SouthEast Lights Journal

Learning To Grow Indoors

By Charles U. Farley / Febuary 27, 2018

When I received the mail from Gypsy Nirvana containing the unopened, pristinely packaged Sensi Northern Lights seeds in 2000, I had been cultivating cannabis indoors for almost 15 years and outdoors for almost 30. I sprouted my first seeds in 1970 after reading A Child's Garden of Grass but didn't really get plants to flowering until the next year when I bought A Connoisseurs Handbook of Marijuana.

A great friend of mine who was in the apprentice program to be a pipefitter (shout out to Local 522!) grew plants at his house in the backyard and when they got too big, we transplanted them to a remote area in Bernheim Forest. Unfortunately, it wasn't remote enough. We got ripped off. That wouldn't be the last time either, so the thought of growing indoors became intriguing.

With the purchase of The Grower's Guide in 1978, I began to experiment with indoor grows in my garage. I had some success but with the price, quality and availability of cannabis in South Florida, there were not a lot of motivational factors driving me other than curiosity. As the tall, rangy Jamaican Class IV/Sativa dominant hybrids grew, the Grow-lux WS VHO lights just didn't have enough energy to make it worth the trouble.

Also, living next door to a DEA agent (honest to God) made me think twice about growing but at that time, cannabis wasn't the main focus for the DEA, it had shifted to cocaine. And with just five or six plants, I knew he wouldn't really give a shit. The photo you see was taken with a Nikon F and processed at Fotomat (do a search on that), which is indicative of the general attitude regarding cannabis at that time in South Florida; it wasn't a big deal at all, I didn't have to worry about the Fotomat employee ratting me out to the narcs. They were more likely to say, "Damn, nice plants, how'd you grow ‘em?”.

When I hit the mountains in 81, I didn't get five acres but my couple of acres was on the edge of a fucking forest, so I was anxious to start growing outside again. I had to gain independence in all matters cannabis before I ran out of an lb I brought up from South Florida. I had a large garden area and sprouted seeds I had saved for many years.

The first crop was so much better than I had hoped for, 6-8 feet tall plants with colas that looked as good as on the Growers Guide cover! For the first time, I really needed the harvesting, curing and drying sections. I didn't get real good at differentiating males from females until the next year or two, a skill I would desperately need when I was forced to start growing indoors.

Taming tall, rangy sativa dominant cannabis to grow in a two foot by five foot enclosed closet with a six foot height restriction took a great deal of patience. Luckily, I had learned the skill of training a plant to grow sideways when I transitioned from growing in a garden to an overgrown hillside, in order to avoid aerial detection. I was doing LST before it had a name.

I essentially did the same thing in the closet, attaching string to the growing colas and securing to the sides of the 2X4 framing. Since they were getting lit by a 1kw MH light and had 450 CFM of air circulation, temperature was not a problem and there was minimal stretching when I sent them into flowering. As long as I gave them a normal amount of water and fertilizer, I didn't think I could go wrong.

I was wrong.

I found out during my first winter grow that humidity matters, very much so, although I didn't realize it at the time. As a respiratory therapist I know more about general gas laws such as Boyle's, Charles and Gay-Lussac's, in addition to absolute and relative humidity principals, than probably 99% of the population. That knowledge did not help me at all because I did not apply it to growing cannabis.

When young spouts are developing with high air velocity, they cannot tolerate 10-20% relative humidity levels for a long period of time, even if watered correctly and in the right temperature environment. It was very frustrating to have 20-30 seedlings sprout their first or second set of leaves then just fail to thrive. They would look great but just wouldn't grow and develop. By the time I realized something was wrong, it was much too late for any intervention. I wish I could say I determined what the problem was after that first grow, but I can't.

That would only come with experience and observation.

Growing Up In The Highlands

By Charles U. Farley / February 23, 2018

The part of the city I grew up in was called The Highlands and like Sunny Isles, it was an environment that offered a very diverse cross-section of people. Shotgun shacks on Speed Avenue were within two or three blocks of the million dollar mansions on Spring Drive, so schools were filled with both very rich kids and very poor kids. My family was in-between, comfortably middle-class. I had three older brothers and most of the kids in my neighborhood were older, so I was exposed to things at an early age.

