NL5 x Hz Female Select: Medical Grow Journal

thefoetus

New member
5Hz Diary: Medical Selection

Hello everybody! We're in the process of selecting a female to be used in our indoor, soil medical grow.

Using the paper towel method, we germinated 39 5Hz seeds, à la Shantibaba - all 39 had sprouted within 48 hours!

We planted them in 'Roots Original Potting Soil' in individual party cups. We aim to transplant them before the leaves are as wide as the pots.

They are currently sitting under a Slimstar 300w T5, where they'll veg until transplant in a week or two. We will eventually flower them in a room under HID lighting.

I'd love to hear any thoughts, and any suggestions or advice from those who have grown and smoked her before!

Peace

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Great start! Just did a selection on a pack, so here's a few things I noticed.

The squat, wide leaved NL learners all had a few pollen sacks near the base toward the stalk, so I'd make sure to prune that area well on those phenotypes.

I only got 1 extreme haze type out of 12, her flowers were sparse with large, hard bracts. She smelled of tropical fruit and champagne. Super clear electric high.

The rest were somewhere inbetween, and nothing greatly stood out until after the cure. Its was one of the better yeilders and was uber sticky, but what stood out was the fierce cat piss smell. Straight ammonia. This plant was straight toxic in the potency department. Just absurdly strong.

Don't be too quick to cull before you've sampled is the best advice I could give. Only the extreme haze one was fussy with the nutes otherwise they were very easy plants to grow.

Good luck man, I'll be watching along
 
Hello And welcome thé fœtus , its good to see people growing 5hz :D. I grew And selected this strain à lot , to spot the good one , look for the 13/14 weeks phenos, you can find easely a super plant does have all :smell /extrem yield/and the imcomparable haze high. You can also look the 5hz and c5 pics of yosemite Sam ,i can post pics of my pheno if it can help you.
 
I have been growing out and breeding my own Med-Rec Northern Lights off and on since the 1980's. One of my small breeding projects my friends and I are working on for ourselves. Based on your chosen selection criteria a production clone for your med grow should be easy enough to find. Good luck.
 
Howdy Bro,

chiming in to wish you good luck and all the best on your endeavor.

And also with a question:
I am currently doing a selection run for Critical Mass. Popped 48, all germed and grew into seedlings. I killed 7 seedlings in the meantime through dumb stuff but the remaining 41 are going strong and I am at the point of cloning them.

Now I wanted to top them either way so I will take the tops as clones.
But here comes my question:

How are you going to go about the whole cloning and selection thing?

I am considering three methods:
1) Take 2 clones from each plant and root them. When rooted, flower 1 batch of clones to determine which plants are female then transplant those into flowering pots and flower. Discard all but 1 male. Maintain 1 batch of "copies" from all females and the 1 male until all females are harvested, cured and sampled, then select. This is probably the most thorough way to go about it. Drawback is the high number of plants (123 plants at one point is nothing to sneeze at).

2) Take 1 clone from each plant, then transplant all plants to flower pots and flower them. When males show, discard them and replace with other plant from veg room until all spots are taken up by females. Discard all males and clones of males safe for 1 to keep in clone form. Harvest, cure and sample females, make selection.
Drawback is that the plants will get staggered with regard to flowering time and will finish potentially weeks apart. This could somewhat be compensated by turning the grow into a perpetual setup and immediately replacing the harvested plants by new ones.

3) Take 1 clone from each plant, when rooted, flower those to determine sex. Then transplant all females to flowering pots, discard all males but 1 and flower them. Once flowered, harvest but leave 1 or two bud sites/nodes and start to reveg the plants. I had good experience with reveging, it takes a while but it has worked every time for me so far. After curing and sampling, make selection and cut new clones from selected female to create a mother.
Drawback is that the reveg plants take up a lot of space in the veg room and until the cure and sampling is complete, I would have to reveg a whole bunch of plants. So I likely would have to reveg them in the flowering room which couldn't be used to flower others in the meantime.


I think you see my conundrum and I would be very interested in how you plan to go about this issue as you seem to have everything planned out for this grow.

Stay frosty

Broseidon
 
My methods are closer to number two than the other ones.

Revegging works better with some lines/plants than others. IMO/E sativa and sativa dominant crosses do better than indica type plants.

