Turning the lights back on in the stinky attic

No cooling at this time of year, it's cold af up in the stinky attic from November through March. I have to run heat at night : / temp with the lights on is a balmy 78. Come spring, I'll put on the A.C. that's tucked back in the corner.
They drank ALL their water last night. I've just been up there drenching them. Wowww that light is brighter than I expected . I know what I'm asking Santa for for Christmas this year!

 

Flower plants, terrible photo

 

Veg plants, marginally less terrible photo but still terrible

 

Found my male. This boy is strong and rooty. He smells pleasant too. The last batch of clones got pretty beat up. Didn't lose any, but they are ugggg lyyyyy. Except for these freaks of nature. When every other cut was just showing root tips, plant #10 was invading the rooting plug next door and had to be pulled unceremoniously apart. Yeah, buddy. You will make strong babies.

 

Yes, literally every single plant in my garden needs repotting. I have two footers still in quarts drinking themselves dry in 6-8 hours. I'm getting around to it; gimme til the weekend before y'all start scolding me. After that... yeah I'll accept scolding.

 

Ohheyyyy baby beans, welcome to the party!

 

So. Update on the Sweet Cindy. I've got 3 distinct phenos in terms of purely physical traits: tall/strong/minimal branching (there's the Sweet Tooth), short/scruffy/branchy/ thin stems (there's the Cinderella) , moderate vertical growth but bushy and rugged (like this form for my grow style).
The two tall ones got a little too frisky and went riiiigght up into the light hood. I had to raise the lights and move the tall plants to the edges until I can get in to repot and move the whole crowd down to the floor to finish.
Here's what light burn looks like.

 

Plenty of TLC here! Good Job! Looks like things are working well! Good luck!

 

I had that happen to me over night once. The plant just took off from watering at night to the next morning. I caught it but still had a little spot on her leaf. Good catch!

 

They look great! Good Job! I have some FP seeds coming up. Decided to use perlite this time. Wow, two days and they are already up ;-)

 

Thank you, it's certainly a labor of love <3

 

Ok I promised [read: threatened] food p0rn so here you go, you hungry barbarians!
I made an early holiday ham. Take the glaze packet and whatever it says to do, add a couple tablespoons each brown mustard and grand marnier, and simmer it down while whisking until it darkens slightly and drips off the spoon like maple syrup. You're just trying to get a head start on the caramelization, and the thicker glaze seals the meat better so it won't dry out .
Ta da! Meat!

 

Since I was already in the kitchen, it seemed prudent to make some CBD cannabutter. This is a pint mason jar full plus a half pound butter and a quart or so of water. Very gentle heat for a couple hours, keeping below a simmer, using a cast iron tortilla pan as a heat diffuser.
Strain while still hot into a half gallon mason jar, pressing out the liquid.
Seal the mason jar and flip up side down.
Put the mason jar in the fridge still up side down (you will see why in the morning) and also refrigerate the leftover bud.
Hold that thought... I'll get back to you when the butter sets in a few hours.

 

Let's go upstairs! Repotting time. Flowering seed plants need more room! Soil is one bag canna bio terra to about 3 gallons mixed commercially packaged compost.
Scruffy low stuff gets pruned off as usual.
No big deal here. Same as before. This is their final repotting before harvest, at 2 weeks into flower, so the jump up in pot size is proportionally larger than any they've experienced yet.
Here's the lineup, and you can see the differences in growth habit amongst the plants of the same strain.
And here they are repotted. 2 are still waiting since they went in late and were therefore repotted within the last week so I'm leaving them alone.
I did this while the soil was at its driest. It is easier to get them out of the pots with minimal rootball trauma.

 

In case anyone's keeping score, the final tally is 7 females, 4 males.
Oh. And the males I put back in veg- I hacked them way back just to get the flowering tops into the trash. They are all backed up; I just need to go through and decide which specimens to keep before doing a thorough cull of the extras.
Next up: more room for Umbras triple grape to branch out! I think they're ready to take some cuttings. I also think that will be a good Sunday morning coffee project as I procrastinate re: other pressing house work.

 

have you tried using coconut oil in place of the butter? i think coconut oil will keep longer than butter. maybe storage time isn't a problem though. i like the upside down jar idea though. also, someone on here suggested to me that i use a potato ricer to squeeze the oil out of the plant material. it works like a charm. i get about 90% of the oil back that way. plus, now i have a potato ricer(whatever the heck you would use it for-prolly potatoes)...

 

I use coconut oil for other applications, gotta be the regular stuff, not fractionated or you cant do the mason jar water trick, you gotta get a separatory funnel to work with oils in a liquid state. I also use shea butter if I'm making moistutizer.
In this case I'm gonna be making almond shortbread and there's no substitute for cow grease : )
As for the potato ricer, yeah I found this site accidentally while trying to find my own ghost, and someone had posted my old canncom butter tutorial using... wait for it....
A potato ricer : p

 

it's this one, in the cooking section.

 

I love that dirty water!!!
Out of the fridge and send the mud right down the drain. Butter is left behind and is visibly green. I'm remelting that butter, just plop the whole jar, in a pan of warm water, avoiding thermal shock of course.
All the plant matter from yesterday goes back in the pot with a quarter pound of butter. This is the second extraction of three. I do this for two reasons:
-substances in solution move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration due to the molecules' (solute; in this case terpenes and cannabinoids) property of spacing (dispersing) themselves out evenly throughout the solvent (butter). So if the highly concentrated butter in the plant matter is melted and mingled with pure butter, the good stuff will disperse out of the butter stuck in the plant material.
- butter is always lost to the process, and I'm ensuring that by the time I throw out the plant material, any butter left in it doesn't have much value.
Triple washing as a chem lab technique is a good habit with other applications!

 

One of the most important things to remember when you make cannabutter is to have another cooking project going so you don't wander away from the stove and accidentally boil your um... mash? We gotta come up with a name for greasy pot slurry.
I made curried mahogany squash soup.
2 mahogany squash (looks like a mini butternut aka peanut squash, which is what I usually use, but just one of those; they're monstrous)
1 large onuon, minced fine
1 inch gingerroot, ground with just as much water as it needs to blend
1 tsp of some relative of curry- anything from Jamaican yellow to berbere to biryani seasoning will do; what you choose depends upon how much you like fenugreek lol
Sweat the onions with 1/8c coconut oil and a couple small pieces of cinnamon and the dry spices
Roast the squash 45 minutes at 350, cut sides down, skin on and gutted of seeds
Combine the roast squash with the onions plus a chicken stock cube and a can of coconut milk, plus enough water to make it safe to boil without burning, about a quart.
Bring to a boil then simmer about half an hour. If you like garlic, add some garlic powder at this stage.
Mash well or cool and blend it. Immersion sticks are good for this, too.
Taste and adjust salt and heat, using sriracha or powdered chili that isn't smoked.
Into canning jars and into the fridge it goes for work lunches.
Edit: the turnips do NOT go in the soup, eww!!! Those are for a ham bone stock (not pictured but I may post my Pea-Free Soup tomorrow lol). Lots of soup in the near future.