I first smoked cannabis when I was 12 years old and dropped LSD when I was 13. Now that I have kids, grandkids and great-grandkids, that seems just so fucking wrong but those were different times and for me, they were very positive experiences. I'll state right now what our kids already know; I'm against the recreational use of any mind altering substance by anyone under the age of around 16-18. The brain is still developing, as is the personality and maturity level of a teenager, so there might be a possibility of detrimental effects with some individuals.

For me, they were mind expanding and life altering experiences. Music especially just sounded so much better when I was using cannabis. I could hear the individual instruments and voices blend together to make up the songs I was listening to, it just seemed magical. LSD is a subject that will get its own couple of journal posts later on so for right now, I'll concentrate on cannabis.

I attended Highland Jr. High School and in those days, the only way to get cannabis was from older brothers/sisters or friends. Since none of my brothers used, I turned to friends, who knew people, who knew other people… you know how the rest of this goes. By the time it got down to my level, it was what we jokingly called a Hogan's Fountain ounce, two seeds and a stem. Everybody knew an "ounce" never actually weighed an ounce. In the Highlands, we called them lids or bags, usually denoted by the number of fingers for how large a lid to expect.

When I got to Atherton HS, I was pretty good in the sciences and was assigned by a biology teacher to help a girl who was flunking out. She was Hungarian and fucking beautiful, way out of my league. After class we got to talking and she asked if I got high. OM fucking G, this is just too good to be true! She pulls out a joint and we smoke what at that time was the best shit I'd ever smoked. I was _so_ high, I asked her if she spoke "Hungarish”. Of course I had to ask her if she could get any more and she said no problem.

She was dating a _college_ guy from Bellermine. She became my dealer through most of high school and since I helped her pass biology, I usually got first choice of bags when they split up a lb. One time, she had some particularly good smoke she called "meshmacon” and I noticed that unlike every other bag, this had almost no seeds. It was $35 USD instead of $25 and was smaller but damn it was good, so it lasted longer.

That summer when I'm back down in Sunny Isles, I meet the surfer for the first time and we start talking "best smoke we've ever had". When I mention meshmacon, he starts laughing his ass off and says something to the effect, you dumb country fuck it's michoacán. He explains to me where it came from, why they didn't need or get any of that type in Miami and what the difference was between seeded and un-seeded cannabis.

Surfers are very unique individuals, at least the ones I knew. Independant, physically fit, spiritual, liked rock and roll and damn, did they love to smoke cannabis. I would eventually gain a great deal of knowledge on how cannabis was imported into South Florida from this guy but on that day I learned a lesson that is just as true today as it was almost 50 years ago.

The "brand name" of cannabis or where it is supposed to have come from doesn't mean a damn thing.

Motel Row In Sunny Isles

By Charles U. Farley / February 20, 2018

Time to step into the Wayback Machine (Sherman and Mr. Peabody's, not the archive) and visit Sunny Isles in the 60's and early 70's. This is where I was lucky enough to spend a lot of my time as a kid. For a city boy raised in the Highlands of Kentucky, it was paradise. Girls from New York and New Jersey coming down to Miami Beach on vacation looking to have a good time, what more could a teenaged boy ask for? My grandfather knew the owner of a motel in Sunny Isles and when he retired, the owner asked him to manage the pool deck. I used to see all these Italian and Jewish guys hanging out on the deck or in the coffee shop, playing cards, all day. They weren't tourists and they didn't work there. In fact, they didn't work at all.

What I didn't know then but do now is they were wiseguys. A new group of them would come down every couple of weeks and bring their families, year after year. Since I was from KY and they were from NY, there was a bit of difference in accents, they used to call me Country. One time I set up a lounge for a guy who you could tell didn't take any shit, dead-on eye contact whenever he talked. He asked me if I knew where to get any real Italian food because "… I'm sick of all this Jew shit like the Rascal House.” I knew of a place in N. Miami called Marcella's from my grandfather, so I told him about it. He asked me what I got there and I told him a sausage stromboli. He starts laughing and says, "I can't believe this country fuck knows what a stromboli is!”

