The Hindu Kush, Explained Through a Seed Pack

Each quality that sells an indica seed was put there by a range of mountains. The short stature, the seven-to-nine-week flowering, the hard resinous flowers, the wide blue-green leaf, the purple that comes in when the nights go cold: not one of these is an invention. They are the answers a plant arrived at over thousands of years to a particular combination of pressures, at high altitude, in a brief dry, cold summer, across the slopes of the Hindu Kush and the mountains beyond it. Breeders carried that answer down the mountain and refined it, but the logic of the plant is to this day the shape of the terrain. The examples pointed to below come from the range at https://kushindicaseeds.com and its catalogue traces to Afghanistan, northern Pakistan and the Indian Himalaya; the account though holds for any true indica out of any seed bank. Reading the terrain is the quickest way to read the pack.

A Dry Corner of Central Asia

The Hindu Kush stretches for about eight hundred kilometres from central Afghanistan into northern Pakistan, with the wider indica zone spilling over to the Indian Himalaya to one side and the lowlands around the Central Asian interior to the other. Cannabis has been grown there for centuries, mainly for hashish, and chosen generation after generation by people who needed resin above anything else: something that could be rubbed or pressed off a plant that would have ripened ahead of the first snow.

That is a different selection from the one that produced the equatorial sativas, in which daylength hardly vary and the plant could grow for half a year. Everything that comes below is a consequence of four conditions about the terrain: it is high, it is arid, its growing season is short, and the nights go cold fast. The sequence in which they are taken here hardly matter; a plant experiences every one of them at once.

Wind and Sun: Why the Leaf Is Broad and Dark

The indica leaf is wide, thick and dark, with few wide lobes where a sativa fan leaf carries many thin ones. Both things about the terrain favour that shape. Thin air and intense sun put a high photon load on each square centimetre, so a broad leaf catches enough without a lot of surface; a large narrow-fingered leaf in that light simply scorch. And constant wind shreds thin foliage, whereas a stout, short-petioled leaf stays put.

The dark colour is pigment loaded thickly into a thick leaf, which is one part of the same answer. To the grower these leaves count in one everyday respect: a broad-leafed indica canopy blocks light from all growth below the top layer much more completely than a sativa’s, so lower flowers on an unmanaged indica come in small and loose. People who remove a fan leaves at week three are undoing, a little, what the mountain put there for many thousands of years.

The Short Season: Why It Flowers Fast

At two thousand metres the growing window is brief, while the autumn arrives early and decisively. A plant which needed fourteen weeks to ripen after the days began to shorten never make seed in such ground, and its genes dropped out of the population. The plant that stayed responds sharply to shortening days and finishes in roughly seven to nine weeks after that cue.

In a tent that response is the single most frequently valued indica trait. Flip to twelve hours and the plant moves immediately, stretches for a fortnight and stacks flower for the rest of a brief run. The quickest strains at Kush Indica Seeds come in at around 7 weeks after the switch, and that allows five or six harvests a year from one room where a long sativa allows perhaps two. This difference is no efficiency on the breeder’s part; it is the first snow encoded into the plant’s own clock.

Dry Air: Why the Buds Are Dense and Resinous

The old zone is dry: low humidity, intense sun, rare rain through the flowering season. A plant there has two problems which resin solves at once. It must protect its flowering parts from UV exposure, and it must hold water in the flower over weeks of desiccating wind. A heavy coat of trichomes does both: their resin heads block UV and the coating slows water loss. Farmers for hashish on top of that pushed the trait further, since resin was always the product.

Dense bud form goes to the same cause: a closely clustered bud loses less water than an airy one in arid air. In a tent those two qualities arrive as a pair, and only one of them is unconditionally an advantage. The resin is. The density turns into a risk the moment the air is damp: a bud shaped to hold water in a desert retains it equally as well in a wet tent, and botrytis spreads through a dense indica cola faster than in anything an equator ever made. The quality that sells the seed is the one that needs a drier room during the last three weeks.

