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Yesterday (Saturday) was cannabis day all the way. I chopped, washed, rinsed, trimmed, and hung Blue 4 and AK 7; planted Sour G photo (other journal); and started the topical oil process (still cooking). Weight and thoughts about this grow at the very end. Here we go...
First pics of the two plants on chop-day.
Blue 4 on day 106:
AK 7 day 104:
One last shot of the family table:
I washed in 8 ounces of H2O2 with ½ teaspoon of Dawn in about 64 ounces of water.
Here are the washed plants drying in front of the 2 foot box fan (off camera):
Blue 4 hanging in the box:
AK 7 hanging in the box:
Scissor hash, mostly from the AK:
Meet the Blue 4 root ball:
Bigger than the AK 7 root ball:
The two boxes got put in the shed with fans blowing on the lower holes, and then it was time for the next round of massage oil.
I took the 180 grams of larf and trim and put it into two pyrex trays. I also took 14 grams of cured Blueberry 1 and 8 grams of cured buds from the clone guy and made a sealed aluminum foil pod. They went into the oven at 240º. The cured bud came out after 70 minutes (rather than 60, to allow time for the heat to get through the foil), and after a lot of flipping and turning, the trim had dried after 90 minutes. I'm not sure whether the wet trim gets decarbed in that amount of time or whether it needs to be dried before you start counting decarb time, but either way, some THCa is beneficial in oil as well.
I crumbled it all into the crock pot. Last time I put them in a blender, but I decided against that because I lost the trichomes that were stuck to the sides of the container. Since they weren't ground up, it took more oil than I had intended to cover the material with these two oils:
13 ounces of each, total 26 ounces. Here it is getting ready for the slow cook:
It took about an hour to get to temp (~200º) and then I let it stew for another 5 hours or so, monitoring it so the temp didn't get too high. I don't want it to decarb any more. It cooled over night and now is back on the heat for the second round. After it warmed up I used a potato-masher to make sure that the oil was getting all the goodness off the buds.
After another 4 hours I'll turn it off and let it cool, and then strain the oil with cheesecloth. Last time I reused the trim for another round of oil but there wasn't enough THC left in it to be effective, so I'll just freeze it until I can find some other use.
Now...on to the details:
Blue 4 at chop (pre-wash): 467 grams
Blue 4 fans post wash: 55 grams
Blue 4 trim post wash: 94 grams
AK 7 at chop (pre-wash): 367 grams
AK 7 fans post wash: 54 grams
AK 7 trim post wash: 86 grams
[There was a lot of larf and green buds. See below...]
Total wet trim weight: 180 grams
Weight of trim after drying: 46 grams (25%)
The cured bud went from 22 grams to 20 grams after decarb.
Total weight into crock pot: 66 grams
Thoughts on this outside winter auto grow:
This grow started slowly with fungus gnats attacking the roots, which made the plants smaller when they went into flower than I had intended. What I mean is that I was training for bigger plants that didn't stretch and that couldn't get spread out like Blue 2. I was left with plants that were so dense that a large number of the buds (or lower parts of the top buds) never got light. The density also allowed bugs to take over in areas that could never get touched by what I sprayed them with.
This is not so terrible for me, as I need a lot of bud to make the topical oil, but if I were doing this exact grow again just for smoking, I should probably have not trained them at all. When I look back at the shape of my untrained plants I can see that while my yield would have been lower, I would have a higher percentage of smokeable bud.
Hindsight is 20/20. The problem, of course, is you never know when your auto grow is going to go your way and when it has other plans. Going forward with outdoor winter autos, I would only do the serious LST on those that have a healthy start to their lives.
Thanks for reading all that, have a great Sunday, and remember, please
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