Early Queen and Auto Night Queen outdoors 2022 - 52°N

Oh really? I thought deer would only eat the leaves. You think they could have eaten the whole plant down to the very bottom? The stem was about 15cm in diameter.
To see the cut you have to imagine that the plant fell over, so the cut is on the vertical. The cut surface has a bit of dirt on it. The green you see on top is actually the bent over part.
 
Just saying it's possible, look for tracks perhaps. Whether or not it was human or deer, this is a good reason to not keep all your plants in the same location
 
I m afraid the tracks are already destroyed by now. But in that place there is deer for sure, I saw them more than once, so it can very well be. I just didnt think they would eat a stem of 15cm diameter, thats awesome. Yes you re right with spreading the plants over multiple places. But its just so damn hard to find a good guerilla grow spot.
 
Wassup Brothers and Sisters,

sorry for being absent that long, was quite busy and a bit lazy too. So from this years outdoor grow I have learned a number of lessons which I am going to wrap up in this post. All in all, I am really satisfied with the outcome of this grow and I must say things went better than I expected. Nevertheless there is always room for improvement.

Yield and end product
I yielded about 700g of untrimmed early queen bud after removing the moldy flowers. The plan is to make the bud to leaf ratio of every pheno and calculate how much pure bud this would be. Due to the rot I threw away probably about 150 – 200g. In the fruity phenos , the smell of the buds has converged so that now all of them (EQ1, EQ4, EQ5 and EQ6) smell nearly the same. EQ4 still has a slightly fruity mango touch to it. The EQ2 still smell the same as in the beginning, i.e. spicy and dank, different from all the other EQs. EQ3 has developed a kind of onion smell during the cure which I do not like. EQ8 was too immature at the time I harvested her, so I will probably make hash from her. There are just too many leaves and too little bud on those stems. My two keepers from this run are EQ4 and EQ6. Effectwise, they all get you high but the strongest and most sedative effects come from EQ6.

Flower onset
One point that I would work on in this strain is the time of flower onset. I have seen plants of my friends who started flowering much earlier, about mid-August and therefore could be harvested earlier. For the Early Queen, flowering started end of August to start of September, so to have the flower onset 2 weeks earlier would be a great thing. I cannot say much about the flowering time, i.e. the period from flower onset to harvest. Of course I would have wished them to ripen up earlier, but I cannot blame it on the strain because September was quite cold in my area and most probably has slowed down the development.

Bud rot and mold
What I have definitely learned in this run is that you must not go on a travel during the end of flowering time or you may end up with something like this.
Mold.jpg
In my case I had to go because of my job, but for next season I will plan ahead. At the end of the flowering period you must be prepared to cut down the plants as soon as the first rain sets in. 2 days of rain, or even just moist weather are already sufficient to destroy a significant part of your harvest. Also it is not enough to check the buds from the outside, be sure you spread the buds and have a look in the stem region to spot mold. Another thing I noticed is that the small leaves turned purplish-red in the buds affected by mold, but I am not sure if this is related.
Anyway, you should avoid mold at all cost, because it is not only harming your health when inhaled, it also adds another working step in between culling the plants and jarring the weed. You will spend a huge amount of time inspecting your buds before hanging them and discarding any buds that are infected by mold or even only suspected to be infected. Then after drying you will realize that more mold has formed so again you will have to inspect all of the buds again and discard anything that looks like it could be infected by mold. Besides that, it really hurts to throw weed away.

Sexing method
Before I planted the EQs outside I wanted to sort out the males in order to not waste resources on them. So I put all the plants in the flower tent for 2 weeks and upon preflower expression I put them back to the vegetative tent to reveg. They didn’t like it at all, some took a month to reveg. On top of that, I had (and still have) problems with mites in my growroom which added more pressure to the plants. In future, I will not use this method anymore.

Environment
The outdoor environment gives a much healthier plant than an indoor environment. It is really impressive how well the plants grow under the sun and how they recover from bad conditions as you can see below.

Something like this
EQ6start.jpg

can easily turn out to become something like this
EQ6end.jpg

So no wonder why @shantibaba advises us to plant our motherplants outside and take cuttings back home to refresh their genetics.

Autoflowering
The last lesson is about autoflowers. I really like the fact that they flower irrespective of photoperiod, giving growers like me the chance to produce buds of the strong sunlight from June to August. In my opinion, LST is not needed to grow good autoflowers. However, it is of paramount importance to avoid any stress that could lead to growth depressions in the early vegetative stages. Its like @Hanzde said, you need to do a flawless run. So no pests or diseases allowed. Plus you should not let them stay in small pots for too long because they will suffer growth depressions and stay small. So plant them outside as quickly as possible, best would be to even start them outside in their final pot. Next season I will grow much more autoflowers and also try bigger pots as well as putting them directly into the soil.

OK, that’s all I could think of at the moment.

One love 💚 and keep it G 🌱

MG
 
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