The next day he comes down all smiling saying he had some of the best scungilli he'd ever tasted. From that point on, I could do no wrong, I was like his favorite redneck. I also developed a certain affinity for Italian-Americans and this was before The Godfather. I would eventually arrange a meeting with one of his son's and a surfer I knew that would result in very profitable relationship for both of them. The surfer I knew from another motel where my brother was a poolboy. I'd helped him out when some football players from Norland HS came to score some weed from him. I played football up in KY, so I knew what to say and how to act when they started being dicks to the surfer, who was from NMB HS. I'm not a real tough guy but I'm smart enough to know it's all about eye contact and not being scared. Everything was resolved peacefully and I became good friends with the surfer.

The surfer liked to go to a place called Thee Image, which was 3 or 4 blocks down from where my grandparents lived. One night he and my brother went there but I didn't go because I crashed out early. Just before dawn my brother comes in, wakes me up and sticks his fingers right under my nose. He says, "Here, that's what pussy smells like, just so you'll know!" As I'm trying to wake up, he starts telling me about a band he saw that "... had some old, bald fucking guy just beating the shit out of the drums, playing a song called Mechanical World." The band was called Spirit, who became one of my favorite bands. He tells me the surfer is making a whole lot of money going out to cow pastures in Davie, picking mushrooms and selling them to tourists at Thee Image.

This was the environment I was in.

Back To Prohibition From Denver

By Charles U. Farley / February 13, 2018

When I got back to my home airport, there was almost a foot of snow on my 4X4. The primary roads had been scraped but going up the mountain was interesting. Didn't get in until late at night, so by the time I vaped the Durban Poison, I didn't feel real "energized, so I could be "productive” with a "spark of creativity”. I was beat down and no cannabis product was going to change that. Again, set and setting can have as much to do with the perceived effect as the actual quality or strain of the cannabis. That's why most people are quick to say what the best cannabis they have ever consumed is, usually by name. They quickly identify where they were and what they were doing with a specific type or name brand of cannabis

photo of old SouthEast Lights cannabis flower

There can't be any discussion about the quality of cannabis without acknowledging the effect of tolerance. At some point in the future I intend to do a couple of posts discussing it in detail but for now, I'll state my tolerance is exceedingly high, no pun intended. When financial considerations are removed, consumption becomes totally a matter of preference.

Since I started using vaporizers, I consume exceedingly large amounts of cannabis. As Sly said, "I Cloud 9 when I want to". In a future post, I'll describe what it was like seeing Sly and the Family Stone in 1970 at Pirate's World in Dania Beach, just thinking about it now gives me goose bumps. With a tolerance this high, my perception of the effects with "name brands” will be totally different than most. I'm not going to be describing the Girl Scout Cookies like I saw on marijuanabreak.com, "…Expect your first hit of GSC to be a sweet but heavy one, sending you through a whirlwind of pleasing and blissful emotions…”. That's not how cannabis affects me or my writing style.

GSC is damn fine cannabis, that's for sure. So was everything else I purchased, including the Golden Goat. There's no doubt these are world class cannabis products. One thing I know for certain now that I've been to Denver.

They're not better than SouthEast Lights.

Legal Purchase Before It's Too Late

By Charles U. Farley / February 11, 2018

The election of 2016 and the appointment of a new attorney general stuck fear in me for the future of legal cannabis. The complex and bizarre legal status of state vs. federal cannabis enforcement is destined to be tested sometime in the near future. On the day the attorney general selection was announced, I decided I wanted to experience the legal purchase of cannabis before anything could change. I haven't needed to purchase any cannabis product for many decades but strangely enough, I was really looking forward to it.

I've been doing BHO extractions since learning the process in the late 90's via the alt.drugs.pot.cultivation Usenet newsgroup but was very interested in trying live resin. I wonder what happened to Bubbleman, the ice water hash guy from adpc? That process always sounded like a pain in the ass to me. BHO extraction is quite safe, as long as you're not a dumbass.

At the beginning of 2017, I flew to Denver for 24 hours to legally buy cannabis, at the state level anyway. This was one of the most exhilarating yet bizarre experiences I've ever had. I decided I was going to purchase a vast array of flowers and concentrates with the goal of trying the "name brands” like Green Crack and Girl Scout Cookies. I also wanted to get as much pure sativa as I could to compare to SouthEast Lights.

