen. Pick a dad I like best watching them complete a growth cycle while growing out some fems of girls I think might be interesting (based on ideas of hybrid vigor and effect) by pollinating just one of their branches with the dad(s) I am thinking about. Smoke the girls and see which one of them I think would have the most interesting seeds. Grow those out.
And I don't know from there but that sounds like a plan.
The Goal My project is toward the most meditative strain I can manage. I know I can already grow out plenty of different strains to manage pain and really the key is power and difference. However, I have found I need to be going in the same direction for more meditative strains. When I mix a lot of different stuff, things get a bit more cloudy. Awesome for managing a nerve pain attack. But it does make me feel more dull than sticking with the same strain all day.
In my other thread, I said I would call this eventual strain "Nachiketa", after a character who talks to death in the Katha Upanishad, which I find really meaningful and interesting. However, the idea of me ever reaching a final point on this project sounds hilariously absurd to me now, so I am just going to call this entire project my Nachiketa project. It will be ongoing until I don't need it anymore (I die).
How I Grow The way I grow is kind of weird. I use a fusion approach that tries to capture some of the early speed of coco while also having the flowering stability of organic soil grows. So I start in peat pellets (jiffy pellets), then move to small coco containers, before ending up at a layered 3 gallon fabric pot. The goal of each of the first two stages is to develop a solid root structure that then takes hold in the layered fabric pot. The layers of the fabric pot are coco/perlite with worm castings and some Neptune's Harvest kelp meal on the top, while the bottom is a mixture of organic, nutrient rich soil (in this case,
Promix BX with extra perlite) that has been further enriched with worm castings, Neptune's Harvest kelp meal, OregonismXL from
Roots Organics, and
Happy Frog Japanese Maple Fertilizer (4-3-4). The
Happy Frog is also innoculated with myco.
For pest control, I use DE and
azamax as well as yellow sticky cards.
I cook the pots for a couple weeks in a bathtub by watering with
Trinity from
Roots Organics. This lets the microbes really get a good population going so long as I don't let bugs also chow down. So far that has been okay.
For liquid nutes, I use the Soul line from Aurora Innovations (
Roots Organics). This plays well with both coco and soil. Yay.
This is of course all subject to change.
Light Lights are a hot topic with growing obviously. I am aiming to keep it simple while also not putting my head in the sand. Right now I am using 2 x
Viparspectra P1500s, which have a pretty full range spectrum. In addition, I run an extra 15 watts of supplemental far red, and that may be going up. It seems to help with growth structure and terp production, but gods do I not feel like arguing about it. In general, if a guy
or gal on the internet thinks they will be able to talk me out of believing what I observe on Planet Milson, I find that obnoxious. We don't exist in the same reality for all intents and purposes. I will happily listen to what people have to say and what they observe and see if it makes sense to me. If it doesn't, I am not going to keep pursuing it.
It does not even matter if the person is right. It does not matter if I am right.
I am only doing what makes sense to me because I am too dumb to figure out
the truth of anything beyond that point and when I try I ultimately get depressed.
I also run UVB because it helps trichomes and cannabinoids on Planet Milson. I am pretty confident this is true for most people but I dunno.
This is all of course subject to change.
Looking Forward I am tumbling forward mindlessly like a child on powdered stairs, laughing. Wanna come?
Haiku Milson melts to smoke:
swirls and plops into wires, spots.
Comes out pixels. Pops.
View attachment 1048761 It's gonna get weird, y'all.
