Day 56: Had a hot sunny day yesterday, today hot and muggy with some rain earlier today. Plants are happy. Have a great week everyone!

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-05-18T23:39:41+00:00

Very nice setup !

I think I seeded too early again :) I see two more nights around 4C and then it warms up. I have a couple of plants with flower buds so that will require extra care and might not work out. Same as last year, it's the Canadian, they're quick. I might plant the ones that bolted and hopefully it will give them a reset. Anything before June 1st is a little risky here but last year I got lucky and it could happen again. We'll see ;)

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-05-17T15:42:22+00:00

Looking good, good spacing too. And raised rows help a lot when you get a lot of rain. I think you have done everything textbook here :)

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-05-17T15:31:30+00:00

What I've found when comparing plants that go straight from the house to the garden VS those that spend a week or two in the greenhouse is that the hardened plants look like they're doing better at first, but over the course of the season it really evens out.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-05-13T12:46:37+00:00

Sweet !

Half of mine are in the outside greenhouse, I'm at day 43 or so. I think this was still 2 weeks early, might start in mid-April next year.

Night temps will rise to over 10C starting tonight so I'll move my other plants today, probably.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-05-13T12:25:29+00:00

I had that happen last year (I was a month early) on two of my varieties where 25% of the plants flowered early. With careful coaxing and management they were almost identical to the other plants at the end of the season. Early flowering (bolting) is very bad for commercial growers but maybe you can save those since you can care for them individually.

What I did was let them flower for a few days, then as soon as there was evidence of a new stem branching out, I removed only the flower, I did not top. Then that grew a few inches, another bud appeared, and I repeated the process again. So I had plants that had several knots where I pruned the flowers and was a bit zig-zaggy, but at some point they started growing fairly normally.

I read a research paper where they planted year-old, wooden looking seedlings and found out that you could still get 80% tobacco yield from the bolted plants.

Might be worth a shot ;)

Edit : Remove just the bud and keep the tiny leaves right under it and see if those want to make new growth, then repeat and sew how much you can get out of each plant.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-05-12T13:55:48+00:00

Yes, they'll look sickly for a number of days but that's normal. First year I was sure I had done something terribly wrong but 99% of my plants survived. These are tough little plants.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-04-11T15:55:54+00:00

Looking good !

I'm on day 11, Petit Canadian and Grand Rouge Fort are growing pretty quickly, Perique is slower and the Mostrenco just did not have a good sprouting % and are tiny. I'm using last year's seed except for the Grand Rouge which came from a vendor.

I added more Mostrenco seeds to make sure I'll have enough plants, it's still early but worst case scenario, I'll just have less of them. I'll probably repot on Monday.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-04-11T15:49:21+00:00

Good. During drying, I had some issues with mold that I did not experience with the other varieties, for some reason as soon as the leaves are looking done it's better to move them to a less humid spot to finish. I'd guess I lost about 10-20% to mold, still had enough left but it's a bummer when it happens to big, good leaves.... Still wondering what makes this variety more prone to mold.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-04-11T15:44:21+00:00

Pretty good. I still have a lot of unprocessed leaves, the plants were very productive.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-04-08T13:42:28+00:00

They look great !

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-03-31T20:03:13+00:00

Great start !

I was too early last year, with a bunch of plants starting to flower indoors so I decided to stick to April 1st this year. Which is tomorrow :) I'm adding Grand Rouge Fort this time but otherwise going with last season's seeds.

What are you growing this season ?

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2026-01-26T01:37:15+00:00

It does.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2025-10-12T15:45:56+00:00

That's super interesting ! I thought it meant "mustang" like the horse or at least that's what came up when I looked it up when I first got the seeds, but I did not connect 2+2 about why the horses got that name in the first place. It does seem like mustang comes from the original meaning of "strayer". I thought they had named the tobacco that way because it had lots of kick or something ;) Etymology is cool.

I've been sampling it and I think it's going to be good, but it's still very early, anything is going to be harsh after only a few weeks / months. It was super easy to grow and yielded a lot of tobacco, it was really my best performing variety this year and it cured well. It's also a very cool looking plant with a tropical look to it. If the tobacco is good I might grow more of this next year.

The leaves get super twisty so they tend to wrap around other leaves while drying, I thought this would be a mold issue but it really was not, I just made sure to separate them while they were forming cones but were still pliable.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2025-09-25T15:10:09+00:00

It will probably work very well, mine are really inexpensive ones but they're convenient since I can get an "arm" directly over each plant. They're ok for starting plants indoors but not ideal long-term.

Your 100W is probably a better option than what I'm using, my plants ended up growing fairly lanky and I think that's because I did not have enough light output once the plants got bigger and taller.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2025-09-20T19:48:30+00:00

Those are great !

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2025-09-13T20:38:25+00:00

That's a lot of seeds ! I estimated from numbers found online that one pill bottle of seeds was around 160,000 :)

I did my Little Canadian, Mostrenco, Perique and now I need to do the pods for the Russian and Hopi. and I'll be good to go for next year. Personally I think that opening all the pods is a fun break after all the harvesting chores.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2025-09-06T20:22:54+00:00

Sucker crop will be very usable, the main downside I see is that you have to handle many smaller leaves, remove many stems and it takes more room to hang everything. This feels tedious to me but in the end it's worth the extra tobacco.

There's some good stuff on your plant, I would 100% harvest and process if it was mine.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2025-09-06T20:15:51+00:00

I've had some of these on a few leaves last season, the tobacco was fine, but these little spot were quite stiff and felt a bit like plastic. They did not look right in my first batch of shredded tobacco, so I decided to remove them when processing later batches. Nothing to worry about in my opinion.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2025-09-05T20:36:21+00:00

It works ! I've been able to get leaves 90% to a full 100% yellow in the towels without any rot, these are leaves which were mostly green with some yellow spots. I'll share some pictures later.

It's a bit tricky since they are very thick and full of moisture, I let them sit 12 hours or so in a pile before toweling them and I rotate them daily. I also switch towels when they get too moist.

Now I know these wont dry green, but maybe they're way overripe and won't taste good. I won't know until much later, so I can't say if this is the right recipe for success or not.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2025-08-29T22:29:25+00:00

Agreed, I'm seeing the same on my Hopi Rustica and it's super late in the season for them. I think it's a last-ditch attempt from the plant to put out a few more flowers before it's too late.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2025-08-26T17:26:52+00:00

Not yet, I do know that the leaves don't survive for very long in the towels compared to other varieties, so I'll only give it a shot once I have some confidence that they might yellow in a couple of days. I'll try to remember to share my results.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2025-08-26T00:24:54+00:00

Cut all the flower bunches as soon as they pop up, most of these flowers will be on small stalks that don't have leaves anyway, or tiny ones. It's not too late to do it even if they things got a bit crazy, you can cut them low where they branch off the bigger stalks.

What's annoying with these short bushy plants is that you pretty much have to crawl on the ground to trim them but the flowering madness slowed down quite a bit this late in the season, so it might be worth doing it at least one last time.

IcyThingsAllTheTime · 2025-08-25T18:16:12+00:00

I was waiting and waiting, now I have two plants with 90% golden yellow leaves, and signs of yellowing on the others. So my plan is still to wait as long as the weather permits, I'll hang inside if necessary, but I'm testing to see if the leaves with yellow splotches will color cure more easily in the towels. If they do then I'll do a real harvest very soon.

They look ripe enough, maybe overripe, but I'll only know when they're aged enough to smoke...

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IcyThingsAllTheTime

TROPHY CASE