It doesn't matter what type of cannabis is used, the situational conditions (called "set and setting” in psychedelia) have a profound effect on how cannabis is perceived at the conscious level. In example, I took a top cola flower of SouthEast Lights to do when I first got to the hotel room. In my ordinary environment, it's quite relaxing and has a very pleasurable, mellowing effect. Not so much when you're in a Denver hotel room getting ready to go out and legally buy cannabis for the first time! I was energized and invigorated walking out from the Hyatt heading to Native Roots.

I was prepared for the security and cash requirements from reading Leafly but it was still a very strange experience. This was an upscale, downtown mall type of environment so I felt totally safe and relaxed. Denver was digging out from a large snowstorm but a week later almost none of the businesses had scraped their sidewalks and the streets also had not been cleared. This made for a dangerous and messy walk. Hell, even here in the southeast U.S. we manage to clear the roads and scrape sidewalks in downtown areas after a week.

After clearing the security process, I walked up to the counter and explained to the budtender this was my first purchase in over 25 years. I told her I had developed Northern Lights for most of that time and wanted as close to a pure sativa as I could get. She recommended Cinderella 99. Oh for God's sake, that's nothing but a Jack Herrer hermie that's been cubed by Mr. Soul. No disrespect to him whatsoever, as I'm familiar with him from the BCGA web forum from the late 90's when he was developing it. But I'd already grown several crops of honest to God Jack Herrer from Sensi and didn't think it was anything that special. I wanted as pure a sativa as I could find and Cinderella 99 wasn't it.

One great thing Native Roots did have was Durban Poison shatter. Now we are where we need to be as far as correct cannabis classification. Even though I wanted to concentrate more on live resin than BHO, this turned out to be the second best concentrate I purchased during my trip. Not sticky or gluey like my BHO or the rest of the non-resin concentrates I got in Denver but true, hard, brittle… well shatter. Even though the budtender wasn't knowledgeable, this was a very upscale experience and wasn't really more expensive than the other places I went. I have a pic on my phone of the storefront but don't feel comfortable putting it up on the Internet, so this post will be a wall of words.

Walking back to the hotel, I slipped on a sheet of ice in a crosswalk after being approached by a "street urchin” panhandler and damn near busted my collar bone. Luckily I rolled when I hit the pavement so the next thing I knew, I was looking up at clear, blue Colorado sky. I looked like an icy, wet, drowned fucking rat when I walked into the lobby of the Hyatt. Things got much better when I reached my room and tried the DP shatter.

Leaving Denver, I had quarters of Green Crack and Girl Scout Cookies, a half of Golden Goat and a whole of Durban Poison with many grams of live resin and shatter of DP and Gorilla Glue. Shout outs to Local Product, Lightshade and especially Botanico whose generic, live resin was the best product I brought home.

What did I learn from my trip? Colorado is doing legalization as correct as it can be done, from a consumer standpoint. I have no idea what's happening at the corporate or industrial level but from my short time there, it's well regulated. I had to show and in some cases surrender my driver's license before even entering the main area. I felt very safe but it was wierd with cops/armed guards present. All purchases were cash only, so no one can run up credit card debt buying cannabis, which I think is not only a good thing for cannabis, but for everything else in general. I haven't had a credit card since my divorce in 1985.

Later on in the week, I'll compare what I bought in Denver with SouthEast Lights.

Adding a Tent to the Closet

By Charles U. Farley / February 8, 2018

After cultivating in a 2' by 5' closet for 30 years, I've learned a little about maximizing quantity while maintaining quality. The quantity of light provided will do nothing for the quality of cannabis but is directly proportional to the quantity produced, up to the point of diminishing returns. When I first started out indoors with Jamaican and Columbian Type IV/Hybrids, they leaned heavily to the Type I/Sativa pheno, so I knew I had to hit them with as much light as possible to tame their height range. I decided to use a 1000w MH, so I would easily exceed the point of diminishing returns with light.

The Tent Is Lit

They Like It

Briefly Outside

Five years ago when I made the transition to LED, I kept the same goal to provide as much usable light as possible. There was so much hype and bullshit regarding growing cannabis under LED lights, it was difficult to know just how much light to provide. I went with 2 Lumigrow 325's after doing a feasibility grow with a G8LED 240 in the clone/seedling closet. It was going to be fun to experiment with adjusting the amount of red and blue light the plants received. A couple of years ago, I purchased a California Light Works Bloom Booster 200 to augment the closet light, as I was using one of the Lumigrow's in a clone closet.

