(Sorry in advance for the lengthy & loving rant. )
Yessir, ghash refers to the current 88g13hp male that b uses. I believe it’s an F3 or an F4 that he’s worked from the F1 beans that @n8tiveguy gave him. To be certain, email him or mrs. b. He’s also had a previous F3 “Deadly G” male that has since been retired, as that one was too overbearing in crosses. He also used an F3 mom in some of his crosses, but I believe she’s been retired.
The current ghash male is one of the best breeding males being used today by any breeder. Doesn’t overpower the mom, but let’s her shine through. Adds a lot of potency and dense bag appeal and yield to moms that lack. Preserves the effects from the mom, just enhances them. He’s like adding organic steroids to whatever mom he mingles with. @Torontoke introduced me to him, and spoke very highly of him. TT was right, and now I’m sold!
Finding killer males is one of the things that makes bodhi so great. He recently showed a series of pics of 2nd, 3rd, and I think 4th generation males found in @Strayfox’s Iraqi line that caused a stir on IG. Because of very frosty and fat flowers on those males, a ton of haters came on and accused him of showing pics of herms and massive bug infestations. What was telling is that all of his fellow breeders’ posts were in awe of the amazing males, and they had no accusations because b was showing stable males (aside from one pic he labeled as an intersex male, which was not used).
The guy tests his males so rigorously by putting them outside with no defenses, in a wet, nasty section of his farm, to see how they handle it. He purposely stress tests them to see how they fare against mold, bugs, drought, heat, and cold. This is why the guy’s males produce consistently outstanding crosses. Quite a few people have noted how well bodhi seeds strains do when compared with other breeders’ strains outside in guerilla grows without any of the IPM and cautious environmental regulation that we put into our indoor gardens. I personally think it’s because of how rigorously bodhi tests his stuff.
It starts with testing his males extensively, working their lines through multiple generations until he finds one that passes the traits he wants to see. Then he lets them do the horizontal lambada with a bunch of known moms from his library. Then he tests select crosses himself based on his intimate knowledge of the moms.
Once he’s satisfied that the male is cooperating and facilitating the things he wants to see, he and mrs. b work on packaging several packs of each new cross, and send them to his testers, both local and around the world. There’s a ton of legwork here, too, as he allows testers to pick which strains they want to test!
He will not release a cross for sale without positive and detailed feedback from at least one tester. If he gets a mixed bag of reactions, he’ll scrap the cross or give it as a freebie, or with special instructions that it only be run outdoors (if it was weird indoors). Sometimes he doesn’t get any tester feedback, but still loves the strain due to his own testing of it, and he’ll give those as freebies, too. Sometimes if he doesn’t get any tester feedback, but thinks the strain has potential yet didn’t test it himself, he’ll wait until the next round of testers and send it out again.
There are no other breeders that I’m aware of that go through this rigorous level of testing on 100+ new strains every year. Think of the staggering about of work and organization this takes for a company run by only 2 people. The whole process takes multiple years before he’s ready to even release a single new cross for sale. It’s shockingly organized and methodical. The one thing it doesn’t allow for is chasing hype strains, but that’s also one of the things I truly respect about his work.
You can tell he and his wife are passionate about this whole thing. They raise three kids, one of which has a serious disability, while also somehow doing all the work above while keeping a huge library of hundreds of exceedingly rare moms. And they’ve done it with essentially no marketing, no advertising, no hype, no bullshit or lies or exaggerations, anywhere, EVER. Kudos to those two. They’re true heroes in the community. And they love dogs!!
Look for upcoming work with two new males, an Iraqi and a Kashmiri. Who knows how they’ll turn out, but they’re in testing now.