Height Is a Cost at Two Thousand Metres

A good deal of the old growing zone lies between a thousand five hundred and three thousand metres. Up that height the air is thin, the UV exposure is heavy, the wind is constant and each centimetre of stem above the ground takes resources the plant cannot spare. A tall plant in such terrain dries out faster, breaks sooner and gets nothing for its height, since there is no canopy to outgrow.

The plant that survived is low: tight internodes, a strong thick main stem, side branches held close, often broader than it is tall. In a tent that translates directly: a true indica seed stretches perhaps half its height again through flower where a sativa doubles, sits beneath a lamp with a modest modest distance and seldom needs training at all. Anyone with limited headroom choose indica for this trait, and it is the mountain, not the breeder, that those growers are relying on.

Cold Nights: Why Some Go Purple

High-valley nights drop below ten degrees weeks before the days do, and many indica populations respond to the chill by producing anthocyanin, the same compound that turns autumn leaf red. On the plant it shows as purple in the bracts, fan leaves and sometimes the stem, which it does nothing for the smoker except look beautiful.

A point to taking from it is a matter of lineage, not decorative. The tendency to colour is inherited from specific cold-valley populations, and a strain that purples every time in a cold final two weeks carries the ancestry regardless of what the label says. Lines marketed as “purple” that only colour under extreme cold, or never at all, usually carry a colour in only the name and nothing of it in the plant. Chilling the room in the final weeks brings the colour out where it is present and does nothing if it is absent; it also slows the finish, so it is a bargain and not a free trick.

Reading the Place Names

The great majority of indica pack names are the names of names or derive from one, and the places are far more informative than most buyers realise. “Afghani” generally refers to stock out of the north of Afghanistan, and the classic squat, hash-plant, fast-finishing type. “Hindu Kush” on a name points to the high range itself and often to stock taken on the eastern side. “Chitral” and “Mazar” name particular valleys that have their own local types, the first frequently purpling and the latter heavy and late for an indica. Kush Indica Seeds gives the collection region for every pack whenever it is known, and that turns the name from a flavour into a datum the grower can plan around.

Most indica seed on sale are hybrid stock many generations removed from the valley, selected for uniformity and not to preserve the spread of a true landrace holds; a buyer who wants the spread needs to shop for lines labelled as pure reproductions and expect the variation that come with the label.

Where the Adaptations Turn Against You

Every trait discussed above was a answer to a condition which a tent does not impose, and any solution that has lost its problem behaves either of two things: it turns into a free bonus or it becomes a hazard. The fast finish and the low stature become bonuses, because no condition in a tent punishes them. The density and the heavy canopy are costs, since the dry wind that justified them is absent and the still atmosphere of a closed room has exactly the opposite influence.

That is why the indica grow succeeds or fails in one factor more than any other: humidity during the last few weeks. A grower who keeps it low is rewarded with the dense, resinous, early flower the mountain built; one who lets it rise gets rot inside the best colas, which is exactly where the plant was arranged hardest to hold water in. In a room, the mountain is to be rebuilt in the last two weeks: cool, dry, moving air. Everything that remains about growing indica is easy exactly since the population was bred for somewhere much harder.

What “Kush” Means Now

The word that gave the mountains its name has travelled further from it than almost any other in cannabis. “Kush” on a modern seed name may refer to a unselected Hindu Kush landrace, a Californian Coast hybrid with one Kush ancestor, or a strain named Kush because the breeder thought the sound of it. The famous OG Kush line, and this dominates the use of the word today, is probably as much sativa-influenced than many of the stock it borrows the name from, while its stretch, flowering time and leaf say as much.

A practical reading is the same one which holds across this article: ignore the word and read the terrain. A listing that gives an low stretch, a finishing time under nine weeks, a dense flower and a broad leaf is selling a mountain plant regardless of what it is named; one that gives a lanky habit, twelve weeks and airy flowers is describing something somewhere else with a mountain name. The seed carries where it was shaped from; the label often does not.

ronniedey

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