 What Welcome to breeder syndicate I'm here with Jay for next generation seeds formerly a Federation seed bank Thank you for coming on the show brother Well, thanks for having me You're you're someone we've wanted to talk to you for a long time We don't we have not covered bc in super depth and you're one of the people that was super integral in that scene responsible for Most of at least maybe you're responsible for bringing it to seed most of what is still being used today from the bc area I should say and I'd love to talk with you about some of that Maybe start with the early Federation time and maybe a little bit before that and talk about what got you into weed What what Canada was like when you got into weed all that? um, yeah Yeah, well, well, Canada as you know is a big country like the u.s. And we have vastly different cultures depending on where you live in Canada and I I grew up on the cation prairies in a very conservative community and Our weed was hard to get it was very expensive And yet to deal with shady people So our dream as a young stoner growing up in manitoba is to go to the west coast Where all the good stuff came from so when I moved out to Vancouver I just immersed myself into it immediately Just tried to try to learn how to grow and I was fortunate enough to get a job at mark emory's Hemp bc it was called at the time. Oh, wow. Yeah, and um, I was just hired as the kid in the back as the carpenter building things wiring up the grow kits building hydroponic systems Yeah, and um, and that was my kind of my first year just getting to know uh growers all throughout british columbia in the west coast, um What year that was? Oh, that would have been 95. I believe Awesome. Thank you 95 And I spent about a half of six months to a year doing that and I don't of course as soon as I could I started my own grow up and uh Together with mike from federation Me and did that together. I would just Collected as many clones as we could get our hands on Yeah, I noticed a lot of the people in bc were so spoiled that they could They could they would drop take a really good clone and then not keep mothers of it because they could just Get buy another tray of drinks for the next crop because everybody had Trains and me as somebody where it's extremely rare I just gathered everything I'd get my hands on and within a year I probably had over 60 different mother strains go ahead and then Testing them and dropping the ones that were shit and keeping the good ones as you do Yeah, and then mike and I started federation not only lasted with me about maybe a year and a half Yeah, and we went our separate ways after that. Um, I started the next generation right away Yeah, and uh moved to vancouver island away from the city Got myself placed in the country and nice farm to work on and Yeah, it's got into a really hardcore ever since I was just I was uh, uh, just a collector of strains. I was obsessive Also collecting a lot of us when we get into breeding like especially with me I know I dove in head first. I wanted I wanted to see everything You know like collected moms kept like hundreds of moms of everything And it took a long time to start sorting through this stuff But you have that excitement and vigor at the beginning of just I want everything. I need to see it all So, yeah, what were some of the ones like the very first clones you started getting? Um, well, we had a few like the sweet paint grapefruit Uh, that romulan that were from romulan joe. I was running the joe for a while And some Hawaiian sativas that came through, uh, mr. G man there from vancouver island seed company He had a lot of good crosses, uh, that are phenomenal in in in my opinion. He's one of the most underrated breeders from back in the day Can we talk about him for a quick sec? Just to give him a little bit of shine because that's someone like even I this far in I didn't know how integral mr. G was into All of it, uh, the the whole vancouver not just vancouver island specifically, but the bcc How much of his genetics played a role in creating the larger, uh supply? Yeah, and a lot of people to see well, he's an old timer. He's very very quiet very private. So he's Connected with all kinds of people and he's he just kept his head down and uh, and did good work and A lot of his clones and cuts got passed around And he would make uh, sometimes make a lot of crosses that he never himself never had time to grow So he'd give it to other growers here test these out test these out And we received some good seeds the original Hawaiian sativa came from him Wow Burmese he had a beautiful Burmese and I know a few other growers have copied his Burmese Is he a source for the Burmese that went around bc? Um, I believe so I can't say all those guys Yeah, I can't say a hundred percent sure, but he was the first one. Um that I know that had it Okay, and he he had it before uh, I believe before a reefer man had it Yeah, no, and if he he was the source of the grandparents of the original godbud And a lot of those varieties And that's what I've read I had my great god cross, but I didn't read it with the great god clone. I read it with the parents of the great god So there's some confusion with that. Um, mine's mine's slightly different than the From the the godbud. Um, yeah a little more a little more fruity. Um, a little more stink to it What were the um, grandparents of the the godbud? Well, there's lots of rumors and there's a lot of confusion But it was a strain that he called jiffy pot Okay, which uh, I always told him it was not a very good name. We could come up with better names And he already sold any of those jiffy pot seeds even though they're Of course Yeah, a few other growers Had the clone and they did a few crosses and then it got renamed different sex groups of growers named the different things After that Some growers called the a-frame. Some were just calling it purple stunk And then the the grandchildren of it the granddaughter, I guess this is what became known as the godbud Oh, okay, and that was via The only one I've ever heard of those was the people from canada have talked to me about the purple skunk You know, yeah, I think there's different generations or groups of growers. I think there's two different section Uh different groups of genetics that were both called purple skunk Makes sense because it's a very common name Yes, it's very generic purple and skunk. Yeah Kind of like purple kush up there. Yeah, was it was there an early just single purple kush clone that was brought up there or um I Not that was brought up here. I believe um reefer man I would probably know a lot more about that than me He had one of the first purple skunks and the island pink I believe it was and I think that was bred out of something that he calls uh king The king bud or king I had that written down here to ask you about yeah the king But I'm just not really uh too sure we we were in we were different circles of uh Community, but we were running through each other quite often and we we actually chat now more than we get back then so yeah So we we have you going on in and uh to To federation you have a little bit of interaction with another person And how early on did you start interacting with like romulan joe and romulan the clones first romulan? Actually, that was very uh, that was even before we that was the start of federation seed company We hadn't had a seed company and uh romulan joe. I was just like I say I was a young kid building hydro equipment and uh Romulan joe, uh, I would just buy my personal smoke off of him every week when he came to town and uh, he said one Weekend he needed help harvesting and moving his his crop from Vancouver Island over to the city So I went and helped him for the weekend and me and my buddy Mike were talking about starting a seed company And romulan was all the rave. Um, yeah at the time and So romulan joe, uh sold us the clone for seven seven thousand dollars Uh, we got we got a couple cuts. He just gave us a few cuts And it was seven thousand bucks. Now is our flagship strain. Um That we started with and kind of built our company around Yeah, yeah, and it it made a big difference in uh, in the in the world of seeds I I know that was one of the ones I chased really early on and I don't know that we ever saw the real romulan pure clone I doubt it. Yeah, I doubt it too. I don't see the real thing down there I mean, there was so many rumors about that clone and where it came from Um, and it was very hard back in like the forum days and stuff and even earlier to determine what was true You know, there was rumors that like the guy romulan joe was actually Called mendicino joe and came from and came from rings and eyes county and fled to canada when a bunch of busts went down And then there was canadiens that said that was bull. That was definitely not true That's not true From the 70s. Nope. It's from the 90s. It's from the 40s You know, it's from there was just it was just one of those ones that there was a lot of rumor And there was very little facts coming out where someone who like knew for sure Would come out and just say what needed to be said. So it allowed all these stories to percule and it came And ronnie than joe was very secretive and he just kind of got a kick out of all the stories that go around about he just kind of And I actually seen him a few months ago and uh, I stopped by his place for a smoke and I told them about some of the rumors because I had Somebody from the states that reads romulan telling the story and and I told joe about this and he just shook his head and laughed And it was not It's not how it worked Yeah, I think that person's claiming they bred it or like it's from their family or some wild Yeah, yeah, yeah Joe's their family members one of the one of the things in cannabis is since we all come out of the shadows It's very hard to have facts. So people come out with a big story And they want to chat about things and you know sometimes there's opposing stories to it And sometimes the people like you said are just secretive and older and don't care Yeah, you know, yeah, it's like I can tell you a story what how about ronnie than joe told me, um, okay, he uh He was a new grower from eastern canada moved to vancouver island. It's outside of victoria and He was taken under the the wing of some of the old timers Back then in the would have been late 80s late mid 80s, but When he first encountered the romulan, it was a couple older fellows. Um, now I think one of them's past And they started off growing they were pre Korean war vets they moved back to canada Into the cannabis and all they had was mexican and clumbian And they started trying to breed with that Um, and they had very very little luck small buds, but they got faster and faster breeding But it was still basically sativa like the clumbian red and uh, Mexican sativas and then in the early 80s, I believe it was 82 or 83 When the first afghanis started coming over And they crossed out their variety that they've been working on With an afghani and then they did a massive grow out. I believe in 84 okay, and It shortened it and made it workable that they could grow in greenhouses They never really had lights going back then it was all in greenhouses on the south island And there there was a rent of the batch That they kept the cutting of it was the smallest plant in the room They said kind of the most finicky as well as far as ph goes But it was so extremely strong And they kept that cut from 94 Or sorry, pardon me 84 1984. Yeah And um And they never even actually the first few years he said they never even gave it a name Never had a name and that makes sense Romulan said Romney and Joe said in the late 80s when he was sitting around helping them trim one day And they're watching tv trim it and they're watching star trek and they're started joking about how This stuff will knock out put a dent in your head. Just like a romulan And that was when the