Best of luck to you!
 
How are you going to go about the whole cloning and selection thing?
Hi Broseidon, thanks for the message brother. I'm smoking Critical Mass right now, it is a truly beautiful strain. The buds have a sweet smell, light green color with dark orange pistils and plenty of crystals. It has (at least temporarily) replaced NL5 as my staple indica. Good luck with your selection!

PlantManBee said:
My methods are closer to number two than the other ones.

Hi PlantManBee, would taking clones from the original females after flowering, once they show sex, be classed as re-vegging?
 
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Looking good man. Nice and clean and orderly.

Just make sure your clones are rooted before you flip the seed plants, you could go either way at that point, the seed plants will take up considerably more room than a clone copy.

Keep rockin those 5hz's
 
topheavy420 said:
Only the extreme haze one was fussy with the nutes otherwise they were very easy plants to grow.
A few are still quite small, they don't look as strong at this point but will heed your advice and retain all the girls through harvest. How did you solve the nutrient issue with your Extreme Haze?
 
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Hi PlantManBee, would taking clones from the original females after flowering, once they show sex, be classed as re-vegging?

If the plant was fully flowering I'd consider it revegging. At least in the sense that it had to cycle through a phase that entails a completely different set of characteristics (and attendant hormones) than a vegetative state.
 
When doing a pheno hunt I always seems to lose a cutting or two for some reason, that's why I suggested making sure they were rooted first before flowering. That's me though, you might get them all first try.

The hazy plant I got, I dialed down the nutes and she seemed to handle it pretty well from there on out. I had started out with a pretty generic, base + bloom Booster-around 800ppm, all exept the extreme haze handled it well. I think I cut the nutes for that one plant in half and all went well the rest of bloom besides a little burning from the early on. Hope that helps, if you get some of those I'm sure you'll recognize them quickily, much taller and lankier than the others, check my log for reference if it might help.

Plants are looking good, should get some really good growth the next couple of weeks!
 
Howdy Bro,

chiming in to wish you good luck and all the best on your endeavor.

And also with a question:
I am currently doing a selection run for Critical Mass. Popped 48, all germed and grew into seedlings. I killed 7 seedlings in the meantime through dumb stuff but the remaining 41 are going strong and I am at the point of cloning them.

Now I wanted to top them either way so I will take the tops as clones.
But here comes my question:

How are you going to go about the whole cloning and selection thing?

I am considering three methods:
1) Take 2 clones from each plant and root them. When rooted, flower 1 batch of clones to determine which plants are female then transplant those into flowering pots and flower. Discard all but 1 male. Maintain 1 batch of "copies" from all females and the 1 male until all females are harvested, cured and sampled, then select. This is probably the most thorough way to go about it. Drawback is the high number of plants (123 plants at one point is nothing to sneeze at).

2) Take 1 clone from each plant, then transplant all plants to flower pots and flower them. When males show, discard them and replace with other plant from veg room until all spots are taken up by females. Discard all males and clones of males safe for 1 to keep in clone form. Harvest, cure and sample females, make selection.
Drawback is that the plants will get staggered with regard to flowering time and will finish potentially weeks apart. This could somewhat be compensated by turning the grow into a perpetual setup and immediately replacing the harvested plants by new ones.

3) Take 1 clone from each plant, when rooted, flower those to determine sex. Then transplant all females to flowering pots, discard all males but 1 and flower them. Once flowered, harvest but leave 1 or two bud sites/nodes and start to reveg the plants. I had good experience with reveging, it takes a while but it has worked every time for me so far. After curing and sampling, make selection and cut new clones from selected female to create a mother.
Drawback is that the reveg plants take up a lot of space in the veg room and until the cure and sampling is complete, I would have to reveg a whole bunch of plants. So I likely would have to reveg them in the flowering room which couldn't be used to flower others in the meantime.


I think you see my conundrum and I would be very interested in how you plan to go about this issue as you seem to have everything planned out for this grow.

Stay frosty

Broseidon

Hi
With so many plants, another way to sex them, to cull the males, is just flip the cuts, before they are rooted.
That will save you time and space, and allow you to remove your males sooner.
Give you more options with your females too.
Good luck.
 
