Indica Seeds: What the Mountains Bred In

Every quality that moves an indica seed has been put there by a mountain. The short frame, the fast flowering, the dense resinous flowers, the broad dark leaf, the colour that comes in as the nights turn cold: none of them is a breeder’s invention. They are the answers a plant arrived at over thousands of years to a particular combination of problems, in great altitude, in a brief dry season, across the valleys of the Hindu Kush and the mountains beyond it. Breeders carried that solution down the mountain and refined it, yet the shape of the plant is to this day the shape of the place. The examples pointed to in what follows come from the range at https://kushindicaseeds.com and its stock traces to Afghanistan, northern Pakistan and the Indian Himalaya; the argument itself holds to any genuine indica out of any shop catalogue. Knowing the terrain is the most reliable way to understand the pack.

The Range

The Hindu Kush runs roughly eight hundred kilometres out of central Afghanistan towards northern Pakistan, with the broader indica zone spilling over into the western Himalaya on one side and the deserts around the Afghan plateau on the other. Cannabis has been grown there over centuries, chiefly for hashish, which means chosen generation by generation by people who wanted resin rather than anything else: something that could be sieved or sieved from a plant that would have finished ahead of the first snow.

This is a different selection to the one that produced the tropical sativas, in which seasons barely change and the plant could grow for half a year. Everything that comes below is a outcome of a handful of facts about the terrain: it is high, it is dry, its growing season is short, and its nights turn cold fast. The sequence in which they are discussed here does not matters; a plant experiences every one of them at season.

Anthocyanin and the Autumn

Mountain nights fall below ten degrees weeks before the afternoons follow, and a good number of indica populations respond to the cold by making anthocyanin, the same pigment that turns a maple leaves purple. In the plant it shows as purple through the bracts, fan leaves and occasionally the stem, and it does nothing for the grower except look beautiful.

The thing worth taking from the colour is genetic, rather than decorative. The capacity to turn is carried from specific cold-valley populations, and a strain that purples reliably with a cool last two weeks has that origin regardless of what the label claims. Lines marketed as “purple” that only turn with heavy cold, or never really, typically carry the word in the name and nothing of it in the plant. Chilling the room in the last weeks brings the colour out if it is present and does nothing where it is absent; it at the same time slows the finish, so it is a trade rather than a costless effect.

Finishing Before the Frost

At two thousand metres the growing season is short, while the autumn comes early and comes decisively. A plant that needed fourteen weeks to finish from the days started to draw in did not make seed in such ground, and the genes left the population. The plant that remained reacts sharply to the first shortening days and ripens in about seven to nine weeks from the cue.

In a tent that reflex is the single most valued indica quality. Flip to twelve hours and the plant moves at once, grows for a fortnight and fills flower for the rest of a brief run. The fastest strains at Kush Indica Seeds come in at around 7 weeks after the flip, which allows as many as five or six harvests a year from one space where a long sativa allows two. That difference is no efficiency on the breeder’s part; it is the snowline encoded into the plant’s clock.

Built for a Desert Autumn

The traditional homeland is arid: low humidity, intense sun, little rain in the late summer. A plant in such a place has two pressures which its resin answers together. It must shield its flowering parts from ultraviolet exposure, and it must hold moisture inside the flower through a long stretch of dry wind. A heavy coat of trichomes do both: the heads absorb UV and their waxy layer slows water loss. Farmers for hashish then pushed the resin even harder, since resin was always the product.

Dense flower form goes with the same story: a closely packed bud loses less water than an open one in dry air. In a tent those same traits come as a pair, but just one of them is always an advantage. The resin is. The density becomes a liability the instant the room is humid: a bud shaped to retain water in a desert holds it just as well in a damp room, and bud rot moves through a hard indica cola faster than in any flower the equator has ever made. The quality that moves the seed is the same trait that calls for a drier room during the final three weeks.