The election year of 2016 was exceedingly stressful and frustrating, so my wife and I were consuming much more cannabis than usual. I researched tents and decided a 4' X 4' would be the best size for the basement. Since I would still be running the closet with the Lumigrow's, I couldn't just use the old MH because of the excess electrical consumption. After dropping around $2000 USD for the LED conversion, I wasn't ready to spend a lot more cash on additional high quality LED's. In the end, I spent around $500 USD for 2 KingPlus 1800's to light the tent. They are cheap ass imports but they put out amazing PAR numbers, have a 3 year warranty and the parts will be easy to replace when they fail. I've grown 4 production and 3 experimental plants in the tent at the same time for a couple of months and only had a bit of yellowing on the very bottom branches.

As you can see from the photos, I'm still exceeding the point of diminishing returns.

Photography On The Website

By Charles U. Farley / February 5, 2018

All photography is done with a Nikon 4300 point and shoot camera from 2003. It has a whopping 4.1 megapixels, uses a 512 MB CF memory card and has absolutely no GPS capabilities whatsoever, which is the reason I use it. That's why the photos look pixelated/blocky if the site is viewed on a large screen monitor. I could take the shots with my phone, which has 12 megapixels, or my wife's Canon T6 with 18 but then I'd have to strip out the GPS/EXIF data, which isn't worth it to me for the purposes of this website. Who knows if I could even strip out all the data if I tried, given the current state of technology.

The only use of Photoshop is to crop, re-size and adjust exposure levels. Most of these photos are indoors, so they require the use of a flash. Since the camera only goes up to 400 ISO/ASA, there will be some dynamic range exposure issues, given the miniature on-camera flash. All of these photos were taken on a black table or mouse pad, outside or in the living room. Most required a tripod because of the slow shutter speed and ultra-low camera weight. I hadn't used this camera in a long time, so it took a while to get used to it again. Luckily I remembered it has an adjustable White Balance setting, so no more of those God-awful purple monstrosities from the closets or tent.

After all, this isn't High Times but I think these shots look pretty damn good, especially given the fact I'm not a professional photographer and use a 15 year old point and shoot camera. I'm not trying to sell anything, so polished, professional photography is not required. However, I do want to document what SouthEast Lights looks like in all stages of development, so I'm going to do the best I can with the old dinosaur 4300.

Imagine that, a dinosaur using another dinosaur.

First SouthEast Lights of 2018

By Charles U. Farley / February 3, 2018

These are the sprouts for the first planting of SouthEast Lights in 2018. Got a late start because I was sidelined by the flu and it's been very cold. Now the temps aren't getting down to 0 degrees Fahrenheit like they have been, so it's easier to keep the seedling/clone closet warm. I've learned from past experience in the winter to monitor humidity levels as well as temperature. I use a humidifier when necessary to make sure it doesn't fall below 30%. Regardless of air temperature, if humidity levels fall that low, the first real leaves will develop and then all growth will stop, never to begin again.

I sprout seeds in damp, paper towels inside a Zip-lock baggie and as you can see from the photo, they are very vigorous. I start with 75-100 seeds so I can choose the best 50 seedlings to begin each project. I don't coddle or treat seedlings in a gentle manner, I treat them just like anything else I'd put in a vegetable garden. I prefer the cotyledon leaves to be formed when I transplant into dirt and frequently, lateral roots have already begun to develop as well.

Everything I do from this point on is focused on root development and leaf production. I use standard, commercially available potting soil that I have thoroughly flushed with spring water to remove the added fertilizer. This is the only time I ever flush the soil. At some point in the future, I'll explain why I think flushing soil based plants prior to harvest, or anytime for that matter, accomplishes nothing but suffocating the roots and is detrimental to your plant. The normal balance between air and water in your soil ecosystem is totally destroyed in a misguided attempt to "remove" nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium from a developed plant cell, so it will "taste" better. That makes no sense whatsoever.

It is difficult to tell from the photos but the soil containers are 3.5 inches square and 7 inches deep. This depth encourages tap root development and allows enough soil volume for vigorous root expansion. The close spacing of the containers encourages competition and promotes height development.

