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Do you prefer Sativa or Indica, or a hybrid?
Do you grow indoors, outdoors, or both?
Are you growing for production or for the connoisseur?
Do you grow large plants or in a "sea of green"?
To answer these questions and to help find the strain that's right for you, read this section and suck up the knowledge. |
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Sativa's and Indica's
Because there is large selection of strains in the internet, this can sometimes get overwhelming when trying to decide which one to order. Choosing is not as difficult as you may think. There are really only two sides of the marijuana family we are talking about here. Indica's and Sativa's.
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Indica marijuana
Indica's originally come from the hash producing countries of the world like Afghanistan, Morocco, and Tibet. They are short dense plants, with broad leaves and often grow a darker green. After flowering starts they will be mature in 6 to 8 weeks.The buds will be thick and dense, with flavors and aromas ranging from pungent skunk to sweet and fruity. The smoke from an Indica is generally a body type stone, relaxing and laid back.
Combining different indicas, different sativas or a combination there of creates hybrids. The resulting hybrid strains will grow, mature and smoke in relationship to the indica / sativa percentages they end up containing. |
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Sativa
marijuana
Sativa's are just about the opposite of indicas. They are tall, thin plants, with much narrower leaves and grow a lighter green in color. They grow very quickly and can reach heights of 20 feet in a single season. They originally come from Colombia, Mexico, Thailand and Southeast Asia.
Once flowering has begun, they can take anywhere from 10 to 16 weeks to fully mature. Flavors range from earthy to sweet and fruity. The stone of a Sativa is cerebral, up and energetic. |
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Indoor or Outdoor
Whether or not a strain can be grown outdoors depends on the length of season you have. All outdoor and indoor/outdoor strains listed in the Strain Table include a approximate flowering time. This is most important feature to consider and is completely influenced by the indica/sativa ratio.
You want plants that will mature before the danger of frost or bad weather comes along. The more sativa that is in the mix,
the longer it takes to finish. If you have a very long growing season, most strains can be grown outdoors. These flowering periods are approximate and will vary depending on conditions. From there you go back to what you like and the descriptions of the plants. |
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Height
The heights listed for each strain are for full sized plants.When growing indoor,we have complete control over how tall these plants get, just by how long we grow them before flowering is initiated. Artificial lights do not efficiently penetrate much more than 3 feet down into the garden, so it makes little sense to grow them much bigger than that.
After the light schedule is changed to 12 hours on and 12 hours off, flowering will begin in about 7 to 14 days.During this time the plants will continue to grow another 6 to 14 inches and then stop. How much they will grow depends on the indica/sativa ratio of the strain. Sativas will stretch the most.Depending on this ratio, flowering should be initiated at around 18 to 24 inches to achieve the end height of 36 inches. How long it will take to get this tall depends on the strain and the conditions in the garden. |
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Potency
All of the strains are potent. The success of the eventual outcome will depend on your personal tastes and the conditions in which they are grown. Nobody tests the THC percentages of these strains and we are not really sure what the numbers mean when they do. THC is found in the resin glands that form on the plant during the maturation process. These glands act
as a shield to protect the seed from the searing heat of the sun.
From our experience this is needed more in a hot, dry atmosphere, than a hot humid one. To maximize resin production drop
the humidity in the room for the flowering stage, the lower the better. But no matter how much resin you induce on an indica
it's still not going to give you the stone of a sativa, so it does have a lot to do with your personal tastes and expectations. |
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Yields
All of the yields listed for the strains are approximate and depends a lot on how they are grown and the quality of the environment.Indoor lights don't penetrate down very far so it is better to grow a larger number of smaller plants to achieve the highest yield of top quality bud. Maximum yields indoors are coming from indicas and mostly indica hybrids, while the more sativa in the mix, the lower the yields tend to be.
Our yield indoors is really limited only by the amount of light we have, not the strain we choose.Given that it is a good growing environment, we would expect the yield to be about the same from any strain in relationship to its indica/sativa content.It is up to us as growers to maximize our plant's potential in our space. To do this we need to experiment to find out how each strain will respond best. |
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Flowering times
Flowering times are an indication of how long it will take the plant to mature indoor after flowering has been induced by changing the lights to 12 hours of darkness. This will be affected by the environment to some degree, but is pretty much fixed in the plant.
Indica's are faster flowering than sativas and hybrids are in relationship to the percentage of each they contain. Equally important in the process is vegetation time, or how long you grow them before flowering is induced. Sativa's grow very
quickly and if we wait too long to flower them they will outgrow the limits of the space and will not fill out. On the other hand,
if an indica is not grown for long enough, the yield can be greatly reduced. In the scheduling of the process they can often both end up taking about the same amount of time to grow and mature. |
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