NeerGreen: New Era grow #1

Bubble hash: a tiny treatise, page 1

The starting point: 94 grams of bone-dry Indica bud.

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I placed this into my extra-speshul bubble bucket with some water and ice.
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I then beat the bejeezus out of it with a paint paddle chucked into my cordless Panasonic.
I would agitate for 3-5 minutes, then run the extract through four stacked bubble bags:
220µm (work bag, blue), 190µm (green), 73µm (goldenrod) and 25µm (pale blue).
I agitated seven or eight times before the yield in my 73 (main) bag petered down to almost nothing.
I found that I could beat the absolute poop out of the chilled soup in my churn and not have the veg. matter break down.
Some ended up in the tiny amount of 220 "take" but could easily be post-processed through a fine stainless-mesh tea strainer.
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So here is the cleaned, combined take from all three bags, labeled for your convenience.
I worked over the course of a day, storing the churn in my fridge in between drill sessions.
A valuable bit of equipment for transfer and washing the screens of the bags: a spray bottle, 1 quart, filled with iced water.
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I took the green, wrung-out "curd" from the work bag and set it into the sun to dry. Today was hot, dry and cloudless, and the residue went bone-dry within three hours.
Note the weight loss upon drying! Some is of course in my glasses, but much must have ended up as solubles in the wash/work water. That stank by the way ... of a mix of weed, boiled greens and some sort of overripe fruit.
The drying curd smelled *just* like the poured-off waste from steamed broccoli. Ew.
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I will post a follow-up showing the drained and dried bubble hash. I got a small amount of 190 retentate (filtrant), a nice whack of 73 and a reasonable amount of 25 (after a few cycles of suspension and settling to remove turbidity). The 25 is pale beige, while the coarser fractions are toasty-brown.
cn

Bubble hash, a tiny treatise, part 2

The 25 was first onto the drying screen.
It was too viscous to drain quickly, so i contented myself with making it into pastilles.

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The 190 was too coarse - it clogged my pipet.
The 73, now ... it makes the most wonderful drip shapes. Do you like my little bubblegarden?
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The shapes are ephemeral; they collapse quickly under their own weight. But they do seem to indicate <cough!> the trippy qualities of this lovely refined product.
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cn

Bubble hash - a tiny treatise, part 3 of 3.
The product finally dried down to a leathery solid that smells faintly wonderful. First, the 190µm, which stayed fairly light in color.

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The 73µm fraction was the main one. i had to play balance-pan Jenga, and the numbers will say why. I consider this an outstanding yield, esp. since I stopped short of tailing to zero or risking significant green impurity. I also love the drip shapes.
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Third we have the 25µm "take". This started out quite pale but air-dried to be the darkest of the bunch.
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Last (and least) i have a few prills of something I got by allowing the 25µ supernatant to settle. This is visibly green in good light, but still hashy. I'll smoke it first.
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So about 15.3 grams total product from 94 grams of somewhat stemmy bud. I didn't expect to do so well, and it is a pure credit to the grower. (Not myself.)
cn

Originally Posted by cannabineer

Fast forward to the year of our Lord Two Triple-ought. I'd made a very good friend (I wonder where he is now ... he hasn't returned my twenty phone messages) who suffered from a variety of ills, including depression and a propensity to panic. He smoked modern pure sweet seedless bud, and on a trip to visit him on Oregon I broke my promise with great ceremony.
This was also the heady time when California's Prop 215 promised to be the sharp end of the wedge that would sunder the darkness of the Anslinger era. I listened to my friend's supply woes, and i decided that I was going to make a go of this. At the time I was married, and I'd enlisted the spouse's support. (That story ended up turning slowly and irreparably sour.)
After converting a homemade back compartment of a garden shed into my secret lab OAR a 'try (cue Frankenstein laugh) and becoming a member of Overgrow (still have the t-shirt!!!) I started with soil ... big cheezy plastic pots from Home de Pot filled with garden-variety (sic!) potting soil. I wish i could remember what seedbank I used, but I ordered 10 beans each of "Kimo Sno-Bud" and "Northern Lights #5". My Google searches for Kimo Sno-Bud are coming up dry, so i can't even find out more about it.
Nine Sno-Bud germinated, and five of these were girls. Only one NL germed, and fortunately she was a girl also. After about five months I discovered the oh so special joys of trimming a harvest and ended up with about four ounces of rather nice smoke. I assayed a Sno-Bud nug. It was 11% THC by extraction and gravimetric analysis (weight, basically) of the refined THC. The crude heated extract (essentially bho) was an honest 89% by weight THC. The NL#5 didn't yield much, but oh did it smell hashy.

