Peking Duck by Seed & Strain

I bought an eighth of a strain called Peking Duck marketed by Seed & Strain. The grower, I gather, is called Columbia Care. I bought this eighth last Saturday, September 2, 2023 at the Beyond/Hello Dispensary “Metro East” on Mississippi Avenue in Sauget. There were a lot of customers and only one person clerking out the orders. Forget about budtenders. The line was moving along but it took a while. I wondered why I had bothered to put my order in online. What difference did it make? I bought two other eighths but that is a story for another day. Without further ado, my strain review of Peking Duck.

Jar Smell

Not much. A little mint, earth, grass, hay. The fact it’s been in the jar for ten months probably has something to do with the mellow aroma of this weed.

Terps

Total of 1.15%. I’m still feeling my way with terps. How much is a lot? What’s not enough? I read a review of a strain recently where .91% terps were panned as being too little, too low. Of the three eighths I bought, this was the lowest terp total. Limonene .61%, b-Myrcene .3%, b-Caryophellene .24%.

Cannabinoids

THCA 25.23%
CBGA .76%

Cure and Shelf Time

Harvest 10.18.2022. Packaged 11.11.2022. Purchased 09.02.2023.

Ouch. I am disappointed to open the bag and look at a jar of flower when it has been sitting in that jar, on a shelf for nearly ten months. I don’t know where my contentedness cutoff would be…six months? I’m skeptical at ten. It’s not fresh at ten months, not even close.

Bud Description, Cost

These are mixed buds. Bigger than popcorn? I don’t have a good feel for popcorn. I have bought flower classified as “mixed buds” and that’s what these look like. The eighth was $30. Down from the usual $40 based on a storewide 25% off sale. Tax was a little over 20%. With a prorated share of the $10 tip I left, the out the door cost is right about $40.

Taste

At first, a sharpness. Acrid. Then some malt, that vanilla flavor that coats the mouth. On exhale, pepper, nose tingle. A couple puffs in, I get menthol/Listerine/mouthwash. Pleasant hints of tastes I like in flower. It makes me wonder what it tasted like seven months ago, before seven months in the plastic jar. A nice winter’s smoke, I imagine. Peking Duck for Christmas Dinner might be what the marketers were pitching. A smoke for New Year’s Day.

Effects?

Let’s see. There is a bite. I feel something. Let’s see where it goes, how it lasts…

./||.

A decent high, a fine high. I went and swept my garage, topped off the oil in my lawnmower. I had changed the oil in that mower last week and wasn’t sure I had put enough fresh oil back in. Barely, just above that lower little hole on the dipstick. Room to add, so I added a couple small pours, perhaps an ounce.

Then I put out the new hummingbird food I had mixed up this morning. I stopped using boiled water when making hummingbird food. A source I believe valid said boiling the water isn’t necessary. The recipe is four parts water to one part sugar. I have been using a funnel to pour 1/4 cup of sugar into an empty, re-usable club soda bottle. This is the same as the little tonic water bottles that come in a six-pack. Plastic bottles, holding about ten ounces. I fill this bottle to where it begins to taper up toward the mouth of the bottle. Then I shake the bottle and give the mix a few minutes to reach equilibrium, to solve. The sugar disappears. I take the garden hose to the hummingbird feeder, to rinse it off once I’ve dumped the old water. In this case, the water was about two days old. I’ve been changing the water more often now that I’ve nixed the boiled water part of the process. The hummingbirds seem to like this unboiled mix just fine. The feeder has not gotten mildewy or gunky/grimy. The hummingbirds won’t be in town much longer.

I also changed the water in the two makeshift birdbaths we put out. I recently started doing two things different in an effort to maintain cleaner birdbaths. Something has worked. I did an internet search to see if there were tips or tricks or hacks for keeping birdbath water from growing stale so quickly; to see if I could keep algae from growing so quickly in the birdbath.

One tip I am not able to use is to keep the birdbaths out of the sun. My wife and I want to see the birdbaths so putting them out of view in the shade wasn’t going to happen.

What I did do is add pre-1982 pennies to the birdbath along with one-quarter to one-half of a teaspoon’s worth of apple cider vinegar to the birdbath water. I’ve also simply been changing the water more regularly, using the garden hose. I sometimes use a scouring pad to scrape out any mildew that might be starting to grow in small circles in the bowl of the birdbath.

Before trying these improvements, the birdbaths would go from freshly changed to beset with algae in the span of four or five days. The water would get pretty gross. The birds shit in there sometimes and there’s debris from the yard, from the wind, split shells from the bird food we put out.

The birdbaths are plant pot saucers. One is a classic orange terra cotta saucer, the other is also terra cotta but it has a glaze on it, which makes it more resistant to algae and which also makes it easier to clean.

Since I have tried these tips, it seems like the algae is not growing as quickly, hardly growing at all. Not like before.

The pennies have to be pre-1982 because after that the mint started using a lot more zinc in pennies at the cost of copper. It’s copper ions shedding off of these pennies that make the water less susceptible to algae growth. Copper has antifungal and antimicrobial properties. I keep two pennies in one birdbath, three in the other. Is this what prompted coins to be thrown into fountains? Supposedly for making a wish upon? Did those coins in the bottom of fountains get there because they were intentionally added, for the purpose of keeping the water clean?

Lineage

I have had a little trouble pinning this lineage down, with certainty. I believe it is GMO x Plum Wine.

Summation

Maybe it’s the weed or just the fact that I’m high and not inclined to do much. I’ve got no project going, I’m not leaving for anywhere soon. I’ve got the writer’s pen flowing, so I must tip my hat to this Peking Duck. It was ten months on the shelf and that had my expectations set pretty low. But it has given me a pleasant, straightforward, not-too-achy, functional buzz. I’m mellowed out but still looking for little things to do. Sweeping the garage, taking the dog for a walk, eating a bit of food. Writing. Typing, blogging, doing this strain review.

This is what I used to do. Talk on the page instead of out loud or in my head, to myself, runaway brain. The act of writing it down allows me to reign it in. I can only write so fast and I don’t want my writing to be negative, to feel like a complaint. Instead, this early September journal entry disguised as a strain review on a blog no one is likely to read. Weeds of grass.