I started growing in the late '80s with Mexican bag seed. In 1989 I made some seeds from above average Mexican commercial. I kept growing other plants but that was my main sativa and for several years I didn’t come across anything better. In 1992 a friend gave me three seeds that he said came from a bag of Mexican brick weed that was way stronger than normal brick weed. I sprouted them and grew them out, the two females I got were normal uninspired Mexican commercial. The third plant was a male but it stunk even as a seedling which I hadn’t seen in Mexican plants before and the growing tips got me pretty high. So I put it back into veg, cloned it, and then sprouted some of my '89 Mexican regulars to cross it with. I made the cross in 1993. The results were the best Mexican bag seed plants I or any of my friends had see at that point back then. The Mexican All Star was born.
I froze the seeds after drying them for a year, That was my main head stash strain through the '90s. By the late '90s I was running low on seeds so I made a large batch of F2s which I froze after drying them through the winter (which is the dry season here). I’ve been growing those F2s ever since and still have some. I am starting to run low so I was thinking it was time to make some more. I still have some of the F1s and I am pretty sure they will sprout because I also have some of the '89 Regular seeds and they still sprout.
In the run up to growing out the last of my F1s I was going to grow some F2s for smoke and maybe make a clone selection for some other breeding.
That is the good stuff. The bad things about this strain is that it is prone to herming and hates everything. I was going to try to find a female that didn’t herm and cross that to some other strains before I got around to the real reproduction. I’ve been growing this strain for 30 years and I have come to the conclusion that it is the hardest strain I have ever grown. Even after growing it 20 plus times each batch still comes out a little bit better than the batch before (although there are a few fluke perfect grows from time to time). My long term project is to go back to the F1s clone every individual and cross all the females with each male one at a time to try to breed out the hermaphroditic tendencies. The problem with this is that the herming seems to come from the million things that stress it and as I have gotten better at growing it I have fewer hermies.
Generally I mostly lurk here but it occurred to me that you all might be interested in this so I decided to start this thread. I am already well into the grow. I started flower the day before Thanksgiving so I am on day 38 of flower.
I started out with 10 Mexican All Star plants. I got three females which I cloned (there are also two Ace Banghi Hazes in the back of the garden).
I also got a male from a very rare phenotype that only comes up in the Mexican once in a blue moon. It is noticeably more sativa than the rest of the plants and once it gets out of the seedling stage develops what I call “alligator leaves” which are thin sativa leaves with deep serrations like an alligator’s back. This only comes up in males and only in about 1 out of 30 or 40 plants.
When I got that male I decided I was going to clone that and cross it with whatever females didn’t herm.
So far, fortunately or unfortunately none of the females have hermied. I may not be stressing them enough to breed out that trait.
These are the three female plants I have gotten:
This is the clone of the male. The alligator leaves haven’t appeared in the clone yet but I know that the genes are in there:
This is the same '93 Mexican All Star that Motaco has grown if you have seen his threads.
