Mexican brick bagseed: Growing out the schwagg.

[Jogro]

Thought I'd do some "community service" and put up my first grow journal on Mexican bagseed.

The forum gets a lot of questions about whether or not its worth growing out beans found in cheap Mexican schwagg.

You know, stuff that looks like this:




The genetics can't be any good, right?

Well. . .lets find out if you can grow a good plant out of this stuff.

Stay tuned.

 

[Jogro]

OK, first of all, why would you want to grow out this cheap stuff?

Well, because you have it, mainly, and the seeds are free. After a long period of abstinence, I recently had to re-enter the game for medical reasons. It so happened, I had a bunch of old brick seeds lying around, and decided they'd be a nice way to test out the setup.

The seeds in question were gifted by an old friend, and they came out of ugly brown brick actually worse-looking than the image above. Brick was bought in the NY area prior to 2001.

Yup "pre 9-11 bagseed". . .stored in a plastic baggie in my refrigerator for a few years, and at room temp for a few more. Picked the best-looking seed and planted it and to my surprise. . .it germinated inside of five days.
The next six seeds? 0 for 6.

And here are the grow details:

Plant grown in soil, using a custom blend of about 60% of the Miracle grow moisture control (sifted to take out nasty chunks of wood), 25% peat moss, and 10% perlite, 5% vermiculite.

Why this? Mostly because all these things are readily available where I live, where as nice high end soils are not. You can mock all you like, the Miracle Gro stuff all by itself contains coco-coir and is a low soil mix. Fortified with the peat and the other stuff, it works great.

Nutes? Eh. . .the MG soil is pre-fortified with slow-release nutrients already. . .don't need any more. Just added a bit of epsom salts for extra magnesium two weeks into flowering, and then again, three weeks later.

Setup? Stealth grow under 250W HPS. More than that, I'm not telling.


By the way, comments are welcome; try to keep it civil, please.

 

[newgrowr]

Nice cant wait to see how it goes i just planted my seeds today might be from some dirt weed but i cant rember lol gl

 

[Jogro]

What do plants grown from 10 year old Mexican brick look like?

Well, for one thing, they're definitely mostly sativa, stretching to about 2-3x their height during flowering. I knew that was going to happen, so I trained the plants horizontally from seedlings, and put them under a SCROG to keep the final height low.

These plants are tough as hell. . .they totally shrugged off 92+ degree F temperatures for several weeks in the middle of flowering. I just kept them extra watered so they wouldn't dry out.

Unfortunately, too much watering led to too much humidity, and I caught a bit of bud rot a few weeks before harvest. Fortunately, I was inspecting the plants carefully, so I caught it right away.

Only two colas were involved, so I chopped them down mercilessly, decreased the watering. Also reworked the ventilation so that there was a constant light breeze going in the grow space. That seemed to lick the problem, and I didn't see any more rot.

This was actually the first time I've ever had bud rot as a grower, but I'm growing under totally different conditions than what I used to, and part of the whole reason I was growing these "schwagg" seeds to begin with was to try and dial in my setup before I started something better.

 

[Jogro]

Nice cant wait to see how it goes i just planted my seeds today might be from some dirt weed but i cant rember lol gl

Thanks for the response. . .maybe I can show you something interesting here.

 

[Jogro]

So. . .what do they look like? Well, forgive the slightly yellowish color; all the pictures were taken under HPS lighting, but they look a little something like this:



For scale, each of those colas is maybe 6 inches long and about 1.5" wide.

 

[Ringsixty]

Nothing wrong growing out... Mexican.
Some come out pretty nice. Since they will be grown as sensmilla.

 

[Jogro]

Scent of these plants? Lovely, actually.

I'm not the best at describing smells, but the plants have a musky scent, with a distinct lemony-citrus undertone. This is NOT what you get when you scent some brickweed, that's for sure.

No skunk or fuel smell at all. Lets get a better look at her:

 

[disk1able]

Looks awesome, was just about to ask for some closeup images
How much longer do you plan on flowering?

