Using the paper-towel method, the seed took about 3 days to crack. Most of the time my seeds take about 2 days, but this one appeared to have a thicker shell. I’ve had nearly 100% luck with germinating seeds in wet paper-towel. After about a 1 day soak in a shot-glass of filtered water, the seed goes into the moistened paper-towel and in a zip-lock baggie (not closed all the way) and wrapped in a kerchief. I put the kerchief onto a dark, warm surface like the top of my computer sub-woofer speaker – works like a charm!

This seedling got off to a bit of a slow start and had some early leaf damage which I suspect was due to the hydroton in the waterfarm being fresh and unused. I’ve found that once your hydroton has been through one grow, it’s easier to start seeds in it as it’s ‘seasoned’ from having had water flowing through it for a few months – this can often cause plants to suffer through some early leaf damage even before the roots have made it all the way down through to the water in the reservoir of the waterfarm. I had a Vanilla Kush plant in another waterfarm next to this one and it was almost twice the size of the AoS at about 2 weeks from germination. Now that the plant’s root had reached the water in the lower reservoir through the hydroton, things really started to get into gear.

The AoS proved to be a very flexible but strong plant in veg. As soon as this plant was 6 inches in height, I started low stress training. The first 4-5 weeks included some extensive LST control and the plant really opened up. By the end of week 6 of veg, this plant was looking amazing and definitely ready to start flowering. We had around 15 nice tops coming in distinctively at this point and you could already see a nice even canopy developing. All the way up until now, I haven’t noticed any serious deficiencies on the AoS – a very ‘happy and healthy’ looking plant! Over these first 6 weeks we slowly increased the nutrient PPM from 150 to about 500. I use GH’s Flora Nova Bloom nutrient throughout my grows – one nutrient at different levels as needed at the different parts of the grow has given me awesome results. I also supplemented my last few weeks of res fills in veg with a small amount of GH’s Flora Micro to give it a bit of an extra nitrogen boost before going into flower.

There were early signs of female flowers in this strain, showing obvious white hairs at around the 5th week of veg, but I didn’t change my lights to 12/12 until just past the 6 week mark. The LST tie-downs were mostly removed at this point, and the already nice canopy was looking even better – even without a scrog screen to manage the tops. The typical first two weeks of flowering showed some nice stretch, but nothing like some other strains that have more sativa in them. At the end of the first week of flowering, I did some fairly aggressive super-cropping – twisting and pinching all of the tops, about 4-6 inches from the top on each. (picture5) I’ve had great success with all of my grows using this method, as it both limits the stretch during this period of the grow, and ultimately gives some ‘heavier’ buds. My theory is that due to the high level of growth at this point, the stem-stress causes the plant to focus on repairing the pinched stems and thereby providing more of that ‘growth spurt’ energy to those parts of the plant. That’s why I try to super-crop in those locations of the tops, as further down the road it provides buds that fill-out better, all the way down the stem. Upon weeks 3 and 4 of flower, the buds really began to take off and show their stuff. The leaf structure was showing some heavy indica signs with nice dark, wide leaves and thick healthy stems. At week 6, the developing buds were really starting to show a strong purple-pinkish colour as well, together with a bit of lime-green – a truly beautiful plant. According to the parentage of this strain, the phenotype I apparently had was the Black-Cherry Soda dominant one, showing a shorter, thicker, heavier stature – other phenotypes with heavier Jack the Ripper influence being greener, taller looking plants. The smell in my grow tent was a back and forth mix of berries (from the AoS) & lemony-pine (from the Vanilla Kush), and the frostiness just seemed to keep building more and more on this plant!

By the end of week 8 of flowering, we were seeing enough amber trichs on this girl to pull the plug and start chopping. The last two weeks of flower allowed us enough time to bring the PPMs down to about 250 and the big healthy fan leaves faded out nicely right before we began harvest (picture10). Some beautiful purplish solid buds on this plant – super-sticky and frosted with orange hairs. Trimming and manicuring took us almost an entire weekend – maybe I’m slow, but I tend to spend extra time manicuring my buds, and keep all of the sugar-leaves and popcorn buds (small non-manicurable buds from the lower stalks and branches of the plant) for making BHO, cannabis-oil and canna-butter. Our dry climate here required us to only need a 5-day hang-dry before splitting our buds, weighing them and dividing them into mason jars to begin the curing process. This plant ended up yielding over 7 ounces of dried, sticky product.