first he's first got coined as a romulan and it just kind of stuck from there I love how That's the story uh joe's told me so That's awesome. That's great. That's good to know. I can I can confirm even now I'm doing some grow outs with some clumbian genetics and I noticed a lot with The structure has absolutely nothing like the old school sativas But the high that you get from that romulan was like a lot of the different uh, the club couple clumbian reds that I've grown and The punto rojo get the very very similar smell and high But obviously nothing Close to the same grow structure, but the flavor really reminds me of the clumbian red that i'm growing right now Um Was the romulan like a squat little thing? Very squat. So it was one of the more afghani types structure selections. Yes. Yes, and and low yield as well But uh after we after we did about five or six back crosses into it, um We noticed every time we used our uh, mostly romulan male on Female of another variety That that smell and potency would would come across Uh and the structure would follow the the female and but he did the other way around and used the original romulan as the female It it was not it was a lot more unstable. It was uh We've actually talked for a long time amongst our crew like as a running joke kind of How when you're breeding You're looking at things and there's all these big impressive plants that throw the kind of structure and bud You want all over the place and then there's this like little runt mutant thing that you think about killing a number of times and that thing ends up being the clear winner Over everything. Yeah, and so it's like it's it's an ode to runts And it's an ode to like mutants and stuff like that because often from a production standpoint all the qualities you're looking for You don't find the quality of smoke and effect Very often in those you find them much more often in the weird ones Yeah I'm shocked they have the foresight to like no to keep the runt because like even back then a lot of the Old wise tales where you have killed the the the unsteady ones killed it, you know as fast as you can get those ones out of there You know as a seedling you then people would be killing the runts So I think that's awesome. They had the foresight to know that What you see is it necessarily what you're gonna get in the end It may have other traits that are really amazing Especially with indoors I've learned that as well with indoors and you don't get away rid of the runts right away With outdoors, I'm looking for more outdoor vigor. So you'll kind of call them pretty quickly But for indoors now you gotta wait and see what they can do Yeah, we wouldn't have things like ogkb or oracle any of the weird stuff, you know if we if we didn't keep the runts around the weirdos Yeah, so I mean, you know effect is invisible Yeah And that's kind of one of the weird things about cannabis is is until you can actually Dry it and cure it and smoke it. You really don't know what you have You don't know if the if the way it smells translates into the way it tastes You know, you definitely don't know how what effect it's going to give you so you can learn some things by watching But it kind of takes dried flower or hash to kind of get you to where you want to be with it So yeah to give you the proper feedback definitely We wanted to have rings because he had my he he lives actually down the street from me and he has a ton of experience growing your work Um, yeah, he's a big next generation fan massive Over the he's always been a Outdoor from seed kind of guy not that he doesn't do indoor But he never really got huge into the clone thing Although he does keep clones. He always likes growing from seed and breeding every year So out of the three of us he probably had the most experience in actually growing out stuff you've made And seeing what he thought of it. Yeah, I was I was mainly a federation guy back in the day I grew a lot of federation like the and that's what I want to go over with you some of these The number one thing that people are asking Oh, you're gonna get you're gonna get someone who knows about federation We want to know about these specific strains So if you want if I can run through these with you real quick just say kind of First first few sentences that come to your head on each and if you want to go into more detail on any feel free Makato Um, that was basically our version of the uh, just we paid gray free Oh, okay. Very cool. It was basically our Semi it was f4 when we released it f4 back cross But that yeah, it's basically the grapefruit That's awesome. Uh dynamite That's that next generation. That's next dynamite is next generation. That's what I saw When I left federation I renamed it dynamite Instead of calling it Makato or grapefruit because People were upset about if you're using somebody else's name. Is it oh You can't call it grapefruit or I'm gonna send somebody to visit you type of thing Yeah, I find out to change the name, but I wrote it in my description. This is our version of the original grapefruit Yeah, I mean what's about the best you can do at that point. I mean People get so well at first when I released it instead of calling I called the grapefruit and I said, this is the grapefruit First made famous by breeder steve of spice of life I just I was giving him credit and letting people know where and I was kind of naive I guess Yeah, and he got upset saying oh well if you're using that name, you owe me money. I'm like, well Sorry, I was just giving you credit for this genetics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah I'll change the names So as you learn your way through toe stepping in in the seed world, there's no written rules It's like each person has their own rules and you better know it ahead at time or else It's interesting because so many name changes happened either from just that very thing where You change seed companies and somebody has a trademark or there's they get upset about the same name Or in some cases like a little on a little shadier note Seed breeders don't want people to know the origin stock of what they're releasing Because they don't want to give credit and they don't want to give a percentage or they don't want to deal with any bulls So they just like make up their own name and then there you go Yeah Yeah, go ahead Yeah, I always like to give credit to where How what I created it from because everything we have was built on somebody else's work that came before us And it's just a matter of letting people know and being honest about it. It was I was my philosophy Behind it, but yeah, there is a lot of people a lot of strange nowadays. You know that there's something in there that they're not telling you Yeah Probably a lot in the states Yeah, oh god, it's it's been that way for forever. I mean we've even talked about it how like in uh, you know Neville would just say what things were in europe And everybody that came after him in holland kind of obscured things And one of the things I want to like matt and I did like a kind of a two-part thing on the history of uh of seed banks And when we got to canada, we realized we didn't know enough about the internal dynamics to like talk intelligently About it, but I definitely come from that era where like say looking at like mark emory's magazine You know, you would open those up and you would see those catalogs and you would see all the traditional Amsterdam stuff that they brought over and were reselling But then you know, there would be um, you know, there would be all these five or six different new canadian companies And they had all the Yeah, a lot of the stuff that came over from this from holland and answer I know some of the guys that were doing all the moving of the seeds over to buy mark and You can guarantee that a lot of those genetics are not what it says on the package When it comes to the dex when it comes to all this imported dex stuff back in those days Um, but as far as the canadian homegrown come companies They're there was pretty much straight up and pretty honest Yeah, and because people were doing their own thing. There were some guys in the kootenays. There's the mighty might boys Uh, thank you for island seed company and a few of the others that they were giving you what it says on the package But not so much with the dex stuff the dex would even joke sometimes When they're selling to canadians and bulk that they just go to the back room and they have their indica bucket and their sativa bucket And they come out and I've told people this for years People don't believe me when I say this they they really did like they like what's closer to jack harer? Uh, there's a skunk age. Yeah, that's a fucking close enough. They won't know. Yeah, yeah close enough They won't know. Yeah. Yeah, that's it is it really is how it went Or just you know, like somebody like we've heard people talk about how like Mark emory would get orders for seeds and have run out of the particular thing that they had requested But he still wanted to make the money. So he's like, oh, this is close enough Yeah, you'll buy it off one of the local guys and then uh And then repackage it Yeah, yeah That's pretty typical I was never back in those days mark emory never had anything in original packaging because everything was smuggled and None of us seed breeders were organized enough to To make packaging and right Risky thing to do back then it was And then keeping the packaging in your house for proof, you know, that's bad get caught a lot of people My age would get those magazines and would literally pour over every single blurb About each of the seeds And create lists of dreams that you wanted because it it was kind of like pre-internet or very early internet as far as forums go And so information was limited And so when the canadian seed breeders kind of came on the scene at least as far as access for americans All the sudden there was this plethora of new stuff You know, they like you were like, oh, what about this or what about that? Oh, I want some of this And uh, you know, yeah That's beautiful Purple stuff coming from canada too because I was a purple fiend and I remember a federation next generation There was one great white seed co maybe a great north that had a lethal purple or something. Yeah, there's all kinds Yeah, like grizzly A few of the kootenai breeders Yeah, yeah, there's one guy from um the kootenai's that used to work with steve He goes by kootenai og on instagram want to give him a shout out. He was great, man. He's a great dude Yeah, I mean, you know matt there's even rumors. I don't know if I believe them or not But there's a story in in mendicino in my area That some of the early purples that came over and became famous in My neck of the woods had some canadian origins to them. Yeah They're really able to verify if that was true Um, but some of that purple skunk some of those purples Especially some of the stuff that was growing up there in bc indoor scene Stuff like that. There are there are some old rumors of origins And that's one of the reasons why the stories have never come out about like which person and Humboldt or Mendo or whatever actually made it Because it kind of came down from canada You know before osama bin laden ruined flying Because there was a big difference one of the things I was thinking about when uh, jay was talking Was that just I mean, obviously we're all we're north americans, right? So you've got the canadian side and the and the american side and there's these two big weed cultures But they have differences But there's this border in between And sometimes the canadians aren't very friendly with letting in certain americans depending on their past You know and vice versa And uh, and you know and then but it was more porous in the 90s and then after the terrorist attacks happened They really tightened up the border Yeah, and they really made it more difficult for interaction, you know, especially