One thing that the forums have over the modern social media sites is that threads can live on for years, go through periods of inactivity or conflict and still gather valuable information over time.
I wanted to make a thread about Mighty Mite and make a repository of links, pictures, threads and general information on this heirloom variety.
Strains like Mighty MIte are very special in the history of Outdoor cannabis cultivation, because while ruderalis crosses where available since the seed bank days, strains like Mighty Mite where the first autoflowers that people where getting good results from. I have some crosses in my collection and never really looked for the pure (except for an embarrassing interaction with the breeder Verdant Green) version.
i recently saw a post on direwolf.og’s instagram about using mighty mite hybrids in the past and the son of the original grower came on and gave a back story, https://www.instagram.com/p/CnCWbWMOE0c_DiyOO8awtt91LKfffDjvcW15nM0/
his post:
Part 1
This is the origin story of MightyMite as I know it.
My father was an original old-time Lasqueti Island grower who cultivated cannabis before sensimilla was a thing. At some point, the Californians came up and showed those on the Island how to determine the sex of the plants and trim the flowers. After this, they were able to start to actually make some money growing.
Seeds were brought up from Washington state by dad’s friend’s brother. They called these new genetics “Larry”. My dad cultivated and bred these “Larry’s” for years and one year he won the island harvest bud festival with the “Larry”. There were no clones at this time. Time warp came much later and changed the OD game forever toward consistent commercial production, but that’s another story.
My father noticed that about 10% of these Larry’s would flower right away into little 4-8 inch bud sticks. He and his friends thought that these were quite interesting and unique, and they started breeding them back into each other. My dad’s wife called them “MightyMite” after a cartoon mouse.
They bred these little plants for years, eventually getting them so that about 20% would flower and finish at 4-8” by the middle of July. Another 60% would finish at about 12-24” bushes by mid August. The rest would be full-term “Larry’s” and finish at the end of September.
My father never really commercially grew MM because he said it was too much trouble to sex out the males for how many plants one needed to grow for production. By this time the TW clone was dominating every year in its full glory. So my dad ended up giving away MM seeds to whoever wanted them.
When I came back to the island as a 19 year old youth a bit lost and wondering what to do, my dad said that I could have one of his old bluff spots that had been busted a few years before. He gave me the MM seeds to grow and said “hopefully you’ll get something off the bluff before the helicopters show up.”
part 2
I planted 25 7-gallon buckets with about 8 MM seedlings. I diligently sexed them as they started to show. Growing was magic! These little plants flowered beautifully. I harvested them as they matured, from July to September, under my dad’s tutelage. I trimmed them and dried them in a paper bag in the sun. I grew 6.5 lbs and sold all for 3200 per lb. My bro walked down our trail with cash in hand and helped me weigh it and bag it before taking it.
After that I was hooked on growing this magical plant.
I do remember that it was hard to find all the males in the MM because the plants could sometimes be so small that they would escape detection underneath another larger plant. So there would be some minor and not so minor seeding that would happen. No one cared back then about a few seeds, so it ended up that MM seeds got out into the world through the buds as they were sold.
from the article ‘The Return Of Ruderalis’ Cannabis Culture
BC’s Mighty Mite
About this time, on British Columbia’s Gulf islands, an outdoor grower was noticing that his October finishing strain always threw out a few plants that finished much earlier ? by late July or early August. After several years of selections for this early flowering trait, the Mighty Mite strain was born.2 Mighty Mite effectively incorporated the auto-flowering trait, while retaining the habit and potency of its drug cultivar heritage.
For those in the know, Mighty Mite quickly became a popular outdoor strain for filling the traditional late summer drought in BC’s pot market before the market was flooded with regular seasonal outdoor bud. Slowly, over the years, these genetics have spread further amongst underground pot growers and been used most successfully in hybridizations with more potent strains.
Aside from getting crops in before cops and other thieves can plunder them, these early plants have allowed growers to produce plants with much more commercial appeal than traditional Northern latitude outdoor marijuana
- 80-100% Indica, it has a bushy single cola. Dark green with a dank pine smell and nice potency. Some plants are autoflowering and cannot be cloned
