Every trait that sells an indica seed was put there by a mountain. The short frame, the seven-to-nine-week flowering, the hard frosted flowers, the broad blue-green leaf, the purple that comes in when the nights turn cold: not one of them is an invention. They are the solutions a population arrived at through many thousands of years to a particular set of pressures, at great altitude, in a short dry season, across the valleys of the Hindu Kush and the mountains beyond it. Modern breeding took that answer off the mountain and polished it, yet the shape of the plant is still the shape of the terrain. The examples pointed to below are drawn from the range at https://kushindicaseeds.com and its catalogue goes back to Afghanistan, northern Pakistan and the Indian Himalaya; the account itself holds to any true indica out of any seed catalogue. Knowing the terrain turns out to be the most reliable way to understand the pack.
A Dry Corner of Central Asia
The Hindu Kush stretches for about eight hundred kilometres from the middle of Afghanistan towards northern Pakistan, and the wider indica homeland spilling across to the Indian Himalaya on one side and the lowlands of the Afghan plateau on the other. Cannabis has been cultivated there over centuries, chiefly for hashish, and selected year after generation by people who wanted a plant above any other quality else: resin that could be sieved or sieved off a plant that had finished ahead of the first frost.
That is a different selection to the one that shaped the equatorial sativas, where seasons hardly change and the plant was free to grow for most of a year. All that comes below is the outcome of a handful of conditions about the terrain: it is high, it is dry, the growing season is short, and the nights turn cold fast. The sequence that they are discussed below hardly matter; a plant experiences all of them in the same season.
The Low Frame
A good deal of the old growing land lies between a thousand five hundred and three thousand metres. At at that height the air is thin, the UV load is intense, the wind is constant and every centimetre of stem over the soil takes water the plant can ill spare. A tall plant in such ground dries out faster, snaps more and gets nothing for the height, because there is no canopy to clear.
The population which survived is low: tight internodes, a strong thick main stem, branches kept close, frequently wider than it is tall. In a tent that carries over straight: a pure indica line stretches maybe half its height over through flower where a sativa doubles, sits under a light at a modest short gap and seldom needs tying at all. Growers short on little height buy indica for this trait, and it is the mountain, not the breeder, that those growers are relying on.
Dry Air: Why the Buds Are Dense and Resinous
The old zone is dry: thin humidity, hard sun, little rain in the late summer. A plant in such a place has two problems which resin solves together. It needs to shield its flowering parts from UV light, and it must keep water inside the bud over weeks of dry wind. A heavy coat of trichomes does both: the resin heads absorb the ultraviolet and their coating slows water loss. Farmers for hashish on top of that drove the resin further, because resin was the product.
Dense flower form goes with the same cause: a closely packed bud loses less water than an airy one in arid air. Inside a tent these same qualities arrive together, and just one of them is unconditionally welcome. The resin is. The density becomes a risk the instant the air is humid: a bud built to hold water in a desert retains it just well in a damp room, and botrytis moves in a dense indica cola more quickly than in anything the equator ever produced. The quality that moves the seed is the one that needs a drier room during the final few weeks.
The Colour of a Cold Valley
High-valley nights fall below ten degrees weeks before the days follow, and a good number of indica populations respond to that cold by making anthocyanin, the same pigment that colours a maple leaves purple. In the plant it appears as purple through the calyxes, fan leaves and occasionally the stem, which it does nothing for the smoker beyond looking beautiful.
A point to take from the colour is genetic, rather than cosmetic. The capacity to turn is inherited out of specific high-altitude stock, and a strain that colours every time in a cold last fortnight carries the ancestry whatever the name says. Strains sold as “purple” that only colour with extreme cold, or never really, typically carry the colour in the name and nothing of it not in the genes. Chilling the room during the last weeks brings the colour out if it is present and achieves nothing at all if it is absent; it also checks ripening, so it is a bargain rather than a free trick.
The Fat Leaf
An indica leaf is wide, thick and dark, and few wide lobes whereas a sativa leaf has more narrow ones. Both things about the terrain select for the broad form. Thin air and intense sun put an high light load on each square centimetre, and a wide leaf catches enough and does not need much area; a large thin leaf would just burn. And steady wind tears fine foliage, while a thick, short-stalked leaf stays put.
The dark colour is pigment loaded thickly in a heavy leaf, and part of the same adaptation. To the tent the leaves matter in a single everyday respect: a broad-leafed indica canopy blocks light from all growth below the top layer far more completely than a sativa’s, so the lower buds on an unmanaged indica finish in airy and weak. People who strip a fan leaves at week three are reversing, a little, what the range did for thousands of years.
The Short Season: Why It Flowers Fast
Above two thousand metres the frost-free window is brief, and the autumn comes early and comes hard. A plant that needed fourteen weeks to ripen from the days started to draw in never set seed in such terrain, and its genes left the population. The plant that stayed reacts fast to shortening days and finishes in about seven to nine weeks after the signal.
Indoors that reflex is the single most cited indica trait. Switch to twelve hours and the plant commits at once, grows for a couple of weeks and fills flower for the remainder of a short cycle. The quickest strains at Kush Indica Seeds come in in about 7 weeks from the flip, and that allows as many as five or six harvests a year out of one room where a classic sativa allows perhaps two. That difference is not efficiency on the breeder’s part; it is the first snow written into the plant’s clock.
Afghani, Mazar, Chitral, Hindu Kush
The great majority of indica pack names are place names or derive from them, and the places are more informative than most buyers realise. “Afghani” usually means stock out of the north region, which is a typical short, hash-plant, fast-finishing type. “Hindu Kush” in a name points to the central 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 colouring and the second large and late for an indica. Kush Indica Seeds lists the collection area for each line whenever it is documented, which turns the name a brand to a fact the grower can plan around.
Most indica seed on sale are worked material many generations from the original collection, bred for consistency rather than for the spread of a pure landrace holds; a buyer that wants the spread has to look for packs described as unselected reproductions and expect the variation that come with them.
Where the Adaptations Turn Against You
Every adaptation described above was a answer to the pressure which a tent does not impose, and a trait that has lost its problem does either of two ways: it turns into a cost-free bonus or it becomes a cost. The speed and the low stature become bonuses, since no condition in a tent penalises a plant for them. The density and the broad canopy become costs, because the dry air that justified them is absent and the damp air of a sealed room has precisely the reverse influence.
That is why an indica grow goes well or fails in a single variable far more than on any other: humidity in the last three weeks. A person that holds it low gets the dense, frosted, fast harvest the mountain built; one that does not is punished with mould in the thickest colas, where exactly where the mountain had trying the plant to hold moisture in. In a room, the terrain has to be rebuilt in the last fortnight: cool, dry, with moving air. All else about growing indica is easy precisely because the population was bred to survive a place hard.
Kush on the Label
The word that gave the range its name has travelled a long way from it than almost any other in cannabis. “Kush” on a modern pack name can refer to a true Hindu Kush reproduction, a West Coast hybrid with one Kush grandparent, or a strain called Kush because the breeder liked the sound would sell. A OG Kush family, which dominates the appearances of the word today, is most likely more sativa-influenced than a good deal of the plants it takes the word from, while its growth habit, finishing time and leaf say as much much.
The usable rule is the one which applies throughout this article: ignore the word and go back to the terrain. A listing which states an modest stretch, a flowering time under nine weeks, a dense flower and a wide leaf is describing a mountain plant whatever it is named; one that gives a tall habit, twelve weeks and airy buds is describing a plant from else wearing a mountain name. The seed carries where it came by; the name frequently does not.