that first Biber to the end after it happened See, you know even mailing seed or getting over the border or exchange of plant matter or what have you Uh became a lot dicier than it was before You know, uh before we had a lot of a lot of problems. Yeah Yeah, I mean before they were kind of worried about mexico But they weren't really worried about canada So canada the border was kind of like, ah, you know, it's americans and canadians are just crossing And then they took it a little bit more serious because they got worried about people using that like porous nature to get in And it made it made the weed game a little different I think I remember uh, well when uh back You think of john alters was the drug czar Right before 9 11 or right around then But actually was before that it was still in the late 90s And mark emory had been getting busted over and over again and he loved being in the media He was on cnn news and our A lot crazy all the time and And we get rated all the time and I remember one year after a second or third bust They came in and the drugs are said we're taking down these canadian um Seed cartels they call them seed cartels And all the seed cartels in canada are the equivalent to narco terrorist every seed They sell is a thousand dollars worth of marijuana on the air and street And I remember uh mark emory he held a huge party When uh when we got called the narco narco terrorists And mark emory took that as a great compliment and he threw one of the biggest parties we ever had Oh my god You know, I probably would do the same I probably would do the same but it would I would regret it But I probably would have done the same like in that area just I mean, there's a reason there's a reason why a lot of the old timers who are free Um, you know shows silence and secrecy Yeah, right, you know being invisible is a real superpower You know, uh once they shine the light on you it's pretty bright Yeah, and one of the old growers like uh g-man they're from that kubra with seed cup a lot of these guys too They started back in the 80s where you could be serious time Um, yeah, and we have yeah, and they are a lot more other things to lose as well businesses and family So they were just used to not even still just they still don't talk about it. Yeah That's how you're conditioned. So do you have more on your list matt? We kind of got sidetracked or whatever, but maybe we could tange it back to it. You could ask Celestial temple sativa Ah, yes, that was that was very nice. It was very um supposedly the rumor was it was seeds from ecuador Um Very nice. We crossed that when we first released that it was uh our grapefruit f4 male In federation. We used that as the male that pollinated the second Just extremely nice strain. Um It was lost it ended up in one of my collections that uh ended up being lost in a in a divorce Oh, no, I lost Yeah, I lost half my seed collection In the divorce and that was one of the strains I lost. Um But yeah, very very nice strain if anybody still has genetics of that kicking around that would be very uh We'll put our ears out Yeah We have a long reach with the show like you like we were just talking about early pearl the other day and something's like I got f2s f6. Yeah, you know, but and they're legit ones. So that's it's kind of neat how that works um sweet BC kush Yeah, um, I'm not exactly sure where that came from it came from um, uh, the asian community in vancouver when I got the The cut and there's rumors that it was a big bud, but it was just so extremely, uh, I know the best way to Best way I creamy a creamy creamy smooth flavor It would get you nice and high but not a confusing high. I considered it for myself daytime smoke Sure, like I could still function. I could still do math I could still drive Sounds like a silver pearl type high Yeah, yeah Yeah, but it was nice and rounded bulbous Was it super dense to you like mega dance? Yes. Yes very dense Very dense, but not not the stinkiest train growing That's why a lot of the asian production growers liked it because it would get very huge and not stink out the whole neighborhood Like a lot of the other varieties Not be a big red flag Yeah Today have a really hard time accepting that a lot that a lot of old famous things To use a term that's very common today weren't very terpy That low smell low odor was actually a big benefit Because you definitely didn't want to pull up to your spot and get out of your car and smell it before you went into the building So people used to think of low odor and and and you know low terpenes or whatever as sometimes a benefit A lot of the production growers in the city. Yes, that's exactly right for the If you're a production grower in the city Growing something for export, but most most of the good old boys living in the country We wanted the turps. We wanted the flavor Yeah, yeah Another part of it too is that you know if you got a big yielding resinous thick dense thing that smelled like nothing You could safely cross that to something much terpier and hope that those terpenes crossed over And would show up because they it wouldn't have any turps to interfere So you were looking for like the resin and the density and the production And hoping that the effect and the flavor came over from the other side of the thing That's exactly what we did with our romulan. We used what we made the romulan bc kush cross Used the the mail from the romulan and it a lot of lent a lot of the potency And a lot of the smell but it kept with that bc kush size Um Yeah, very very nice way to that was a nice cross. I still I still produce it, but I don't have the original bc kush cut anymore But yeah, that's yeah, I still produce a version of it. So That's cool that you you've you've found a way to keep your lines going even when stuff gets lost You know your lines well enough to be able to work them to get them back to where you feel comfortable saying this Represents that line well enough to be that line. That's that's yeah There's still a few few varieties. I'd like to to get back but haven't been able to But which ones yeah, which ones my bonkers definitely my bonkers string What was that one? It was by it was It was one of the first trains I I bred on a large scale outdoors on Vancouver Island And it was across the first mail I used was a Burmese grapefruit Okay, that was the video and the female was from some growers in the prairies of Manitoba It was a purple motherfucker. It was called crossed with uh Early sativa, which is basically a very fast version of the Durban That was that what early sativa was? Yes, it was I got to grow the seed like that way different than the Durban's that they have now It is a short spot one Maybe it was a natural but that's what it actually was and it was very very lethal Just like yes motherfucker and the purple motherfucker It was always grown from seed because you couldn't keep a kite And the the resonance on that between the Burmese And the resonance of the purple motherfucker It was just astounding the the leaves even the fan leaves had crystal right out to the air So when I first made that the first four-way cross And I grew a massive crop on Vancouver Island outdoors in one of the wettest parts of the island And the buds only they came out the size of footballs the top buds And even the smaller buds at the bottom was the size of that pop cat and uh But just the production was just massive But the first few years it was kind of airy Yeah from the purple motherfucker and the early sativa And I grew in a wet part of the island. So at that first year I lost about half of my crop to mold So it was all seeded. So I selected My best seeds and after about the third or fourth generation of breeding that Into itself outdoors I was In the wettest and wettest of years. I was still 90 percent of plants had not a drop of botrytis or mold on Oh, wow Just from going through the first few years of just Culling out those traits. Um, yeah And it became really well known around Canada anyway for The amount of resin and that the terpene level was through the roof So a lot of people would use it to make hash And things like that and I that's one strain. I didn't lose as well That I've had I've had customers come to me and send me seeds like oh, yeah, I still make your bonkers So silly send me some I try it out It's not like not like not like it was and I yeah, the only people I know that actually have seeds if it put away Is ari and a greenhouse Yeah, good luck on that getting them back Well, my my business partner is actually pretty decent friends with them He ari is like, well, I don't have I have so many seeds. I don't have time to go digging through that or send an employee It's arian has such a large catalog I can't even imagine And when I first moved to Holland and I did a seed trade with them actually with mylo from Made the cheese. So I traded my bonkers with for the cheese And then mylo didn't have time to eat and he ended up just giving them to ari and putting them in his vault Oh, wow So that's the only place that I know for sure That there's a good Good generation of it there stay to it stored away. So Man, I love to know what's actually in his vault and what it actually is You know, like some of that early early silver pearl stuff and early pearl and early girl Get my hands on it Yeah, basically every old original person I would love to know what they still have and what what their little seed vault contains Yeah, because everyone claims they have not everyone many people claim they have everything Unchanged from the beginning And obviously as we all know the truth is a bit different than that But pockets of stuff exist and some people are very generous and some people are like I have it and you don't and it's sitting there until I decide to do something with it Well, the one Dutch company that I have a lot respect a lot of respect for is the flying Dutchman I'm not sure uh, Eddie I'm not Forget his name, but I've tried a lot of his genetic back in the day And uh, in Holland itself and in Europe. He's got an extremely good reputation You get a few coffee shops where you can go and get the real strategy But yes, this is the real master push from, you know, 1983 or whenever it was and it's got the original proper cuts Um, it's I really like A lot of the other Dutch companies now just Pot of gold and the real McCoy from from them, you know, uh, we found multiple really nice versions in those things Um, so yeah, there was a time when I liked the flying Dutchman quite a bit Yeah, I like their sativist uh from our kundios from our kundiabo They were uh through the original skunk haze crosses Yeah, and that's what my my haze that I use in my grapefruit haze cross my Romulan haze Is from that over 20 years ago Oh, wow The flying Dutchman skunk haze Your grapefruit haze made it down to southern california down to san diego and um Mid-2000s it was got it got pretty big down there. You guys great for days Yeah, we're closer to the 2010 probably Actually when I started seeing it at collectors, but it got big down there. It's pretty cool Um, sweet cotton candy Cotton candy, you know, that's a special um, that's well cotton candy federation. That was basically it's an f2 sweet tooth Okay, just oh sweet tooth blueberry Sweet tooth blueberry Yep, and then back across to sweet or the grape. Yeah, it's a sweet tooth again. So And you said it was sweet tooth number two Specifically if I remember correctly, yes Okay And we have Yeah, right hawaiian sativa I think we went over that a little bit, right Little bit. Yeah, that was from um, that was from Vancouver Island seed company. Yeah. Yeah, it actually had I believe I believe that was an f3 back cross when we we released it So probably 80 something percent hawaiian sativa. Yeah, an old afghani And that's another story. I do have a hawaiian sativa now. It's not quite like the original back then I wish I had something a little closer, but Yeah, very just reproduced