It has been some time since you have heard from Relay's garden. This post is going to be highlighting the BIF strain C99/HBxPBB. This strain was produced by brother Jat, and it is a top class rendition.
When I first ventured in to this grow I had no idea what I was getting into. This particular strain exploded out of the gate. Wasting no time she began to properly develop into a high quality bush. In the beginning all was normal. Pod buster, single tines, and then triples, all in normal specs. That is when I began to notice the umph in this gal. She started developing branching but wasn't blasting in lank. A little shorty, but a fat lil shorty.
It all started with the bean, a bean which I got from Brothers In Farms. There is something to be said about big things from little packages. With this little package came on big girl.
Not your everyday looking beaner, it isn't black like the ones from your typical Mexican import, it isn't light green to white like the dormant ones your buddy has been saving from all of his fire bags. This seed has a personality all its own. Like the stripes on a tiger, these markings are unique.
I soaked the bean in a damp paper towel folded over and placed in an open ziplok. I just set that ziplok up on the closet shelf for 3 days and walla, that baby popped right open and extended out her tap root. All I had to do then was put that gal in the dirt.
This plant started producing great looking foliage. Nice and symmetrical as the leaves began to form. So far it was just adding water. I started off with some really nice dirt I had purchased from Fox Farms, so there wasn't much need to be adding any nutes in the beginning. On a side note, I think this is where a lot of new growers go wrong. They start out with some really good medium and then right away start adding this and that. When your using purchased medium that has already been amended, you want your plant to use up the nutes that are already present before adding more. This will help in avoiding a nutrient burn or worse a complete nutrient lockout.
As I was mentioning before, Jat's strain wasted no time in growth. It wasn't long before I was outgrowing the sprouting box.
She was growing way to fast, I started her in late January with the intention to get her outside by May 1. I expected her to grow a bit slower but no matter, you just keep rolling. Time to take some clones and get this strain off to a couple of other growers around the area. Plus I wanted more than one in the garden myself. So I started trimming her up, and bending her around, taking my cuts in the process.
The clones looked fabulous, even a week later.
Once they got to growing some nice new foliage I put mine in a new pot. This clone here is the un-scrog'd pheno 1 C99/HBxPBB.
Finally it was time to get the garden ready for this years grow. Not to be fooled, I have been growing for years, and every year it takes the same hard work to get the growing space up to par. From clearing any weeds, to turning the soil, to layout. A lot goes into starting up a grow.
Once the layout is ready it is time to get my gals outside and in their new beds. I really take pride in introducing them to their new homes. Usually it is some of the first days we are able to get back out into the outdoors after a long cold winter. It is always a refreshing feeling that spring is around, and the next 6 months or so of gardening has begun.
[C99/HBxPBB Pheno 1]
[C99/HBxPBB Pheno 1]
[C99/HBxPBB Pheno 1 Clone]
[C99/HBxPBB Pheno 1 Clone]
With the planting done it was now up to the sun and weather. The vegetative cycle worked on for few months. I didn't run into too many issues during veg this year. I did have a few aphids, and other pests, but this year the lady beetles made whoopie on my gals. Leaving behind their marvelous little larvae which devour aphids and other soft bodied cannabis pests.
I built a scrog net to place over the top of 1 of the pheno#1's. This net was 4 foot by 4 foot square made from 2x2s. The paracord was strung in 3 inch squares around a simple roofing nail. Weaving the cord as I strung it up to hold a bit more rigidity for holding down the pushing branches. I put on 16 inch legs and pushed the frame down into the dirt 2 inches. This gave me about 1 foot from the ground to the top of my net.
Here are some pics to show how the gals exploded. These pictures range about 2 months...
This was the end of veg, and flower was on the cusp. Growing outdoors brings its challenges. This year was no exception. We have had a hot and humid summer. These conditions seem the make cannabis ailments more profound. We didn't have much rain that would be considered good rain. When it rained it was either super humid and just sprinkled under cloudy skies or it poured and poured and all of the water ran off instead of soaking in good. The humid sprinkling days the foliage just collected water that wouldn't evaporate. Ugh, it was depressing. Then it hit, another year battling leaf septoria. To save the majority of my crop I had to pull the Big Mack that I was testing for 
If that wasn't enough, I found a patch of the pheno#1 that had began to develop white/grey mold.
I ended up cutting out 1/4 of the scrog'd plant just to be sure I got all of it. Frankly, I'm not out of the woods yet. I still have about 60 days to go before full harvest will be in sight. So I went through and limb by limb, bud by bud, defoliated any leaves that were in contact with leaves next to it. This heavy defol is going to impact my overall yield.
Generally you really don't want to be heavy stressing the ladies when they are in flower, but in extreme cases, it could be the savior of the crop. I really want to see these gals make it through the duration.
So far, they are doing well, stacking buds, popping hairs and producing trichomes.
Here's what the buds are looking like today.
I can't wait to see what these gals will look like in a few weeks. Already frostier than all get out and as stinky as a road squashed skunk. This quite possibly is the prettiest buds I have produced in this garden.
If you are in the market for some top notch cannabis genetics, you are doing yourself wrong if you don't go over and check out the Brothers In Farms web site. The company is just a community of cannabis breeders that continually challenge each other to breed the next best cannabis strain. Close knit and brotherly, the BIF fam is your fam! Until next time, get those buds growing.
Relay