Skafidr grow log 2024

[slouch]

Yesterday there was a forecast of rain and thunderstorm so I decided to harvest a batch to towel-cure them just before the rain comes (I felt those leaves were ready to harvest and I wanted to do that before the leaves got wet (didn't want to wait for them to dry before harvesting)).

I harvested all the Obourg that was ready (all the leaves from the 15 gal fabric pot and the leaves from the plastic pail), and the two of the Little Canadian (also all the leaves from the 15 gal fabric pot and the leaves from the plastic pail).

Then the rain came. Heavy rain. With strong winds. And hail. We never get hail. But yesterday we got hail for 15 minutes.

It shredded my leaves and bruised the seed pods.

I'm sad: put lots of energy and enthusiasm into a project and get it crushed by nature. But I guess that's part of the game!

(FWIW, I'm not giving up, I'm looking into what's next, see this post.)

Dude that’s brutal

 

[Skafidr]

Dude that’s brutal

It is! Also I was happy to be inside, filming what was going on outside, when this happened

Fun fact: the leaves on the non-topped plants did not get as damaged as the leaves of the topped plants. The leaves of the topped plants were much thicker so I suppose they were likely less nimble to react to the hail.

 

[Skafidr]

Yesterday I went ahead and cleaned up the patio with the plant shreds laying on the floor (don't want to clog that drain, otherwise I'll get water inside), and did a pass at removing all the leaves that I thought couldn't be useful.

This morning, some of the parts seemed to be "dead" green, like squished lettuce (the thing you don't want to eat), so today I harvested all the leaves. The dark green soft parts around where the hail hit seemed to have dried so I suppose those spots will remain green forever.

Given the state of the shredded leaves, I don't think I'll "colour code" them with yarn the way I did with the others:

• I'm planning to let them turn to yellow in the towel, and then try to sun-cure them (maybe shred them first as suggested by Bob)--I won't hang them.
• Given the size of the whole batch, I probably can manage to handle them in "sub-batches" - per variety - I won't need to know if they were from the top or the bottom of the plant, I'll likely end up shredding/mixing everything per-variety to make pipe tobacco.

Note to self: Next season, choose a couple of "mainstream" varieties that would likely be easier to handle¤ I know I'm also likely to try and grow again those varieties I grew this season, just for the sake of "understanding" them.

The stalks are still up. I'm planning to go for a "sucker crop", that may give me a couple more of "whole leaves" (I have so few.. ), the idea is to be able to use some to wrap the shredded tobacco (a.k.a. 'cigarillos'?). So I suppose I'll need to cut those stalks that don't have flowers and let a sucker grow. We're quite late in the season so I don't expect to have a huge harvest.

I think that's all for now.

---
¤ As a reminder: I "shot first, asked questions later" when I chose the seeds. The selection will be better next year!

 

[Nic308]

Yesterday I went ahead and cleaned up the patio with the plant shreds laying on the floor (don't want to clog that drain, otherwise I'll get water inside), and did a pass at removing all the leaves that I thought couldn't be useful.

This morning, some of the parts seemed to be "dead" green, like squished lettuce (the thing you don't want to eat), so today I harvested all the leaves. The dark green soft parts around where the hail hit seemed to have dried so I suppose those spots will remain green forever.

Given the state of the shredded leaves, I don't think I'll "colour code" them with yarn the way I did with the others:

• I'm planning to let them turn to yellow in the towel, and then try to sun-cure them (maybe shred them first as suggested by Bob)--I won't hang them.
• Given the size of the whole batch, I probably can manage to handle them in "sub-batches" - per variety - I won't need to know if they were from the top or the bottom of the plant, I'll likely end up shredding/mixing everything per-variety to make pipe tobacco.

Note to self: Next season, choose a couple of "mainstream" varieties that would likely be easier to handle¤ I know I'm also likely to try and grow again those varieties I grew this season, just for the sake of "understanding" them.