those buddy just reproduced those I'm sure he'd be happy to send you some of the reproduction up and see if it's anything like the original Yeah, yeah, last year me for man was saying the same thing this refer man's down in jamaica right now And he's trying to bring back the old lamb's breath And he's testing out all these other sativa varieties in jamaica And when I was chatting with him the other day he mentioned that he had some of these old hawaiian sativas as well Island sweet skunk. That's still one of my best sellers Yeah, I bet that's a good one. It's uh, you know, I've had that one from day one That was the sweet skunk number four from spice of life Mm-hmm that first year when steve made the uh sweet skunk There was about three or four different cuts that he selected that went around for a few years And this was the most sativa phenotype out of all of them. Okay that I kept and started working with Yeah, it's still one of my favorites still one of my best yielding strains as well Is it would you consider a hazy? Yes in flavor. Yes. Yeah definitely a real lemony hazy like Similarities to some of the super soap for hazes even yeah, yeah, or the jack-o-rears. Yeah That makes sense. We've heard that it we've heard that it's like, uh, it's based on nl5 haze But I mean we hear different things from different canadiens. That's one of the rumors And you'd have to ask steve or, uh, uh, red Yeah, yeah, lights and feeds. He would probably know a little bit more than me about the exact background of it I just recerts received one of the clones in 96 so Sure exactly wake up. But yeah, I heard also heard the rumor. That's nl haze So there's lots of good stuff that came from nl5 haze It just made me mention that too because when you said it was like one of the haze One is one of the most sativa ones and it tasted a lot very similar to those things You know, it doesn't mean it's true, but it like it definitely lends some some points to it. Maybe Yeah, and one thing I kind of wanted to mention just real quick because I think it's interesting is You know, I was talking about the line between canada and america, obviously But as america starts to legalize in all these different states Especially like on the east coast and the and the, you know, new england and new york and some of these areas that are a lot wetter They keep trying to import California bread strains which got developed in a very arid climate And I've always thought that people north of the border Will probably have genetics like when you were talking about like, oh, I was growing on the rainiest asked part of this island And we were breeding for it and by three or four years in we got some stuff that was resistant Um, you know in the west coast, we don't have very much of that because it never rains in summer But yeah, unless you're in oregon state or washington state. Yeah Yeah, but in california, I mean to put in, you know places like new york and on the east coast where summer is very humid They're probably going to end up wanting to breed in canadian work into their stuff Because a lot of that stuff will have resistances Definitely, uh, my uh A colleague of mine here that runs that golden hat seed company. Um, he's originally from oregon Mr. Uh, ron herrington and he uh, this last summer did a massive grow out with a bunch of uh, american auto flowers Okay strains right next to some of mine and some of his And he said most of the american bread ones that were from california or colorado Or a few of these other places he said they just were inundated with mold and metritis Meanwhile, my varieties of auto flowers Where he said not a drop of mold on them. Um And that goes back to yeah, you pick up those traits after years of selecting You select because if you have to Nobody wants to lose 50 to 75 of their crop to rot So you start breeding with the ones that survived it And like you said by third fourth generation you get to a point where you don't have a speck of it Yeah, it's hard in california to breed for those traits because it doesn't rain in summer So you don't have humidity Yeah, we're not really Yeah, I notice that too. I live for uh for nine years I lived in uh, spain and it's similar latitude as as northern california around san francisco Uh, except in spain the difference is they have really high humidity Uh, so a lot of my varieties did really well there. Uh, yeah, it was really neat to to grow My strains down at a completely different climate, but All everywhere I've grown long term has been very humid Uh, because the coast of valencia there where I lived it's it's regularly 70 80 percent humidity Uh and 35 degrees outside celsius So, uh Yeah, I haven't uh Right. Yeah, right now where i'm living in in uh, alberta canada It's very dry. So this is probably the driest climate i've grown in in my whole 25 years of growing And I miss I miss growing in a human climate. Sometimes it's hard for me to get my rooms up past over past 40 humidity in my indoor grow rooms And it's really hard to dry in your curier but here in this climate as well Um, yeah, I I have good friends in colorado who have similar dryness issues And and keeping their dry rooms moist enough for long enough. So you get that slow dry You know, um, and your weed doesn't turn into dust Um dryness is a huge Is a huge positive in my opinion once you get late into flower But when you're early in veg, I think more humidity is actually helpful To get small plants to vigorously grow because they don't dry out and crisp Definitely that my with my uh bedroom goes up in humidity. I I don't worry about it at all But in the flower room the drier I can get it the better All right, ubc chemo back to the list. Oh, yeah, I like ubc chemo. I don't know anything about chemo I I grew it for a few years. I ended up dropping it. Uh, I just was never impressed with it It some people loved it. Uh, I thought it was a way overrated Yeah, a lot of brown hair no resin Just not I'm not particularly fond of that earthy flavor of strain. It's not something I like myself I like the spicy or the fruity strain It was just very dull tasting to me. So After I started next generation, um, I didn't that was one of the clones I dropped Yeah, so there's other people that would know more than me about that one How about time warp um, very Very underrated, uh, very impressive strain Okay, very underrated. I think I have a jar left here actually. I smoke. It's okay Um, what's it what's it taste like and smell like what's the the turf? Slightly piney little floor like a floral, uh Perfume in some ways. Okay. Yeah Um And I think one of the reasons that it stuck around for so long on in in British Columbia was uh, it's one of those strains that Uh, you can store for long periods and it'll keep its flavor. It doesn't leave it. Uh lose the terpenes. So So when everybody's harvesting in September and October The prices obviously go down for when you're selling your weed So time warp is one of those you could dry it pop it in the freezer and six months later or next summer When it's dry you could pull it out and it'll sell it smells just as fresh as the day you put it in Wow That's a good good good trait. That's a very good trait. Yeah, and it was just really nice to smoke, right? I know it wasn't the strongest straight, but I would guesstimate because we never did test back then I would guess around a 17 to 20 somewhere in there. Okay for percentage Uh Hitting 20 might be a little hard, but yeah in that in that zone Yeah, and I actually I'm bringing that one back because I lost that original cut as well Um, I supposedly it's still out there, but I had lots of f5 and f6, uh crosses that I had So in the last few years I've been doing selecting To get it back to close to the original and so now I have two different versions of it. I have uh the one that's Very similar to the original And I have one that is similar to the original but a lot larger And what's what are they called? Uh, well just time warp and time warp xl Okay Basically and uh the xl should be On our website in a few weeks. Oh awesome. Uh, the original will be ready just in time for spring Hopefully by by april we'll have the the original time work back That's pretty cool. It's one of I've always wanted to try it, but I noticed like whenever whenever I was young and I was buying um, like Outdoor strains trying to grow them indoor. It was it was actually harder to bring outdoor strains indoor for me You know like I would always hermo unless unless I started like keeping a clone of one and running it several Generations as it acclimates it stops that, you know, but like it took a while to learn that stuff, you know And the time warp cutting is one of those strains that uh, we never do get in indoors very very stringy The uh branches could not hold up the buds And it was it's meant for it was bred outdoors. It's meant indoors. It just did not Yeah, it was not impressive at all indoors. Yeah, some plants just don't translate. It's it's really weird I know not so has a lot of experience with that too, you know Indoor to outdoor strains. Yeah, I mean, I definitely have seen a lot of very stable stuff outside That panics and herms when you bring it inside Yeah, um, I've done a bunch of experimenting and side by sides because I've grown a lot of the same strains for a long time Uh, I think that plants use different spectrums of light for different processes And when you put them outside in the sun They just get like the whole Cornucopia of anything they could want from light is right there for them to pull And if you look at the spectral charts of any kind of lamp you might use indoors They're very very narrow compared to the sun And so I tend to believe that there's certain things that like the sun You know, um You know and and you just don't get unless you blend a bunch of different types of lights in the same indoor Um, you just don't you just it's really hard to approximate that and some plants are super sensitive to light Uh, and you know in UV and and all that different types of stuff. And so I can't say it for certain Um, but I would agree with that. I would definitely agree with that You know, I mean, I I have plants that are very old now And I think sometimes they're very finicky inside and I can struggle with them a little bit But if I put them in a greenhouse, they're a champ Every time without fail. They just rock. That's that that's how the time works. Yeah And I just attribute that to like, you know, the sun is the best light So, you know It's interesting in that regard. What about pineberry Pineberry, um Very nice strain. Um I'd much it was it was a very popular strain outdoors in canada Back in the day and I bet a lot of that got sold down south as beasters Um, I'm sure but it was the beautiful little like golf golf ball size buds And just prolific easy to trim very very branchy It would usually finish I always harvest the plant in stages when we get the fields up and outdoors You'd go, uh, probably the first or probably the second week of september You'd go cut all the tops the top foot top colas And then you'd wait another two weeks and then the bottoms would just fail a to get big and You could do that almost three harvest off same plant and just work your way down as as it thickened up It was another one that was very mold resistant. You could put it in the rain and you take it And I know a lot of guys sold it as indoors. It looked so nice in the bag People would pass it off as indoors when if you go over and you know, you go, oh, that's obviously outdoor greenhouse, but you know, a lot of the a lot of the public didn't know that so It was nice enough to fly under the radar. Yeah, that's very common I mean, especially the first second and third cut thing For even my area outdoor growers and stuff that had limited dry space Something that you could cut in waves And you could fill your drying room and then by the time you were empty you could take another round And then