I then decided I wanted to try hydro. I lived close to a rather good hydro store ... thse guys were mega helpful, and they steered me toward NFT. I set up an ebb&flood table for veg under a 250W MH lamp with the combo hood/ballast. The flowering room, about 4x7 feet, got 2x600W HPS in glazed hoods. For a strain I selected Bros Grim "Cinderella 99".
The other thing that I did was research hydro nutrients. I bought a lovely book, "Plant Nutrient facts for Hydroponics & How to make your own Fully Formulated Plant Nutrient" by Jim McCaskill , published by Foothill Hydroponics, N. Hollywood CA 91601. Using formulae in that book, along with individual nutrient ppm guidelines for cannabis gleaned from web searches, I devised my own salt fert recipes for veg and flower. I compounded these out of entirely ACS reagent salts, available to me because at the time i was still a pro lab chemist. My experiment was to grow a thorougly controlled non-organic crop from seed to bud. I used deionized distilled water and MES (morpholinoethanesulfonic acid) as a non-metabolizable buffer.
All ten beans popped, and they did well in veg for about 6 weeks. They took to my 100% artificial nutes like seals to surf. I transferred them to the NFT gutters, veg'd them a little bigger under the HPS, then flowered them. I was left with 5 femmes, four nice ones and a runt. I kept a small male branch alive and chucked pollen at a pair of lower branches for my very own cindy F1 seeds. Those buds seeded while none others did. I still have the seeds, although after several HOT Rednekistan summers I doubt their viability.

I yielded a bit over a pound of meticulously-groomed bud from that grow. I presented it to a San Fran dispensary where i had an "in" thanks to an Overgrow acquaintance. Even after I disclosed my zero-organic policy, my bud still got top marks, as evidenced by the fact that I sold that pound at their highest purchaser rate.

Very soon after that grow finished, I lost my job and had a full-scale nervous breakdown that led me to where I am today ... a shadow of my former self, relentlessly depressive after every med (incl. green) failed me, alive only by grace of SSDI.
Now that I am really truly alone for the first time since college, that gret pioneer spirit (fuck it, got nothing to lose) kicked in, and I'm almost finished completing my new grow facility. More about that anon. cn

Like reading a book, well written man, very well written.
I think I might've found your Kimo Snow, it seems to have been out breeded by hybrids of it, but I googled around, and found a link which I hope might help you.

http://canadianhempco.com/index.php?...oducts_id=1511

Looking forward to updates man, subbed.

Many thanks, Derple. I've since discovered that the Kimo Sno-Bud came from a defunct seedbank called Medical marijuana seeds. They had a green cross logo ... cn

Awesome thread cannabineer. You have a very interesting journey to get here. Glad you came around enough to share some of your story with us,thanks. Very, Very jealous of your knowledge of chemistry to be able to make your own nutes. That is genius, but catching up on your thread I feel like you are quite the smart man. IF you have answered this question already Im sorry, but since you know chemistry, do you fine tune the feedings with your special mix, meaning do you have certain compounds to work for certain deficiency or is that in your veg mix and flower mix. Sorry for rambling on canna.respect

Originally Posted by noob78

Awesome thread cannabineer. You have a very interesting journey to get here. Glad you came around enough to share some of your story with us,thanks. Very, Very jealous of your knowledge of chemistry to be able to make your own nutes. That is genius, but catching up on your thread I feel like you are quite the smart man. IF you have answered this question already Im sorry, but since you know chemistry, do you fine tune the feedings with your special mix, meaning do you have certain compounds to work for certain deficiency or is that in your veg mix and flower mix. Sorry for rambling on canna.respect

Noob, thank you for your kind words! The base recipes are from some work i did eleven, twelve years ago. I grew a batch of Cindy 99 from seed to finish on those. I didn't encounter any deficiencies. My rDWC attempt failed, so i have not yet had the opportunity to do more testing and tuning. I figure the micros are "set". It's the tier-two macros, Ca, Mg, S ... where I still feel I need to do some work. Maybe this winter I'll do a proper hydro grow. Maybe. cn

Originally Posted by cannabineer

Noob, thank you for your kind words! The base recipes are from some work i did eleven, twelve years ago. I grew a batch of Cindy 99 from seed to finish on those. I didn't encounter any deficiencies. My rDWC attempt failed, so i have not yet had the opportunity to do more testing and tuning. I figure the micros are "set". It's the tier-two macros, Ca, Mg, S ... where I still feel I need to do some work. Maybe this winter I'll do a proper hydro grow. Maybe. cn

Ok thanks, And if I maybe so bold to say this but I know if you want a proper hydro grow you figure it out you nebula's beyond my wisdom. plus rep