The stalks are still up. I'm planning to go for a "sucker crop", that may give me a couple more of "whole leaves" (I have so few.. ), the idea is to be able to use some to wrap the shredded tobacco (a.k.a. 'cigarillos'?). So I suppose I'll need to cut those stalks that don't have flowers and let a sucker grow. We're quite late in the season so I don't expect to have a huge harvest.

I think that's all for now.

---
¤ As a reminder: I "shot first, asked questions later" when I chose the seeds. The selection will be better next year!

Lucky, I didnt get that weather in Beauce.

 

[slouch]

It is! Also I was happy to be inside, filming what was going on outside, when this happened

Fun fact: the leaves on the non-topped plants did not get as damaged as the leaves of the topped plants. The leaves of the topped plants were much thicker so I suppose they were likely less nimble to react to the hail.

Dude the last time I experienced hail was maybe almost two years ago, I was driving and all the sudden the storm hit and I was driving through a hailstorm with golfball size hail hitting my car and it sounded like gunshots. It’s definitely not fun weather.

 

[Skafidr]

Lucky, I didnt get that weather in Beauce.

Heh even a fellow grower from Montreal ~18km away didn't get that!

 

[Skafidr]

Dude the last time I experienced hail was maybe almost two years ago, I was driving and all the sudden the storm hit and I was driving through a hailstorm with golfball size hail hitting my car and it sounded like gunshots. It’s definitely not fun weather.

Must have been quite intense! I would have been worried for the car (specially the windows)!

 

[slouch]

Must have been quite intense! I would have been worried for the car (specially the windows)!

I was afraid the front window was going to blow but I guess they make car windows pretty tough.

 

[Skafidr]

Yesterday I took some of the more yellow/dry-ish tobacco out of my "air curing barn" (read, plastic box). To my surprise, and annoyance, I found intruders. I found some (what I think are) aphids. Green ones. I did not find any of those while the leaves were still on the plants. (I have given up another of my plants to a black aphid clan.) Anyway, I borrowed an AphidRemover Pro and gently squished them out of existence.

I moved those yellow leaves to a new place where they could hang and dry; however, I was quite annoyed with the setup I had (hung using a metal wire through the midrib): to remove the leaf that was ready in the middle of the string, I had to remove half of them. So I came up with an improvement over my previous iteration and I added a little twist to the hook I made with the metal wire. So now I can handle them individually.

Also, there was one leaf that had mould on it, so I discarded it.

While I was at it, I also hung a few of the ones that I picked earlier this week before the hail came; the "Obourg" leaves were yellow, or yellow and brown and pale green. The yellow ones looked like the theory showed, while I feel that the ones with the green may colour cure oddly.

Then I did a pass outside. Since I decided to try my hand at doing a sucker crop, I removed the stalks of the plants that did not have flowers.

For the nerds out there, here is some data:

Number	Variety	Topped	Soil Qty (l)	Pot type (fabric/plastic)	Plant Size (cm)
1​	Scent of Italy	No	38​	f	29​
2​	Scent of Italy	No	19​	p	12​
3​	Scent of Italy	No	19​	f	21​
4​	Big Red Strong	Yes	19​	f	85​
5​	Big Red Strong	Yes	19​	p	62​
6​	"Turkish"	No	38​	f	29​
7​	Obourg	No	19​	p	22​
8​	Obourg	No	19​	f	37​
9​	Little Canadian	No	38​	f	36​
10​	"Turkish"	No	19​	p	17​
11​	Obourg	No	38​	f	28​
12​	Little Canadian	No	19​	f	23​

I don't have time right now to do any kind of analysis on this. Also, I'm not able to tell at this point if a bigger pot produced more leaves, however photos show that the leaves of bigger pots appear bigger than those of the smaller pots.

A caveat I realised today. I mentioned many times that "bigger pot -> bigger plant". However, this has to be taken with a grain of salt now and should probably be tested further: since the "bigger pots" had twice as much soil as the "smaller pots", I gave twice as much water when I watered them. And I also gave twice as much fertilizer, since I had twice as much soil. The next time I test this, if ever, I should give the same amount of fertilizer even if there is twice as much soil.