by the time you emptied it, you could take the third round. That was very beneficial Um, because space was a premium and you could you could much easier grow more than you could process most most most No, definitely for us to uh You know the whole month of september and halfway into october It was basically a month and a half of harvest every two days and go up to the bush You harvest what you can Watch for any problems And if it's still sunny out you leave what you can and then it was Every second day you do the truck drive and Yeah, it was uh a lot of that too. You hang up the pineberry And then you get down for a week. It's dry enough We've got to fill up the room and then we just pack it away in a room to trim later Because you rarely had enough time to uh to trim it as it came in I'm sure All right, I miss those old days Yeah, I do too to be honest with you My old days are different than your old days, obviously I'm unlike the generation under but even then still like the for californians like The heyday of prop 215 was was like You know, we had a pretty good. I think better than we had it for a long time For a lot of people, you know The reason why indoor is king is you are able to grow indoor in more places than you are able to grow outdoor both from like a Place where outdoor was you know would do well and you could get away with it and and not get in big trouble You know indoor you could have a garage or a bedroom or a warehouse and it was safe from prying eyes outdoor You kind of had to be somewhere semi permissible or at least where the cat and mouse game could get played Yeah, um, yeah, so very rural very rural Which is you have to be you have to be an outdoorsman up here in Canada to do it so What do you know about the ortega clone that went around canada anything? Um, actually, I've never worked with that one. I can't really tell you much juneville on that one Yeah, I wasn't sure that that's just one of those ones that I hear about Um, there's an iranian that went around in canada, I think Auto yeah, I believe that's that's more in uh eastern canada Gotcha, I'm not too very ill in Quebec. It's like the m39 those trains more of a Quebec thing Gotcha Pink kush Did you kush? I've never worked with that one. Um reefer man would be the professional on that one. Yeah We did a lot of work with it. So I've never uh, I never really worked with it myself Okay, my next list goes on into the next generation era Would you say it's the most important era for your your work and the stuff you're most proud of? Oh, yes, um Federation was just my first year and a half in the business Yeah, I figured and I'm almost 26 years now doing next generation So, yeah, I that's even to this day. I have a lot of the old strains I picked up I still stay with a lot of my old strains and keep trying to perfect them instead bringing on everything new Yeah, that's that you know the popular strain of the year I admire that a lot unless it really impresses me. I'm not really interested in other breeders work Yeah I mean in the american market today Uh people that do that are probably like 2% Yeah, like 98 percent is probably One-off hybrids that they make and then they sell and then they move on And each drop that they do is a unique you know Breeding or reversals or whatever the first time working with any of these moms Yeah, and it's very rare to have people that just like these are my favorites. This is what I like These are the traits I'm looking for and I'm going to keep working these lines towards what I enjoy Yeah, that's exactly how I do a lot of my varieties. This is Once I know what I'm looking for I'm just trying to stabilize certain traits um With a lot of the varieties so Yeah, and I a lot of people keep offering me and I do obviously do Do some one-off with tones and cuttings of other varieties. So right now I have a really nice lario g I've got sure my deaf abba and a few other strains that I just I bring into it and do make some one-off crosses, but they're not the They're not the strains that I treat like my children the other there's Part of my catalog that you know been a part of my life for 25 years So I can I can tell you exactly how they do in different climates and What to feed them what not to feed them? Well, I know more stuff about the genetics and what happened on back in the old days in the late 90s to 2000s Because I left Canada in 2008 Okay, and I moved back only in 2017 Oh, wow Almost a 10 year gap where I don't really I'm kind of out of touch with what happened during that 10 years Sure when I came back here five years ago um I kind of just get set up my warehouse and I started doing my own My own varieties again, and I mixed less with what's going on in the local community than I when I used to Where where did you go during those years and were you still breeding and selling seeds? Oh, yes, I was breeding in Spain So I was making a lot of seeds in Spain I lived in New Amsterdam for six months That was too expensive to live there. So I moved down to Spain and Yeah, I had a few different breeding operations down there and I produced a lot of seeds for A lot of Moroccan farmers and actually for farmers as well. There's a lot of the Dutch guys Uh They would farm out their seed making to a Spanish tourist So, yeah, yeah In plenty of profits and the loan where I lived I know a bunch of the big seed producers that they're all personal friends. So I that produced for sweet seeds pyramid seeds For green every other state bank over there. It comes from the same farmers And the Dutch Dutch growers too. It was too expensive to grow. So they would just come Meet a Spanish guy or somebody like me living in Spain and Help us make needs for them. They bring us they bring us the cones and say, okay, here you go We'll buy them off you for a buck of seed Uh, just make them for us. So a lot of the Dutch companies don't need to make their own stuff anymore Oh, yeah, that's been going on for a long time too since when 2000 really Yeah, I mean, I believe in 99 or 2000 they changed the law in Amsterdam There was a loophole or in in the Netherlands. I should say where you could grow legally cannabis seeds and they couldn't mess with you Um, and I think they closed that loophole and then a bunch of the famous seed companies got rated or busted or whatever And I think that was one of the big reasons that the exit has happened um And it also secretly seems to be When they started farming out the actual seed production to third parties and not doing it in house anymore But just not mentioning that it was all third parties producing their seed Yeah, and a lot of the Dutch guys, you know, if you're living in Holland, uh Wouldn't you rather live in Spain where it's nice and sunny? Uh all year round So a lot of them are tired to to Spain. So a lot of them did bring their genetics down there and they have their network of friends and growers You know, a couple bodies seems like Spain and Switzerland First you know Reader reader steve went to switzerland schonzi went to switzerland's mother people went swiss for a bit Yeah, all that and then some people went to spain and vice versa and that kind of became like the new places in europe um one thing I just is totally random, but I don't want to lose it before before we do is that um Maybe you could talk for a second when you were in spain about like How much moroccan do you think is still actual land race moroccan and how much is imported spanish work grown in morocco So, yeah, actually, I know quite a bit about that Because I went to morocco several times quite quite a few times with a lot of big I had some spanish friends that were big hash smugglers And some of them had grow shops and there were seed breeders in spain I would go supply Spain or supply morocco with seeds But uh, the first time I went there to meet some of the farmers in the mountains In ketema, uh, I went there looking for that old school moroccan Sure The real brown The stuff they made the redder Yeah, they made the keyfoot, but by the time I went there it would have been around 2009 2010 They had are at that period. They had already switched over to mostly pakistani genetics Interesting. There were very few farmers that were still doing the old school moroccan Strains that had that nice dusty flavor More like the kind of more resembled a lot of the lebanese stuff actually Yeah, think about it and uh put a lot redder hash, but the pakistanis would yield double or triple and But they at that point they still weren't cutting the males that they were just starting to learn To go out to the field to cut the males And and if you did if you were a grower who did it cut all your males Well, your neighbor's male paul and still gonna float in Yeah, but but even with a bit of that floating in you're gonna They're still gonna be substantially less. Yeah Yeah, when we started going down there To morocco a lot of the big guys that were the big sellers in the region for the local hash farmers We're starting to clue in that if we started Bringing buying the spanish feminized seeds They would up their yields. They wouldn't have all these males and they would get a lot more hash So they started recording a lot of From spain a lot of the super silver haze and critical The critical plus so So many of the farmers there started switching to buying feminized seeds and a lot of the Us farmers in spain when we had extra seeds. We knew that every year The moroccan buyers would be up in spain and they would buy seeds by the million And then they would distribute it to their farmers and stop the quality and yields So, yeah, they switched I would say with the last five years. It's mostly spanish varieties which is based on Dutch stuff a lot of the critical and so And I've actually been in quite a bit of contact lately the last two years with a big moroccan And they're really looking to develop strains now that are more drought resistant So a lot of the A lot of the varieties from spain were not drought resistant. They used so much more water And uh, so a lot of the farmers there now are putting in drip lines even back when I was there in the farm that we went to They already had drip lines my my spanish friend who Was the buyer of all their hash. He brought down two vans full of drip lines to this farm for these guys and they were doing a really good job of it and But yeah, they're really the guy that i'm talking to now He's on the other side of the mountain. He's not up in the mountains in catamal He's down in a research place of 10 acres and they're trying to develop the drought resistant varieties Oh, wow I've been talking to him about it. He's asking me which varieties of mine are the most drought resistant So they're gonna be working with some of my Varieties doing some selective breeding area It makes sense. They they go from very drought resistant varieties that probably were low lower yielding because they're because they Could survive in an arid climate and they weren't really getting as much inputs as they needed But they would live to these bigger yielding Dutch things that drought resistance isn't a problem when you're in holland indoor And you're just getting fed with rockwell all the time So they weren't breeding for that and so they get these bigger yielding plants, but they're thirsty And then they realize they don't have enough water You know I never did find find any of the original moroccan. I had the The guys that I knew there I'd asked them about is there any farmers still growing this original variety? And I had them looking for me because I wanted to get my hands on the seed Sure, and I had any luck What's a shame about that is you would think that the critical plus you were talking about and the super silver haze and some of that Those obviously like some of that original moroccan would be prime breeding candidates To try to mix into those lines and to find ones that are drought resistant and acclimated but yield more Yeah, that's