Serious Happiness: First child of the revolution
So it’s really a little revolution that has happened at Serious Seeds – and the first child of the revolution was named Serious Happiness, a sativa/indica hybrid created from their legendary AK-47 and their famous Warlock male. Serious promises that this strain “brings happiness twice” – at first, through an easily manageable growth with an ideal indoor stature and lots of big dense buds with few leaves, and then also through a long lasting buzz with both a body stone and incredible head high, delivered by its sweet and fruity buds.
Serious Happiness is not a super fast flowering hybrid, she takes her time, maturing within 60-70 days of flowering. A harvest of 400 – 500g/m2 can be expected if the plants are left in the vegetative stage for 4-5 weeks. Under natural light, this strain finishes mid to end October.
At the IC Mag Cup 2015, Serious Happiness received early applause when it took third place in the Sativa category of the Grower’s Cup, entered by a guy called Cloudz. Another grower who recently put the Happiness to a cultivation test was The Doc. He sowed three feminised seeds and (as usual from Serious Seeds) got a germination rate of 100%. The three Happiness plants did very well during the vegetative stage, exhibiting vivid compact growth with excellent lateral branching. Also, they were amazingly uniform – from such a cross, The Doc had expected much more instability and diversity.
Four weeks after germination, The Doc switched the daily light cycle from 18/6 to 12/12, as it was about time for the flowering stage. The plants were 39-48 cm tall at that point of time and expected to approximately double their height during flowering, because of their mostly sativa nature.
In the course of flowering, it turned out that two of the plants resembled each other like clones, growing accurately head to head until the very end, even with the same amount of branches and buds, simply amazing. These two Happiness plants, indeed, had almost doubled their height after four weeks of flowering, while the third plant didn’t stretch as much as the others, remaining to look very bushy, almost globated. It was about one third lower than its two Happiness sisters. But all the three plants exhibited an impressive number of side branch buds that obviously were going to become big and thick, arranged around a marvellously prospering top cola on the main stem. “This is a perfect indoor plant growth and bloom pattern. Looking at these plants already makes me happy”, said the Doc with a smile on his face.
During the fifth and sixth week, the plants put on a lot of bud weight, with the flowering tops assuming a fat and bulbous shape. Their calyx-to-leaf ratio was very high, only a few leaves were protruding from dense, massive calyx formations which were encrusted with a myriad of resin glands after eight weeks of flowering, giving the buds a sparkling white appearance.
The Doc reported: “The three plants are already looking quite ripe now. Yippie! One of them comes with a big surprise – it smells like wild cherry! Fantastic – that odor I’ve never experienced before. I know that there is this myth of an AK-47 cherry pheno once found by a certain grower… while Simon says that he himself has never come across it. But who knows, maybe it really exists, having come through now surprisingly in this one AK-47/Warlock hybrid plant?” The other two plants also had a very nice sweet and fruity smell that could not specifically be defined though.
Dockie harvested the three Happiness plants after 61-63 days of flowering, early in the harvest window stated by Serious. The two clone-like plants each measured 95 cm in the end and impressed him with nineteen big roundish side tops that felt hard like a rock. Also laden with plenty of fat tight buds, the third plant had arrived at a height of 78 cm. The total dry weight of the buds was 291 grams, so the average yield almost amounted to 100 grams per plant – a proud achievement for a cross that has not yet been bred to perfection, I’d say.