Leaves for a Thin Atmosphere

The indica fan leaf is broad, heavy and a deep green, and only a few broad lobes where a sativa leaf carries many thin ones. Two things in the terrain select for the broad form. High-altitude air and hard sun put a heavy photon load on each square centimetre, and a broad leaf catches enough without much surface; a large narrow-fingered leaf would simply scorch. And steady wind tears fine leaves, whereas a stout, short-stalked leaf stays put.

The dark colour is pigment loaded thickly into a heavy leaf, which is part of the same adaptation. To the grower the features count in one everyday respect: a dense indica canopy blocks light from all growth below the top tier far more completely than a sativa’s, which means the lower flowers of an untrained indica finish in airy and weak. People who remove a large leaves at week three are reversing, a little, something the range put there for many thousands of years.

Height Is a Cost at Two Thousand Metres

Much of the old growing zone sits from fifteen hundred and three thousand metres. Up that height the air is thin, the UV load is intense, the wind is relentless and every centimetre of stem over the ground costs water the plant cannot spare. A tall plant on that ground loses more, breaks more and gains little for its height, since there is no canopy to clear.

The population which persisted is compact: short internodes, a strong thick central stem, side branches held close, frequently wider than it is tall. In a tent that carries over directly: a true indica line gains maybe half its height again in flower whereas a sativa doubles, fits under a light at a modest modest distance and seldom requires tying down. Anyone with little height choose indica for precisely this reason, and it is the mountain, not the breeder, that those growers are relying on.

Afghani, Mazar, Chitral, Hindu Kush

The great majority of indica seed labels carry place places or derive from one, and the names are more informative than most buyers realise. “Afghani” generally means stock from the Mazar-i-Sharif of Afghanistan, and a classic squat, resinous, early-finishing type. “Hindu Kush” in a listing refers to the central range proper and often to stock taken on the Pakistani side. “Chitral” and “Mazar” point to particular valleys with their own local forms, the first often purpling and the second large and late for an indica. Kush Indica Seeds gives the collection region for every line whenever it is documented, and that makes the name a flavour into a fact the grower can use.

Almost all indica packs on sale is hybrid stock several generations removed from the valley, selected for uniformity rather than for the variation of a true landrace holds; a buyer that wants the spread needs to shop for packs described as pure landrace stock and accept the variation which come with them.

Where the Adaptations Turn Against You

Each adaptation discussed above was a solution to the condition which a tent no longer impose, and a solution that has lost its problem behaves either of two things: it turns into a cost-free advantage or it turns into a cost. The fast finish and the short stature are advantages, because no condition in a room penalises a plant for them. The density and the heavy leaf are hazards, because the dry air that made sense of them is gone and the still air of a sealed room has precisely the reverse effect.

This is why an indica cycle succeeds or goes wrong on a single variable more than on any other: humidity in the final few weeks. A grower that holds it low is rewarded with the hard, frosted, early flower the mountain built; one that does not gets rot in the thickest colas, where the the mountain was arranged the plant to keep moisture in. Indoors, the terrain is to be reconstructed in the final two weeks: cool, dry, moving air. All else about growing indica is easy precisely since the population was bred for somewhere hard.

The Drift of a Word

The word that gave the range its name has since travelled a long way from it than almost any other in cannabis. “Kush” on a current seed name may refer to an unselected Hindu Kush landrace, a West Coast hybrid carrying one Afghan ancestor, or a line named Kush because the breeder thought the sound of it. A OG Kush family, which dominates the use of the word today, is most likely as much sativa-influenced than a good deal of the plants it borrows the word from, and its growth habit, finishing time and leaf show as much much.

A practical rule is the same one which applies across this article: ignore the word and read the terrain. A listing that states an low stretch, a flowering time below nine weeks, a hard flower and a broad leaf is selling a mountain plant regardless of what it is named; one that gives a lanky habit, eleven weeks and airy flowers is selling something else wearing a borrowed name. The seed remembers where it came by; the label often does not.

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This post was written by Arturo