definitely right. That'd be the way to do it Yeah, too bad You know, I didn't mention it. But like when you were talking about uh reef remand being down in jamaica Jamaica has a similar thing and that most of the original jamaican lines are basically it seems like almost completely gone And they've been replaced by dutch genetics Um that were shorter and faster and bigger yielding and easier and maybe better names for them Um, and so it's it's you know, it's the way nature works or whatever But you know, a lot of these land races have been displaced Well, that's one thing that I know reefer man is doing right now in jamaica With the plot of land that he's working on he's trying to bring back a lot of those old varieties He has pretty extensive collection. And I know he's been working on bringing back the old jamaican landsbreath With uh, there's a rastafarian collective there. I believe he's working with But trying to bring back the old one. So if anyone can do it, he can do it. So I've I've often thought too that like some of the places like in afghanistan and pakistan That have so many of their original varieties It's probably because it's been at war for 25 years and it's been pretty dangerous for westerners, especially You know, uh white christians or something like that to go into those hills Um, and so as a result of that they really haven't gotten Super silver haze or critical mass or this or that or dutch hybrids because it's not easy to go there You know, yeah, that's not it's yeah, you know, definitely a little more secluded ghost genetics Haven't been polluted yet. So Maybe someday I'll have to grow a grow a beard and go there. All right Yeah, I know I'll draw a beard and go So I'll incognito So let's talk about let's see Diablo, that's it. That's a real popular next generation one that I remember Yeah, it was very popular. Um, that's another one I've lost But that was basically my avalon, uh crossed with that early sativa as well That derby. Oh, wow. So it was it was very cool Yeah, I know there's a lot of growers in the midwest in minnesota michigan You know crossed Nebraska Back in those days, they just loved and raved them up to the avalon because it was one of those strains When it was in veg it grew like a sativa and streamed fast, but the second it tripped into flour Um, it would flower fast Whether it was indoors or outdoors indoors. It was about a six flowering period But it didn't give the quality quality buds indoors outdoors. It was just amazing. So In a shorter climate you could you could veg you can get a large size plant and when it flipped it flipped hard and fast That was one of the yeah, it was very nice strain Everybody rings that was his favorite He has a bunch of pictures of it just mass just like 14 foot plants out in minnow Yeah, um your afghani kush Which hash plant did you use in that? Uh, the afghani kush. It was an afghani hash plant Uh in bc back in the day That was one of the first ones that I used to breed my avalon strain with But it was an afghani hash plant crossed with the bc kush actually Okay, my uh first thing that I strain that I referred to is the afghani kush Yeah, so that's those are that's the parentage there Okay, uh grapefruit haze. We talked about this earlier. It was going around San Diego for a while Yeah, um, that's like to say that the original grapefruit the pink grapefruit micado dynamite whatever you want to call it Yeah, uh with like I say in the flying Dutchman, uh Skunk one by haze Very nice I've been working with that ever ever since um, it's now basically is an inbred line But it was the very it was the first first variety that I turned into a into an autoflower Oh, wow doing that as an autofower very very long time now since I've been in spain about 10 years And it's the one that has great mold resistance everybody that grows it here in canada has When it's side-by-side with another autoflower it may not be As large a plant, uh, but it is stinky and it's no mold Very very mold resistant. So What did you use to um to To make your plants autoflower? What was your autoflower input? It was the very first A ruderalis cross I used was of uh ruderalis bake bud Okay, that was going around from a grower friend in spain who worked with a few other seed companies And that's what I did my first uh back cross with and it was already Uh, it was already a semi stabilized Ruderalis bake bud It was already being sold as an autofower. So that's what I used as my first back cross And then yeah once I had four back crosses into it. Yeah, it was it was a stable It was more more stable. Yeah, I'm a few generations into it now I did a lot of a lot more selecting since I've been back in canada as well. So That's cool. Yeah, I've done very little autoflower work, but I did some with uh Ernesto from buddha seeds spain Okay, his his uh white dwarf they were dwarf autos auto dwarfs. I think he called them. Okay, they were tiny Yeah, I had a good friend in spain that made a bunch of the red dwarfs white dwarfs. Yeah. Yeah, yeah few of those it couldn't even be my buddies drove that they came from Yeah, Ernesto, right? Uh, I think he owned uh, he owned buddha seeds, but he yeah, I believe yeah Like most people over there like what they buy their seeds. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah You know, this is a little off topic, but maybe not when uh Since you decided to go and move to europe for 10 years Was it personal reasons? Was it weather? Was it like you felt like it was a business opportunity over there for seed making? Was it a combo? There's a combo of reasons. Um I I've always wanted to travel europe and And you want back in the day if you wanted to reach the big leagues in the seed business yet To move to europe. Yeah, so and that mixed with uh The week that I moved there was also the week mark emory got sentenced to five years in prison for selling seeds Oh, that's a good time to be and I was I was uh, let's just say they were looking at me pretty heavy I bet and I just felt it was time to go and leave for a while Yeah, before I end up in the can as well Before you end up, yeah being a model I was more in the background, but I was one of the largest seed producers that that he had. Yeah So I figured well, it's the perfect time to leave Better get out while you're ahead Yeah, so that's what I did and uh, you know, I did you enjoy living there? I loved it. I I miss it every day. I loved it. Oh, wow. I uh, I still consider I almost consider spain my home Uh living there for nine years When I travel to spain it feels like I'm going home Yeah, I bet did you did you speak spanish before you moved there? Did you learn while you were there? I learned a fair amount of spanish when I was there. Yeah It's pretty fluent now, so Is it fairly affordable compared to like california that you know very affordable Very well in spain spain if you're living in the north of europe, it's very expensive. Yeah Like when I lived in hall and I believe in cadian or american dollars I probably paid about 2,500 for a small apartment With a little garage in the back in in absterdam So uh, when I got offered the opportunity to move to spain My rent went down to about 400 dollars And uh, and I had a three-story 14 room hotel that I lived in for 450 dollars So and cost of living is next to nothing in spain. Oh my goodness in comparison to Yeah, yeah Yeah, so yeah, and it's sunny The food is cheap and great So the culture's probably gonna look nice and polite there. Yeah, the culture's pretty polite. Yeah Very very different from what I'm used to I mean the the the culture one of the things I think is cool about the culture Especially for people that do a lot of indoor gardening like we all do is uh, they stay up late Um, you know, it gets it gets hot there. And so it's very common You know, you'll have you'll have playgrounds full of kids at 10 o'clock at night because that's when it cools down That's normal. That's totally normal You know eating it eating at 9 45 at night because that's when it's cooled down and you start cooking You know late does it get that hot there? It gets very Like no, yeah, I I loved that. I was always being in canada when I lived in the cities I do my watering usually at night I'd go out and start working in the girl room at 10 p.m. Because you knew the neighbors weren't gonna come over Things like that. So you go out to the girl room at 10 p.m. You work till two or three in the morning Um, and that was kind of my cycle. So when I moved to spain it fitted perfectly Yeah, that's what I was just thinking I was like man It really is well suited for indoor gardeners because it's got that late night lifestyle like matt you trip out You can literally be at a playground at 11 o'clock at night And it is full of screaming eight year olds and running around parents hanging out The swings are full people are like it's so weird like Yeah, they just they rest Yeah, a lot of the elderly people don't go out during the day because it's too hot. That's not good for it It makes sense at 10 p.m. You'll see all the old ladies on the street with their canes walking up and down the street till two in the morning That's awesome During the summer months. Oh, it's great. It was very I enjoyed living there and uh I'm still considering retiring there once I'm First I'm gonna get myself On a personal note my dad wanted to move the family to spain in like the 90s Um, because he had a bunch of work in europe and it was so much closer My mom wouldn't do it because she didn't want to learn another language But he was basically like if we would have moved there then with the exchange rate what it was and how cheap real estate was He's like, I probably would have retired 15 years before I did Just because of the way it all worked out. Um, you know, it was so affordable I think it's changed a little bit, but it used to be incredibly cheap No, it still is compared to canada uh in the u.s. Uh, it's still very cheap Very very cheap. So Yeah, I can never afford to buy a nice house here in canada again, but down there no problem Yeah, same in california. It's crazy now. It is crazy. Like where I live in california Bakersfield it used to be like one of the last little bastions of affordable living in california You know where you could get a house for 250 thousand dollars You can't get a tiny house now like a 1200 square foot house for less than half a million. It's it's over You know like Yeah, for 250,000 in spain you have a beautiful house with a swimming pool and a nice view Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah Matt, I mean matt doesn't even live in a net. I mean he technically lives in california, but like It's not technically hard. Yeah. I just mean The reason why I say technically is because when people think of california, they think coastal and woods Mountains I live in hell. He just lives in in boiling hot desert dry And it's a little worse and it's still an affordable now. Yeah, it's crazy So what what are some of the ones you want to cover the most from next generation that that are current stock That you want people to know about the most? Well, we brought our romulan back feminized. Yes Awesome. It's uh, yeah, it's as close as I can get to the original except that it produces better than the original Produces much better than the original. That's a big good trait for it Yeah, yeah, I can't say it's not quite as piney As yeah, the old one was but it's it's pretty damn close so Is that the dominant terpene profile for romulan was pine? Yeah, very pine. Yeah, piney Gotcha, it's definitely the dominant one definitely so So, yeah, um, and I don't know if you've seen my cattle log or peruse the uh, the website A little bit, but I got a few new varieties. Um, I'm bringing back an old columbian red, uh, mexican variety Oh, wow. The seeds are just fattening up right now How long have I got tested? uh around the 12 12 weeks Around the 12 weeks zone So awesome and a lot of people that