Qleaner and a Cola named Lance

by Subcool

This is the story if the largest single cola I have ever grown but there is so much more to the story than the bud we nick named Lance Armstrong.

This journey actually goes back about 15 years ago when I had the idea to cross Jacks Cleaner with Blue Berry.

I was intrigued by  the idea of a sour berry strain with increased potency over just pure Blue Berry. The resulting cross JCB did not meet my high standards and I decided to discontinue that project. even though it did result in the famous cutting Batgirl.

Over time I continued breeding with the Jacks Cleaner cutting and through trial and error eventually created the strain Jack the Ripper using Space Queen as the male. When I moved out west and came across the strain Purple Urkle with her grapey taste my thoughts drifted back to the sour berry cross and I thought Oh My Sour Grape! Since I do not believe in reversing the sex of a female plant in order to obtain pollen I took a different route.

I used the Space Queen male outcross the Urkle creating a completely different strain everyone knows and Querkle. I actually created this strain so I could have genetic line to select and Urkle dominant male I am sure all the fans of Querkle will be surprised to hear this.

I first made a small batch of test seeds using a random male we found in the first test run or Querkle. This first attempt was tagged as Qleaner V-1. The initial findings were promising so we started 40 Querkle seeds and re started the male selection process from a much larger gene pool.

After working down from seven males we chose the one with the most dominant Urkle traits. That Querkle male was then crossed with the Urkle mother plant to create Deep Purple. The sole purpose of this pairing was so we could grow out the Deep Purple line to confirm the traits he would pass on. I confirmed the male did indeed pass on the desired traits of coloring as well as the grape fla- vor I was looking for. In fact the male turned out to be such a good breeding male that the test cross Deep Purple went on to be one of most sought after strains.

We then used the pollen from this male and our Jacks Cleaner female to create a new strain we called Qleaner V-2. Qleaner V-2 was grown out by TGA testers and the results were stellar. One skilled tester Bongorilla had such

good results that his best Qleaner female made it into Skunk magazine as well as Big Book of Buds 4.  The Photo credit was left off by Quick Trading on the first printing but they promised to fix it on the second print- ing.

While all the attention went to Bongorilla’s amazing pic- tures I also grew out Qleaner but I never documented my results on paper and that is why I decided to re visit this strain in this article. I started 10 seeds and they all germi- nated without problems and they were transplanted into plain Roots brand soil. I enjoy growing from seed for a few reasons, one it’s always a nice surprise to see what the seed will produce. The other is Hybrid vigor seeds simply grow faster and with more energy that clones do. Maybe this is why many old school growers grow from seed each year.

The plants took off and around 6 weeks of growth they started indicating sex. Over the next 10 days I was able  to determine I had 5 females and 5 males a good ratio in anyone’s grow book. I then transplanted the females into 5 gallon containers using my Super soil. Normally I grow my plants out in 7 gallon pots but with unknown seedlings I prefer to take up a bit less floor space in the bud room until I find the keeper girl. The plants  went into bud when they reached 30″ at around 60 days from the start of the seeds. The plants started stretching a few days after entering 12/12 lighting and continued to do so for about 3 weeks ending up at a height of 5 feet. The buds started forming fast by the fourth week of budding and this was when I started getting grape, lemon and berry smells. The plants were quite resinous as you would expect from a JC hybrid but I could also see the Urkle traits as well. By week 6 of flowering many of the plants had started to exhibit a purple tint to the outer leaves and in the resins themselves. I had 3 females that leaned more to the Urkle side being slightly shorter and having a wider blocky structure. Two of the females however leaned more to the Jacks Cleaner side and it was one of these females that produced the enormous cola. At the time Lance Armstrong was going for his 7th win at the Tour de France so as a tribute we nick named the already towering Cola after this amazing athlete.

Week 7 came and all of the plants were keepers in their own right, each with its own unique smells some more berry some more grape and two with a more pronounced lemon smell. It was around this time that Ed Rosenthal invited me to submit a bud shot for the cover of his new grow book. I took hundreds of pictures of Lance during this period but Ed was looking for a specific style of picture that in the end I was not able to capture. It had more to do with the shape of the bud Ed wanted a picture of a cola that filled the entire frame and Lance was so tall and had a pointing spear style top. One of the pictures how- ever was used inside the book in the grow section which is very cool. The shot features me holding a yard stick next to the bud which is over 21″ long.  The dry weight  of just the main top cola was 74 grams  and it only took   a small pinch to medicate with.

Qleaner not only has an amazing color but a Grape taste that I can’t get enough of. The lemon taste of Jacks Cleaner combines with the grape taste to produce a candy like taste. Unlike Purple Urkle this new hybrid is covered in raised tricomes that make incredibly tasty bubble hash that will simply wipe your memory clean. The high is a mix of body stone and a slight trippy feel- ing. You have to really be careful not to smoke to much  as the taste is so addictive but this isn’t your normal tasty weed with loads of flavor and no results, this mix of heavy weight parents brings on a serious stoning. I found myself just grooving to Tool after a few bong-rips just smiling like a Cheshire cat.

So there you have it the story of the biggest bud I have ever grown from seed. I had to break about 1/4 of the bud off just to fit it into a tall pasta jar. Every time I would see a card holding friend I would pass a piece of the bud along until that huge tower was whittled away to nothing.

You can learn even more about the Qleaner at tgagenetics.com/strain/qleaner/qleaner.php