Most of them had suckers that I missed last time I did a pass at removing them, however since I want leaves in the hope of binding/wrapping, I discarded the suckers that had damaged leaves.

The seed pods of the "Petit Canadien" (Little Canadian) were starting to break open and leak, so I decided to harvest the head and hang it to dry inside (even if not all the pods were brown).

Then I watered those plants and fertilized with liquid fertilizer those that had not previously received solid fertilizer.

The last thing I did in the evening was to smoke a couple of pipes (while going for a walk), but it's not very "in line" with the topic of this forum, I was not smoking tobacco, but rather herb blends from smokably.com (I'm out of tobacco since the beginning of the summer).

I'd like to formalize the mental model I have about "suckers" that I kind of laid out it my mind yesterday.

Plants have a fundamental drive to reproduce. They do this casually until they feel threatened (yeah, cut those flower buds!). Suckers are a response to threats. So, it is not sure that seeing a sucker means that it will grow as casually as the main stalk grew, giving as many leaves, etc., it may try to produce flower buds quite early. I suppose this is why some of the suckers that I missed already had a flower bud--the sucker was only a few inches tall.

 

[Skafidr]

I checked some of my curing leaves earlier, and some of them have mold on the stem.

I suppose I need to lower the humidity and remove those stems?

 

[Skafidr]

Long time not posted. Was busy AFK.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I removed the "top" parts of the leaves that had mould and I re-hung them in a dryer place.

Also, as I mentioned in the opening of this post, I was busy with life so I did not handle my colour curing leaves that were in a towel in a timely fashion so some of them "over cured", they went from yellow to brown (fwiw, there was still a bunch of leaves that were still mostly green).

So I tossed the leaves that were not very good looking (I kept those that just appeared brown, tossed what looked a bit beyond it). I did not see rot per se, though.

Then I decided I'd follow Bob's suggestion here, sort of, and in part: try a "Rajangan" approach.

Since, as I understand, oriental tobacco is typically sun cured, I decided to use the sun to cure the "Turkish" leaves I had. I made three piles: "not too damaged"/"okay", "damaged and yellow" and "damaged and brown". I removed the stems from the "damaged" leaves then shredded them to a width of ~5 mm. Then I spread all of that over oven wire trays in two transparent plastic boxes, and set a pot with water in, then set those boxes in the sun (I used a "plumber shim" to keep a small opening in each box, and plant pots as weight to make sure the lid and the box stay in place, it can be quite windy up here).

(For what it's worth, it seems that "over cured" tobacco is needed when creating "srinthil" (as seen here), so I'm not too worried about this "brown" pile.)

I then decided I'd try the de-stem and shred sun-curing with the few green "Big Red Strong" that I had, just to see (these did spend the same time in the towel as the other leaves, but for some reason, did not become yellow). After all, I thought, this fellow shows something where the shreds are still quite green: David The Good: Drying Tobacco / Sun-Curing Tobacco in FOUR Days. And so I added this with the rest.

I need to mention here that I needed to move my boxes from the lower floor balcony to our upper floor patio mid day to have the boxes and tobacco exposed to the sun; all in all, the boxes could get ~10 hours of sun on sunny days.

For the other hail-shredded varieties, I simply hung them to finish curing and dry. The main reason I did not do the same thing for all the shredded leaves is because of space; the setup I have only allowed for the four "types" I wanted to process first.

As for the results, I'm not good to judge this as I have only smoked a few cigars and one variety of pipe tobacco so far. The colour seems good, except for the experiment I did with the green Big Red Strong leaves, which remained green, apparently.

I've been busy with life, and so I haven't looked into the next steps yet with this Turkish. I can't kiln it, so I'll have to figure out how to store it and age it only using time.