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Hi
With so many plants, another way to sex them, to cull the males, is just flip the cuts, before they are rooted.
That will save you time and space, and allow you to remove your males sooner.
Give you more options with your females too.
Good luck.

That seems a good idea. If we use this method, how long will the cuts take to show sex?
 
I think it really doesn't matter if you keep the clones or the original seedplants as backups. Personal preference.

I plan to backup the clones and flower the original seedplants as they are just much further along and bigger and the clones can grow/veg while the seedplants flower. Once they finished flowering, I suppose the backup clones will be somewhere around where the original seedplants were when they entered flowering. At that point you could go for a second round or simply prune/trim back the backup clones until you were able to cure the harvest and sample it and make your selection.

I am not sure either way what is a good method, hence my asking :D

At the moment I simply topped all my seedplants and used the tops as clones.
They are about 4 days old now and I haven't seen a root stub yet. A few of the tops have drooped a bit, most are looking more or less like when I cut them. I noticed that some have continued to grow leaf mass though which is not so great as they are supposed to put their energy into the roots ...

Anyway, since I just now topped them, I figure I give them another up to 4 weeks to veg before flowering. If this round of clones won't root for some reason, that should give me enough time to try for a second batch.

Imho you can't veg too long (unless it makes you hit your ceiling during flowering) so I am in no rush atm.


What still gives me a bit of a headache is the fact that it takes a solid 1-2 months after harvest until I can make a solid judgement and selection.

Originally I wanted to move on to the next strain after finishing the grow and just keep the clone backups until I had time to select.

But it looks to me like that is just too many plants/too much space taken up and I will likely end up flowering the backup clones (after cloning them again) instead of going to the next strain while I wait for the cure and selection...

Reason being that if I keep say 30 backup clones, even if I prune and trim them to keep them in solo cups, and move on to popping another 30 seeds of the next strain to pheno hunt, I will have to clone that next strain while still not having made my selection on the first.

The plant numbers will just get too staggering for me. Spacewise I think I could manage but I know I would start feeling uncomfortable if I got significantly beyond 100 plants...

Let's see how things shake out though. I did plan all of this so long in theory and then when I first tried to put it into practice, I ruined my organic soil by adding bio canna boost and rhizotonic which lead to a massive fungus gnat infestation and severely crippled second grow. I wasn't able to root a single clone yet due to this.

So step by step I suppose. For now I need to get some rooted clones, then I can look further ;)

/Edit
re: Flipping clones before rooted to sex them
Wow, I was not aware this is possible!!!
That seems like a game changer to me, honestly.
How would I go about that? Simply cut clones from each plant as usual, put them into jiffy peat pellets and just instead of waiting for roots, stick them under 12/12 and they will show tiny buds/pollen sacks?
That would be amazing because I could simply cut a second round of clones from the bottom of the plants (where I would defoliate them anyway before flower) and stick it under 12/12. That would safe me from re-potting/transplanting all those males into the larger flowering containers and having to remove them again once I learned their sex.

I suppose if this works as it does in my head, I wouldn't even have to bother with rooting hormone or cutting at 45° angle and all that. Just snip off a clone, stick it into some perlite or a jiffy peat pellet or something and throw it under 12/12 and within a few days I should know the sex, no?
I would've thought the "clones" would just die then but I suppose it makes sense that they would stay alive long enough to at least show their sex without a doubt.
 
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Should we train pre bloom eg. LST, FIM, topping or other method?

Everyone do you have any views about whether we should train or top the plants while they're in veg? We're thinking a flat canopy should produce more medicine.

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Deffinately a nice sized space to work with and lighting seems well distributed. I think with a flat level canopy would yeild really well however considering the variety and your doing a pheno selection it might not be the best option first go around. Your gonna really want to compare and contrast the different stretches, internal nodal lengths and so on to help you choose your keeper's. Assuming you get a 50/50 m/f ratio that leaves you with 20 plants give or take, so around 2 plants per light. I would suggest 5 gallon buckets with tomato cages with the plants topped once or twice. Should still yeild nicely and really aid you in your selection.

Labeling your pics/phenos well in your log here will help imensly when your smoke testing. I find it so helpful to go back and reveiw pics and notes while I'm smoking the finished product.

It will be a good show no matter the direction you go man, keep Killin it bro!
 
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