scares off but not me. Yeah, even if it was longer I'd rather have a a nice pure trust for the columbian red line or something then worry about how long it flowers I've also got a tester room. I last year. I made a bunch of uh, I crossed my romulan with a few uh, Malawi gold uh landrace. Oh nice And also with the purojo columbian And also with the acapulco gold So I've got a a nice room right now with about five weeks into flower right now I'm doing a big uh, grow out and testing them out The Malawis the first round they were so wild and so sativa and I didn't find I wasn't quite uh Very impressed with it, but I did a few crosses anyway with a few of the nicest parts And the romulan cross that I've done with it are just coming along phenomenally right now And it's shorted so much and made it growable indoors because they were just they were so lanky in the first round that I did so yeah If I do release that that's that's probably still going to be a year or two away before I release that That's what I'm working on right in my private stuff right now That's really cool stuff though. Yeah, Malawi can be really resinous. Uh, I always have a story like I learned that some Like sativas will not flower under like normal 12 hours of light with Malawi That was the plant that I learned that with after three months of keeping it under 12 12 and zero Sex straight showing up. I'm like With the conglies sativa one time I grew that out as a week 16 or 17 Yeah, and the bugs were no no bigger than my little finger And all my friends were like jay, you're you're an idiot. Why you could have pulled off two or three cops already And meanwhile they're just pulling down weights And I've got the six light room that I just I just cut it through in the garbage, but yeah But if you don't experiment with those you don't find the good ones either, so That's very true. Yeah, I I never seen anything like that for Like yeah, I noticed that with the conglies it wouldn't flower it would or did it take so long Yeah kick off Was it from seed? Oh, yes. Yeah, because one of the things that I learned um You know with some of the guys that had run like a bunch of the nevels haze and some of like the That kind of work in holland Was they told me like if you take an old clone and you flower it It's ready to flower because it's been alive for long enough that it knows it's it should be blooming, but it hasn't And they said if you get some of these equatorial sativas going They're very used to like from seed knowing that they need to veg for six or seven months Before they even want to think about flower So they said it can be very difficult to get an extreme sativa like that to trigger early Because genetically it just doesn't want to You know like you can force that you can force the matter with light cycle, but it's harder Because it wants to much it's almost like a pre puberty, you know human or something like until it hits that phase It's just not ready So the opposite of auto flower Yeah, the opposite of auto flower like and it makes sense right like you have a situation in which It's always 11 13 or 12 12 or something like that near the equator Like a malawi or a columbian or a panamanian or maybe something like that And they're just used to growing for you know, maybe even six seven months eight months before they bloom and then they bloom for five Some of them take longer than a year from seed to finish because there is no winter That they're terrified of dying under they don't it doesn't get cold enough to die Yeah, that's true Yeah, if you want to grow those indoors, it's best to keep them root bound in a small container in the corner of the room For six months before And then pull it back out again. Yeah I brought home some nevels haze and I think it was 98 or 99 Right around then the first year or two it was released And I was planning on making all this seed and I set up this room And I couldn't even get the the males to drop pollen You know for a month I had a whole room that was just ended up being head stashed because it was like, you know, 20 different plants That I was thinking was going to make seed and there was no pollen to make seed And I had to restart them and put more plants in there with the same males and wait some more And I did but I that was in the I didn't know the tricks of the light cycle To me when you bloomed everything was 12 12 That was what the book said That was what you did. I never heard of 11 13 or 10 14 or any weird times like that It was like You know at the time the level of knowledge I had it was like 12 12 is what you do So, you know learning Yeah, what were some of the books that you What were some of the books that got you into growing like when you first started learning to grow Were there books involved or just people? I was fortunate enough to uh get plopped down in vancouver where uh I learned from other growers more than books Yeah And when when Jorge Javantes was making his first books, or maybe not the first books that I knew of anyway Yeah, he was he was up in canada Taking photos in my girl rooms half. That's so funny If some of the first books that I seen were books that I was in Yeah So So, yeah, I I was hands-on hands-on learning for me and that's awesome Yeah, that's that's really really interesting not many people can uh say that Their first books that they were seeing had their grown room in it So you have your your blueberry punch Which is which your romulan blueberry? Is that what it is? Correct the very romulan male Which which blue line are you using? um, it was uh one that I The one I'm using now My for my first I was a dj short blueberry from the late 90s And I crossed that with the grapefruit male that I was using And then back crossed that there's an f4 basically f4 blueberry That cross that I'm using And that's basically the one I'm using I'm actually doing a phenohunt of that generation right now. I've got about 40 females going right now Oh, nice. I'm looking for a new fresh blueberry to use Yeah I always so I have my main grow room where I make my seeds and then I have my five light grow room where I'm just constantly just testing and just growing out things Yeah, yeah Yeah, I'm a blueberry fiend myself. So I understand the hunt for the perfect blue. That's one of my uh favorite things of life Yeah, I was a lot a lot different than what you see is blueberry on the market these days We used to have so different And way different than the dutch passion blueberry is nothing like the blueberry from back in the day Yeah, you know when that's passion one is a lot easier to grow Yeah, it looks a lot better nicer in a bag easier to trim Uh, but it just has no smell. It's not that old fruity smell that the old blueberry had The dutch don't seem to care that I noticed I had a lot of some dutch strains because they all mix their Blueberry with tobacco. So for them the flavor Isn't as important. They the dutch breed bred for a healthy grow structure And buds that yield a bag they weren't as concerned about the smell That makes a lot of sense with the fact that they were mixing it with tobacco that they wouldn't have paid as much attention to that I used to battle with them about it Yeah, me too. I still do Well, I mean, you know, I would go over there and they would think I was nuts for smoking pure flower And not mixing it with a bunch of tobacco, you know Or like the most common thing they would they would do is they would make a a hashish snake That they would a thin a thin, you know Roll of hash and then they would roll tobacco around that and make a big spliff and start chiefing that and so Yeah, the first couple cannabis cups in Amsterdam that I went to I went with a few other canadiens In Vancouver feed bank my friends there and a few other Readers and they would make fun of us canadiens Because we would smoke pure joints and they're like, oh, these are the hardcore drug addicts. They're smoking I don't actually smoke tobacco So I found it very difficult like especially in winter when Amsterdam is very cold and and kind of grimy To be in a coffee shop with like eight or nine Spliffs going And the amount of smoke and the amount of tobacco smoke and just me just wishing like like these places need a huge carbon filter Like because yeah, it was actually kind of intense. Like it's more tobacco than weed You prissy american I mean, they thought they thought it was they thought we were nuts for sure as far as the smoking pure cannabis, you know, but um, but yeah over there Right, I have Matt and I argue about this, but I almost think that like dj shorts blue work is so inbred Um that it works best in outcrosses. No, I agree You know that like it's really hard I've grown a lot of his work trying to find like amazing examples of each line And it's really hard to do for me to find like the grail that like looks good and tastes good And has like potency to it and isn't a leafy monster Um, but it seems to shine when you throw it on things that aren't it well I I think and I'm gonna stick by it till the day I die now and it wasn't from anything that I did It was it was it was growing someone else's blueberry work like um, and I at the time when when this guy uh loan star from texas resin company when he released his blueberry work I had released my first blueberry work So I had no interest in growing his because I already had the best, you know It's like I got the best mine already smells like blueberries. What would how much better could it be? Well, mine was lacking resin production and it was it was beautiful It was very purple. It looked more like organ purple tie type more loose buds not dense Um low resin production and just no recreational potency It had a lot of medical potency where where nerve pain and stuff it would dull it. It was great for that But recreational people would just be like, what is this garbage? This isn't getting me high, you know But I thought I had the best one and then I lost it Um And I had to go through a bunch of blueberries and the first place I started looking was canadian blueberries Because in my experience canadians that was that era where people were starting to capture that super blueberry actual blueberry smell Actual blueberry taste was in the canadian blue line So that's where I started and I ended up going to this guy lone stars work who I'm not sure which blueberry line he used But it seems like at some point near the end he outcrossed to some sort of afghani Let let the blue breed true the blue turps and the blue flavors all that breed true But it doesn't breed like an inbred plant because of that because of that one single back cross I can cross it to like His line to a blue velvet and not have too much inbreeding that all you get is the mutations and the The you know foxtail look with no resin So yeah, I'm pretty staunch on the blueberry need and outcross at some point Yeah, I've uh, yeah, I've pretty much noticed the same thing The ones I've seen and it's yeah, and the blueberries from back in the late 90s early 2000s In vancouver there in british columbia. There was a lot of them and they were very similar in some ways to the grapefruit There were some similarities But if you draw on a batch of the blueberry seeds Some of dj shorts crosses with the blueberries were always better than the straight blueberry Yeah Make sense interesting too is that I think when he started selling his seeds first He started at sag martha with tony and then he ended up at dutch passion But he didn't really control that too much I think it was more like he sent him a bunch of seed and they made their own selections And then when he's when it started getting sold in canada It's almost I think he kind of took control of it again and was sending seed up there I had no idea what was going on. Did dj go? It was available in canada before dutch passion or anyone in europe had it. Oh really? I didn't know that. Oh, yeah So he was selling first through canada I don't know why there was there