 

[Jogro]

A few better shots. Again, this plant came from a seed found in the ugly brown bricked weed from ten years ago.

 

[Jogro]

And the "money shot":

 

[Jogro]

Looks awesome, was just about to ask for some closeup images
How much longer do you plan on flowering?

Good question.

After 11-12 weeks of flowering, this plant had most of the signs of being done: swollen calyxes, pistils mostly brown/orange, high resin output, cloudy trichromes, strong aroma, etc. But for two things:

The trichromes never turned amber, and the buds never really stopped growing. . .new buds just kept forming on top of the plant.

I figured this is probably one of those sativas that never really ends flowering, so I just chopped it.

Also, even though I'm pretty sure I llcked it, since I had a problem earlier with bud-rot, I didn't want to push my luck.

 

[Jogro]

Post cure pix and smoke report coming later.

Again, comments welcome.

 

[disk1able]

Looks beautiful, looking forward to the smoke report.

Im hoping for some luck and non hermies from the bagseeds i had laying around too, we'll see,..

 

[209 Cali closet grower]

did my secod grow with some a-1 seeds and mex, well the mex didn't come out good, but was my seceded grow

 

[Jalamar]

damn thats impressive from bag seed, guess it had good genes all along but mexicans didnt treat them like ladys

i had barneysfarm g13haze in dwc that acted just like that it was very sativa dominant, i thought it was almost ready at 12week but i still had loads of clear thrics and the buds kept coming in waves every couple days, i think the harvest window was like 4weeks i harvested it perpetually and finaly took the last branches down around 16th week and even those had only small amounts of amber

 

[Azoned]

I did a side by side commercial Mex bagseed vs. brand name grow...
This bagseed is near as good as the brand name.
It came out with a definite grapefruit twang to the smell and taste.

 

[ataxia]

great job Jogro...
... My first grow was with two "total schwag" grows ... both plants had the same 3x stretch. two total different phenos one would literally not finish .... most definitely equatorial. The other had a finishing time of about 11 weeks and tasted like sugar coated muthafuckin pineapples...needless to say it was delicious, and had a niiice non-racy, happy sativa high.. .i had only wish i cloned the plant.... anyways big-ups for the schawag bag seed company...
....beautiful grow, rep, and subbed for that smoke report...

 

[ExtremeMetal43]

awesome man one of the best grow reports ive read. would be fun to gow out some schwag seeds.

 

[Jogro]

I did a side by side commercial Mex bagseed vs. brand name grow...
This bagseed is near as good as the brand name.
It came out with a definite grapefruit twang to the smell and taste.

I haven't posted the smoke report yet, but I'd go so far as to say this Mexican stuff is definitely better than some of the lesser "branded" commercial beans, in yield, potency, flavor, and overall grow quality. In fact, this plant embarassed some generic white widow I was growing at the same time, with better finishing time (!), bud/leaf ratio, and MUCH better scent/flavor.

And of course it blows away the "brick" stuff it came out of, to the point, where you wouldn't recognize the two as the same genetics.

To me there were a couple of positives here:

-The plants were just tough as hell; again, they shrugged off several weeks of 90+F light-time heat, where as the white widow clearly didn't like the temperatures at all. I might add that the high temps may have prolonged the flowering time a bit.

-Plants weren't bushy or leafy at all; although I don't think they are "pure" sativa, they definitely had that long/branchy sativa structure, making them perfect for SCROG.

-Low leafiness carried over to the buds. Calyx-leaf ratio was actually really high here making trim/manicure really fast and easy. In this respect, again, this plant was actually better than a lot of commercial lines, I've grown/seen.

-Yield was medium-high. I'm estimating about 2.5 ounces from the plant growing in a 3 gallon pot. Final yield would probably have been closer to 3, but I lost two colas to bud rot. Also, since this was a new setup and not a line I had a lot of experience with, I didn't quite maximize the output. I probably could do a bit better growing it again.