When do you all start your outdoor plants? I plan on trying 1 or 2 outside and was wondering how well it works here in Tucson. Any strain you would recommend that is available out here as a clone?
Ideally you want your seeds to be in the ground and to have germinated before the weather gets too hot; from my 9-years of experience with outdoor growing the Months of April to mid-May are optimal as the air temperature is just right for germination without yet being so hot as to roast seedlings and young plants. You can plant later, but germination rates go down and the plants have to contend with more heat stress.
I can't authoritatively recommend any particular clone for outdoor growing here because the vast majority of clones in circulation were either selected from stock grown indoors or from stock grown in outdoor climates -- like California or the Pacific Northwest -- radically different from ours. The unique environmental stresses a plant will face growing in the Tucson area willprobably trigger epigenetic changes in almost any clone and as a result it will probably not entirely resemble the mother plant in terms of growth structure and appearance.
For example, 2 years ago I received some clones of the Exodus UK Cheese cut, a Pineapple C-99, and a Tahoe OG Kush. The UK cheese, in spite of my best efforts to keep the soil cool, was dead in a matter of days because of heat stress. The Cinderella-99 faced constant onslaughts by tiny but savage black ants and while she finished the quality of smoke was awful. It should be noted these black ants ignored every other plant in the garden. The Tahoe OG, on the other hand, did phenomenally but -- unlike how it seems to grow indoors -- this girl stretched out and put on large, phallic colas with the swollen bracts and lemon-kerosene-skunk funk characteristic of the OG. In fact, that delectable skunky bottom end is not something I've noticed in indoor-grown OGs. If you're going to restrict yourself to clones perhaps try and procure an OG Kush or something else from the Chemdawg line?
That being sad, I've had much, much more luck with pure sativas and sativa-dominant varieties than with Indica or Afghani-dominant ones. Old-school Mexican sativas (Oaxacan, Michuachan, Guerrero/Acapulco) do excellently outdoors, as do Colombian varieties. Some of these girls can easily reach 10+ feet in height and yield ~2 pounds per-plant, but this takes a considerable amount of time and space.