was clones that are going around when I started Wow, yeah, I mean organ his the where he's from isn't very far from from, you know Yeah, he'd make regular trips into canada and I believe he did some work with uh spice of life Yeah, yeah, steve Yeah, steve and rea. I think one of steve's original sister barry Yeah, someone's that sister barry had some of dj shorts blueberry that came straight from him So that makes sense Yeah, that's wild Yeah, I never really realized that that the clones are going up before they were even released in Europe like the seed lines are released in europe the clones were going up and making them out At the time that they that sag martha and those groups were selling it This is kind of pre the canadian seed selling at least to the public that was easy and well known Um, you know, it really was only holland. Am I right like that like canadian seed selling happened a little bit later Yeah, it's actually pretty much wouldn't mark first started and then kyle with kind seed that would have been around 94 Yeah, I believe Right right in that that ballpark. Yeah Yeah And then I was sharing with matt before we did this I have like some I have some like old cannabis cultures and some different stuff And we were like looking over like the federation list In marx catalogue and different stuff, you know and and you know dj was in there. He had his four things I think it was like blue velvet blue heaven blueberry and flow. Maybe something like that. Yeah You know and and so he was in there in the Yeah in the early years of of of those things being advertised, you know, there was definitely people selling his stuff So high dollar high dollar for that for the era super high dollar insane high prices back then I wish we could still get those prices. Would that be nice? Yeah, wouldn't that be nice? I remember those prices just a few years ago. I didn't around no more. No, that ain't happening So is there anything else you want to talk about other than what you have coming up? It's anything else. You're really stoked about that you you have good stock of you want to get out there Um, well, we have a Nice banner banner, uh, grapefruit crosses Okay, you know right now. Um, one of the other more popular strains I have I know it's more popular in the south is truffles I have a black truffles. I've crossed with that clump of red Oh, wow So uh And that will be on the website probably in a few weeks The plants are due to get cut in about a week. So So, yeah, very I'm looking forward to that. I've already did some testers of it and now I've did the batch of seeds of the clumbian truffles the The mexican sativa with the clumbian reds coming up soon as well That's awesome. And and the romulan is still one of my Yeah, I'm so happy with the one that I have right now Yeah, finally released it again so Yeah, I guess it's so many strains right now. It's hard to wrap my head around anyone in particular Yeah, I'm stoked to see you bring romulan back to you know, like I said, there's there's been many cases of many Different companies none in particular that I'm referring to but many companies coming out claiming that they have pure romulan You know or this romulan hybrid and you know, they're newer people and probably don't you know and it's good to see a Reputable person that you know has good provenance with this stuff that's worked it for years that knows it bringing it back Bringing it back with the real name and everything There's the romulan here in canada. There's just one going around on the recreational market In all the stores that they sell as romulan And actually it was romulan joe that first showed me a bag when I went to see him a few months ago And we looked at it. We tried some together and we were like, no, this is a romulan grapefruit cross Oh, man. I was guaranteed it's a old romulan grapefruit of mine That that's going around. It's definitely not the original and there's also pyramid seeds now in spain They've released a romulan But it's also but it's a romulan cross that I had in spain that my friend of mine is making for them So the romulan that they were selling is not the romulan as well, but it's it's got some romulan genetics in it but I know other than other growers that might have the Something as close as me would be vik high Yeah, I don't know if you remember vik hi. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think he passed away now But he had a really good version of it as well Uh, a little bit more of a fruitier version, but it was nice. It was very nice. Yeah Well, that's awesome. Yeah I'm doing going to be doing a lot more Work in the future here in south america Yeah, that's what I heard. I'm excited. Yeah, it's actually next week. I'm going to chili and to argentina Again, so I'm setting up working with a few breeders down there With with my genetics to try it down in their climate and that's one thing in south america, too Especially in chili. They get a lot of rain So there's a lot of interest in our holders just in strays down there That's awesome. Teaming up with a few breeders down there and And so we'll see how it goes So I hope it goes well Keep the facility in canada in operation But uh in canada with legalization. There's not much money to be made here anymore Yeah, it's really really difficult to make a living And the people are just bombarded with the store weed. There's a store on every corner And unless you're a real Grower who's really passionate about it people here don't buy uh Vice deeds anymore. And there's so many other breeders that just flooded the market Yep I just don't see much of a future myself for myself in canada anymore. So I'm gonna probably start making the transition Yeah, over the next the next few months or the next year. So It's only a matter of time in my opinion from the u.s. Is is just right behind you guys and the way that you're seeing it I think is the is really a very realistic and smart direction. I really really believe that Are you going to be doing any land race hunting while you're down there? um Not while i'm gonna be bringing some of them my my columbian And a few of those strains for people down there to to grow out and test out and Yeah some moms. Yeah But at first my i'm first gonna get established down there with my flagship strains like the romulan The island suites kind of dynamite the time warp My most popular strains gonna get established first before I get too experimental down there. Yeah. Yeah, right so As we are as we're all getting older you know, um A lot of things for especially for new smokers and stuff like that They hear things like nl5 or romulan or this or that or whatever And they're famous names that they know almost nothing else about And so romulan is definitely one that whether or not you have any access to the real romulan or you just have a hybrid or whatever The name is going to get used because it's a catchy name. It's stuck It's part of cannabis history now Um, and it was prevalent enough and popular enough that young people They want to try the best things of yesteryear And there's people out there that want to give them what they want whether they have it or not You know, yeah um, that's for sure Yeah, with my romulan when I moved back to canada Um, my partner was like gay just work on that romulan because everybody asked for it And I've been working for five years now before I Get a release it because now I'm confident in what it is. I'm happy to put my name behind it But uh, we for years we got asked to bring the romulan back and I guess I'm working on it But I'm not gonna release it until Until I'm you know, I'm proud to put my name behind it. So yeah We're finally at that point now. So You know, it's funny. I was talking to your partner and he's like, yeah, you know I know a little bit but I was mostly on the back side. You need to talk to jay and he's like I used to run a seed bank. He's probably never heard of it. It was called kind and I was like, oh, this one Here's your catalog because I had like a big collection old catalogs read out of his old catalog to him. He was stoked Yeah, he's a cool guy. I like him. Yeah, he ran the kind seed uh all the shipping into the business from uh, the uk for 17 years He lived there and he became close personal friends with all the big dutch breeders him and aria and her good friends And he just knows about shipping seeds anywhere in the world And he's a super friendly guy at phone. So Oh, and I've known him for like five years So every any customer that talks to him on the phone, he makes them happy Oh, I bet So yeah, I I have to interview him sometime as well because just the His side of the business is to me is just as important as you know, even the breeding side of the business There was a lot of history. He knows so much history and back stories about what went on behind the scenes Who got what went, you know, who who got what batch of seeds went and know what behind what strain probably, you know He probably has a lot of info like that. So as far as the dutch as yeah as far as the dutch scene goes, uh He knows that very very well Yeah better than the biggest clumb just seen because he was over there during those days kind seed was one of the biggest seed sellers Yeah, yeah to america in those days Um, it's kind of like seedsmen or attitude seeds are now That's how kind seed was back then. So he had a good personal relationship with all the breeders Um, yeah, he was one of the few people that I know has been in Aryan's breeding rooms where his mother plants are crazy. Yeah That's cool. That's really cool Well, man, I we have so much more I could go over like I have a list of massive List of strains and everything we can go over. Um, I'd love to pick your brain some more We're hitting right around two hours now So I was gonna wrap it up because we've taken a lot of your time But I just wanted to thank you For coming on and speaking with us about all these strains. Um, I appreciate you Also for keeping track of your work like from a breeder perspective I respect that a lot like you you're able to speak your lines. You know your lines You remember the males, you you know all that that's that's not a common thing and I highly respect that's something That's something you can't fake. It's it's stuck in my head. I I I remember I could think back 25 When I smell a plant I'm like, oh that smells like something I drew 22 years ago And it was in this town under this light and it was May and I just ate a hot dog, you know Yeah, yeah memories I feel that I mean Matt and I we talk a lot about There's certain people that you talk to and they're extremely vague About some of the stuff that they do and for me being like a you know a weed nerd or something like that since it's like so much of my life Like someone wants to talk about it like you said I can be like, oh, yeah It was like I did this and it would smell like that and this happened And I remember I was and you were wearing that because it's just so part of it You know, you can talk confidently about stuff that because you spend every day with it People won't realize that growing and breeding is day in day out. You have to have success And you have to stack those days together for a long period of time to get to where you want to go Yeah, and if there's no days off None Take your whole life Yeah, you don't travel you move All right Travel you That can watch Yeah, thanks for having me on it was we can chat again sometime if you want to get through the rest of your list It would be an absolute pleasure man anytime anytime So, yeah, thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful evening and uh, we'll talk to you soon You too man. All right. Take care What? You know, it was like it was like I was connected with everything around me All of a sudden I just started questioning everything I'd ever been told You know by the time by the time I got high that very first time When it started to hit me And I'm like well