Back then the whole story of Dutch Passion began with a couple of outdoor strains, amongst them Purple Star and Twilight, bred by breeder Henk van Dalen in the seventies and early eighties.

Until today, this seed company is known for carrying a wide range of superb outdoor strains, and Dutch Passion recently further expanded its outdoor assortment by four new exciting strains: Taiga, Tundra, Pamir Gold and Snow Bud. Another newer outdoor strain from Dutch Passion already released in 2008 is Frisian Drew, a 50:50 indica/sativa cross of two legendary Dutch strains: Super Skunk and Dutch Passion’s own Purple Star, found after three years of selecting clones.

Already in its first year of market presence, Frisian Drew received prize honours for being the winner of the outdoor category of the High Life Cup 2008.

Dutch Passion says about Frisian Drew it’s the most beautiful outdoor variety they’ve ever encountered: “Although we produced many Skunk/Purple hybrids in the past 20 years, we have never seen anything coming close to this hybrid.” Dutch Passion promises a high yield, good stem to leave ratio (only little leaves), very good mold resistance as well as a pleasant taste and strong potency. Frisian Drew will ripen already in the first week of October, flowering takes 7-8 weeks.

German grower Hi-Five gets his personal marijuana supply from organic outdoor gardening, so he depends on reliable high-quality feminised outdoor strains.

With Dutch Passion strains, he has always gained positive experience. Let’s see how he did his thing last year when he cultivated a bed full of feminised Frisian Drew plants. Hi-Five uses to grow his marijuana plants on a south-facing side bed of his garden (next to a garden wall), where also two little apple trees are growing.

The wall is high enough to protect the plants from curious neighbours and also from storm damages. The two little apple trees also have a protective function, heavy rainfalls or hail falls are partly being catched away by the trees, thus don’t hitting the plants too hard. The crowns of the apple trees are not that dense, rather open, so that enough light shines through to the plants.

At the beginning of February, Hi-Five prepared the garden bed’s soil with his own last year’s compost, adding 50% of that “earthy gold” to the soil already in the bed. Compost is a blessing for any kind of plants! It improves biological activity of the soil, optimizes the soil’s structure by aerating it and giving it more water holding capacity power and provides a lot of organic nutrients that can be taken up by the plants bit by bit, without the risk of over-fertilisation. Apart from compost, Hi-Five mixed 10% horn shaves (an excellent source of organic nitrogen) and 10% granite stone meal into the soil.

Stone meal contains a good deal of lime, potash, magnesium and several trace elements, slowly releasing them. Hi-Five  digged the whole bed thoroughly over and let it rest until cultivation started in May.

 

He figured out that five Frisian Drew plants would probably be enough for his 1.5 x 6 metre plot. Hi-Five didn’t want to make use of the full season, as his plants otherwise would have gotten too big. He could have started cultivation as early as at the beginning of April, but waited until the beginning of May instead, sowing five feminised Frisian Drew seeds into jiffypots contained in a heated mini greenhouse. They all had germinated very well after a couple of days and were placed onto a south-facing windowsill.

Two and half weeks after germination, Hi-Five started to gradually acclimatise the plants to outdoors, hardening them off by exposing them to sunlight and night coldness a little bit longer every day. That procedure also helped the plants getting more solid stems, due to the wind, lignification quickly advanced. At the beginning of June, Hi-Five planted the five Frisian Drew plants into the garden side bed he had prepared in February already.

The Frisian Drew plants grew very well. Thanks to the soil’s high nutrient content and water holding capacity power, Hi-Five didn’t have to water and/or fertilise the plants in the first two months, he could give free rein to mother nature. Summer advanced, and at the end of July, the feminised Frisian Drew plants revealed their gender – they all proved to be female. Hi-Five happily watched the resin glands prosper on all the plants, as flowering got into full gear in the course of August. At the beginning of the flowering stage, he had started to fertilise his plants with BioBizz’s organic “Bio-Bloom” (N-P-K = 2.0-6.0-3.5) once a week.

The plants became heavily resinous (most obviously thanks to the influence of mighty Super Skunk genetics), in fact, these were the most resinous outdoor plants Hi-Five had ever experienced! The “green apple tree roof” that widely protected the plants from heavy rain falls may have contributed to the extraordinarily high resin content, preventing the resin glands from being washed off the buds.

The five Frisian Drew plants did not produce any male flowers, becoming 100% female, so they passed the femi test with flying colors. And “with colors” can be taken literally here: Two of the five plants produced lovely purple buds, thanks to the Purple Star genetics in Frisian Drew. Another very positive result was that mold wasn’t an issue at all, all the five Frisian Drew plants exhibited totally healthy high-grade sinsemilla buds in the end. Which was uniformly reached by the five plants at the beginning of October.

 

Hi-Five  was well satisfied with the yield, he got a solid pound of buds from his plants. While this was not too much for an outdoor plant in general, one has to take into account that the Frisian Drew plants were started late, having had a relatively short vegetative period and slightly reduced sunlight supply (due to the apple trees above).

But potency was awesome, reflecting both sides of the genetic spectrum, having a both sativa-like uplifting (at first) and indica-like stoney (later) effect. Frisian Drew’s potency can easily compete with strong indoor buds, it’s of really exceptional outdoor quality. The same applied to the great organic taste that was quite mild and sweet, but also had a spicy’n earthy outdoor note. In addition, Hi-Five luckily produced some fine organic hash from the very resinous leafy material that had accumulated during harvest. This Frisian Drew hash was incredibly delicious and potent, totally blasting Hi-Five  away for hours.

Frisian Drew is another outdoor champion strain from Dutch Passion with a remarkable potency

Written and Published by Tony, Dutch Passion in Weed World Magazine Issue 85