As for the "growing" part of my life, the suckers grow in an odd way (frenching? this would be a bit weird because the original plants were all right... but then most folks don't care about a plant after it has done its job so it may just be that they produce weird suckers?). One of the Turkish sucker put out a flower bud so I topped it.

 

[Skafidr]

I did "cure" the "Rajangan" for about a week; it was not a perfectly sunny week but we got some good sunny days. I could have stopped doing it earlier but I did not have time.

Here is the progress/result.

 

[Skafidr]

I haven't posted in a long time because I haven't done anything concrete w.r.t. the growing in a long time (aside my adventure with testing my soil pH; analysis paralysis due to frenching).

I managed to do a pass at the plants today.

Roughly, I:

• removed the flowers
• removed the bushy parts
• completely removed some of the plants that were not going to make it (whatever 'it' may be)
• trimmed those plants that had stalks that could (???) produce viable leaves

The nights are getting cold, but no freezing in sight (close to 3°C, but not below), so I'll play with these until there is frost.

I did pick up a couple of leaves that seemed "okay", although I'll likely toss them with the couple of "random" leaves that I have when/if they dry, and make "random" smokable stuff (I'm not sure from which plant they come/I did not bother to note, and they come from suckers anyway).

I've uploaded pictures of the roots. They were not so hard to remove and I don't think they've fully occupied all the room they had. The Little Canadian that I had left flower had very easy to remove roots so I wonder if those that don't experience hardship produce less roots?

In details:

Plant number	Variety	Pot	Note
1​	Little Canadian	Fabric 15 g	Removed the bushy parts and the stalks, let's see how it does
2​	Little Canadian	Plastic 5 g	Removed the bush parts, the flowers, left only a coupe of stalks with leaves, let's see if the leaves can get larger
3​	Little Canadian	Fabric 5 g	Removed the whole plant. It was small and full of aphids.
4​	Obourg	Fabric 15 g	Removed, very small and bush, no stalk per se, screw it.
5​	Obourg	Plastic 5 g	Removed the bush parts, the flowers, left only a coupe of stalks with leaves, let's see if the leaves can get larger
6​	Obourg	Fabric 5 g	Removed, nothing came up after I cut the original stalk; this plant was a very small and late planted one.
7​	Turkish	Fabric 15 g	Removed, big bush, no long stalk, screw it
8​	Turkish	Plastic 5 g	Cleaned up a bit, removed the flowers, left a couple of stalks to see what happens
9​	Turkish	Fabric 5 g	I had left this one flower; I cut the new flower heads, left a few small stalks to see what happens
10​	Big Red Strong	Fabric 15 g	I had left this one flower; I cut the new flower heads, left a few small stalks to see what happens
11​	Big Red Strong	Plastic 5 g	Cleaned up a bit, removed the flowers; this one has a single stalk
12​	Big Red Strong	Fabric 5 g	Removed; stalks did not raise, there was a couple of okay leaves at the bottom but I did not feel like handling this further.
13​	Scent of Italy	Fabric 15 g	This one looks the most healthy of all, even if it took a lot of time to get this. I left the "strawberry" plants just for fun.
14​	Scent of Italy	Plastic 5 g	Bushy, I removed most of the leaves to see if "non-frenched" leaves would come out
15​	Scent of Italy	Fabric 5 g	Bushy, I removed most of the leaves to see if "non-frenched" leaves would come out

 

[Skafidr]

I gave them double-dose of fertilizer yesterday evening, let's see what happens! (The one in the yellow bottle.)

 

[Skafidr]

I watered the plants yesterday evening, gave them a whole watering can each.

The coldest night forecast is 2°C on Saturday night. I hope I can see some growth before the first freeze!

 

[Skafidr]

The coldest night forecast is 2°C on Saturday night.

There was a "frost warning" for this night but it seems it didn't happen.

Plants appear to be still up. "Pas mort, mais pas fort," as we say (not dead but not strong).

Next frost forecast is due on Wednesday night (-1 °C).