I am able to use the deep containers for 40 seedlings but I always like to have 10 extra plants just in case something adverse happens. The containers are placed on a tray that I use to keep the plants watered. The water keeps the soil quite moist at the bottom of the container and roots strive to reach there.

Even though I have a T-5 fixture from when I first started cloning, now I use LED’s for every stage of plant development. Since I've recently bought new, cheap-ass LED lights for a tent, I've changed how I light seedlings in the closet. I'm using a light that throws down about 1000 milli-mols of PAR at a foot and I vary the height, depending on the temp at leaf level.

This brings up a point; I'm not an engineer or physicist and I do not have an indepth knowledge light measurement. No doubt, people much more knowledgeable will read the sentence above about PAR and immediately think I am a complete dumbass. And that's OK. All I know is what works for me and this does.

Northern Lights Has Been Reverse Engineered

By Charles U. Farley / January 27, 2018

I have been growing and developing generations of Sensi Seeds Northern Lights cannabis from ten seeds I acquired almost 20 years ago. I don’t use the word “breed” because that’s not what I do, I don’t have the physical facilities to effectively and realistically create new strains of cannabis. However, many years of experience with this strain of cannabis has given me insight into how it grows and develops, the result of not only genetics but environment as well.

Very rare NL Type I/Sativa

Rare NL Type II/Indica

Standard NL Type IV/Hybrid

A quick word about descriptive phrases used in describing cannabis. I’m a pretty decent writer and could easily impress you with astounding displays of highly invocative words and phrases to make you think what I’m describing is the best thing you could ever experience with cannabis. That’s fucking bullshit. How I perceive the mental and physical effects of cannabis are going to be totally different than they are for you, because we have vastly differing life experiences with it. How I describe the effects will be totally different as well. For instance, there is not a variety or strain of cannabis that could ever, ever make me paranoid or apprehensive, yet you may have experienced this feeling. All humans perceive things in dramatically different ways, so all these flowery descriptions don’t mean anything. You have to actually pay your money and try the product to know how it will affect you personally.

So keep in mind when you read all of those highly descriptive phrases people use to describe their cannabis seeds, they are selling you something. You aren’t going to be “tripping on an LSD-like experience” with any cannabis product, including concentrates, trust me on that one. It’s like comparing herbal tea to mainlining methamphetamine, two vastly different substances with astoundingly different effects. I digress, as Owsley used to write. One of these days soon, I’ll expand on why I think he was such a visionary genius with cannabis, among many, many other subjects, excluding LSD.

Moving on, I decided to do a straight, line-bred cross of multiple generations of seed (F2->F3->F4) and a completely separate, back-crossed, in-bred line of seed as well. The back-crossed, in-bred line is called SouthEast Lights. One thing that has been amazing is how stable Northern Lights is. Rock solid out to the fifth generation, then I started getting the occasional Type II/Indica pheno. This was a nice change of pace from the standard pheno of Northern Lights; poplar shaped and much more showy with lots of deep green color, strong smell, and heavy resin, along with a profound, sedating effect.

At F6 of the line-bred Northern Lights, I had the first Type I/Sativa pheno. Familiar to me from indoor growing in the 80’s, it was a great change of pace, for a very short time. A moderately low yielding plant, almost absent of resin and smell, yet it still had a very familiar effect that’s quite different from what I’m used to. A quick word on visible resin, it doesn’t mean a whole lot unless you’re making hash. As far as desired mental effect is concerned, all you have to do is look at a high CBD, low THC variety that’s just glistening with resin to prove it’s not directly related to quality. I would rather have 1 cc of resin that is 95% psychoactive than 10 cc’s of resin that is 5% psychoactive, wouldn’t you?

I sprouted the last of the Northern Lights F6 generation seeds in the spring of 2017. From seedling to early vegetative stage, all had their usual, uniform appearance. That changed when the aggressive growth phase began. One plant in particular was height dominant and a couple weren’t spreading out quite as squat as usual, so I decided not to cull the suspected male or the underachievers and experiment a little bit. Instead of my normal selection process, I went with the atypical plants. Out of the four plants that made it through the selection process, one developed into a Type I/Sativa, one into a Type II/Indica and two were Type IV/Hybrid. This was the very first time I had all three cannabis types in one development project.

