Grandmommy Purple Grow Report: My 25-Week-Long Bonsai Art Project

Greetings, weed and art lovers! The Grandmommy Purple grow report that I want to share with you today is very unusual. I hope it’ll inspire you to create your own bonsai installations. Or at least you’ll get an idea of how much abuse a modern strain of cannabis can take.

In my Grandmommy Purple grow, the plant was subjected to all kinds of stress: topping, close-shave defoliation, tying down, and, above all else, exposing the root structure. She took it all without complaining. The yield was never my goal here, but this feisty lady still brought me enough bud and hash to fall in love with her smoke too.

A Puck-Shaped Container For the First Few Weeks

I chose a very shallow starter pot for my Grandmommy Purple seedling (only a couple of inches deep) because I needed a wide and shallow root structure.

Cannabis, in general, prefers tall containers. The reason is that the main root goes very deep in search of water and nutrients while the roots closer to the surface are in charge of breathing. In shallow pots, seedlings develop rather slowly but also stay short and wide which is perfect when you grow a bonsai.

Not Your Regular Re-Potting

So, my seedling wasn’t very big in week 4 when I decided it was time to transplant her into the final 7-liter pot. But the root structure was exactly how I wanted it—short and wide—and I put my seedling on top of a glass sphere with a tiny LED light beneath it.

For now, the sphere was hidden inside a cylinder filled with soil, but I would remove it later and expose the roots.

Grandmommy Purple Wearing a Mask

It took Grandmommy Purple another two weeks to settle in and grow enough to be ready for yet more pain. This time, I topped her and removed every leaf and node except two uppermost shoots. I installed a Venetian carnival mask right over it so that the shoots went through the mask’s eyes.

And in week 7, when the roots have sufficiently established themselves in the pot, it was time to expose the glass sphere. As I expected the roots “hugged” it from all sides. It was beautiful. Like old trees with their roots exposed by soil erosion.

At this point, I covered the soil surface with pebbles and in week 9, removed most of the temporary stilts supporting the mask. Now the stem itself was sturdy enough to hold its weight. My little art project started to look nicer and cleaner by the day.

Tying Down And Pruning

My goal over the next several weeks was to wait till the exposed roots became thick and woody and to train the two top shoots perfectly horizontally. I kept leaving only a small bunch of leaves on top and pruned away everything else. I wanted the growing tips to span much wider than the pot before letting them go up.

In week 12, I finally stopped defoliating and let both tops grow naturally till the 12/12 flip in week 16. All this time, my Grandmommy Purple was bathing in 240W from a Viparspectra XS2000, but frankly, she didn’t need that much light because she had so little foliage.

For the same reason, I only began feeding my baby in week 13 from seed. I started to give her Berkana by Druid Nutrients. This formula has an NPK of 10-30-20 and includes all secondary nutrients, like Mg, as well as trace elements and amino acids. You can use it for both the vegetative and flowering stages and get great results.

Do I See Double?

By the beginning of flowering, both shoots looked like two separate plants grown from clones: perfectly identical, big, leafy, with shiny deep-green foliage. And each would grow by a factor of three before the stretch was over 4 or 5 weeks into flowering.

They would form a towering central cola and quite a few side branches too. And all I needed to do was to remove the excess foliage and keep feeding my Grandmommy Purple with Berkana.

Looking Like a Piece of Art

The leaves still had a very deep shade of green like the plant was getting too much nitrogen. I knew that the excess of N wasn’t a good thing in flower, but my amazing Grandmommy Purple didn’t seem to mind. She started popping pistils after just one week of 12/12, and 4 weeks into flowering, she was already glistening with trichomes. The silvery trichs looked stunning against the backdrop of vibrant green.

After 7 weeks in flower, the flowers have stacked up very tight, forming long dense colas. And in the next week, the buds began to swell while the leaves started to fade a little. I saw no purple color, though. My Grandmommy Purple looked more like a white strain to me, amazingly resinous but, strangely, with a rather weak smell.

In the last two weeks before the harvest, the buds got even more fat and looked very fleshy and solid. The remaining fan leaves began to droop and yellow beautifully, especially when I started the flush. The plant didn’t really need any of my gimmicks to be called a stunner.

Grandmommy Purple Seeds For Sale

VIEW STRAIN

The Smoke Was Beautiful Too

At the end of this long journey, I got over 46 grams of closely manicured nuggets and 7.3 grams of dry sieve hash. The smoke was sweet, earthy, and herbal, and the high was of a kind that starts in the head but quickly settles down in the body. Then you feel a great happy buzz and can’t stop yourself from giggling. I had been sorry to chop my lovely bonsai tree, but the finished product kinda cheered me up.

I’m glad my Grandmommy Purple grow report let me relive the experience with this amazing strain. Hope you enjoyed it too. Happy growing!

Herbies Head Shop expressly refuses to support the use, production, or supply of illegal substances. For more details read our Legal Disclaimer.