That’s when I realized I had reverse engineered Sensi’s Northern Lights.

I understand enough about the history of Northern Lights to know it was created by NL Seattle Greg (_much_ respect) from a mixture of a pure Type II/Indica, a Type I/Sativa and a Type IV/Hybrid of mixed heritage, then refined and standardized by Nevil and Ben (respect) at Sensi.

I was looking at all three ancestors of Sensi's Northern Lights at once.

For logistical reasons, these three plants had to share a 4X4 space with four production plants, so things got a bit crowded for a month or so until they were ready for harvest. Even with all the light I was slamming down on them, it was hard to penetrate the canopy down to the lower branches so some leaves got a bit yellow, which is rare for me. Rather than continue the F6 generation, I decided it was time to concentrate on the next generation.

Inspiration For This Journal

By Charles U. Farley / Jan 24, 2018

Having this website gives me the freedom to write precisely how I feel at this exact moment in time. The videos below are an inspiration for how I’m going to approach this journal. Similar to the character in the 1990 movie Pump Up The Volume, this is going to be a pirate website and I’m going to be writing about things that matter to me. I don’t really give a shit if anyone is reading this, because this is an outlet for me and my family, not any type of commercial or promotional endeavor. As the main character in the 1976 movie Network said, I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. This website gives me an outlet to voice my frustration with not only the injustice of cannabis prohibition but with the current U.S. political situation as well.

Everybody Knows

I'm As Mad As Hell

Listening to these opening lyrics:

"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. Everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost. Everybody knows the fight was fixed, the poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That's how it goes. Everybody knows."

Leonard Cohen

and then hearing this line:

"You ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up? You know that feeling that the whole country is like, one inch away from saying, "That's it! Forget it!". I mean, think about it. Everything's polluted. The environment, the government, the schools, you name it."

describes exactly how I've felt for the last year, since the inauguration. As the cliché goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. It makes me mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

The slow progress we've made in the U.S. on the road to legalization the last 10 years has been brought to an abrupt halt with the 2016 election and subsequent appointment of attorney general. I'll state right now I am a lifelong Democrat who voted for Bernie and, _very_ reluctantly, for Hillary but will soon be registering as an Independent. The Democratic Party no longer represents what I stand for. As my grandfather used to say, “Republicans want to do everything for rich people, Democrats want to do everything for poor people and I’m a whole lot closer to being poor than I am being rich.” Unfortunately, now both parties represent the rich and powerful. This country needs a third political party... desperately.

Since I now have this method of communicating, let me take this opportunity to say to the president, and I'm going to use the words from a T-shirt a woman was wearing during the Women's March of 2018:

"Fuck You! You Fucking Fuck!"

I cannot say it better or more succinctly than that.

The Online Journey Begins

By Charles U. Farley / January 20, 2018

It's been one year since the inauguration and I knew last year when I got back from Denver I was going to develop a website as a way to channel my rage at the political situation here in the U.S. That trip will be the subject of a future post but what I'm getting ready to write about now has nothing to do with Republican or Democratic political philosophies. It's about a pathological liar who treats women like shit being elected president, those are indisputable, non-political fucking facts. When the president appointed his attorney general, I knew the situation regarding cannabis was going to get much, much worse.

Last year, if you knew even the most basic facts about the attorney general's history in Alabama, you realized that enforcement of existing cannabis laws was about to change, dramatically. In a country where many states have legalized the possession and sale of cannabis, the profoundly sad fact is it is still highly illegal in the vast majority of the U.S. and people are still being arrested and put in jail for the simple possession of cannabis.

Predictably, on January 4th of 2018 he rescinded what is known as the Cole Memorandum, a 2013 legal document that ended federal prosecution of offenses related to cannabis. This action should put the fear of God in every consumer of cannabis in the U.S., even in states where it's legal. All of the progress that's been made in the epic legal battle against the criminalization of cannabis has been brought to a complete and absolute halt.

This site will primarily be concerned with the cultivation and development of cannabis, not politics or current events. But when those events have a direct and detrimental impact on the small scale cultivator of cannabis, I'm going to speak out against the madness. After this tumultuous year, now is the time to document what I've done so my family will understand there is absolutely nothing morally or ethically wrong with growing and using cannabis.