I remember when I was young and buying hash off the streets. We usually got the lower grade Moroccan and that was what most people sold as the “standard”. If we were lucky we got some star hash which was a bit better than the standard hash. It was stamped with something that looked like the star of David why some older people called it jewish hash or super moroccan. Dried buds were kind of rare at one point where I grew up and that was part of the lure growing your own. That’s why me and most of my friends started to anyways, to get the high grade and to get the different flavors of flower rather than hash.
There were no scene where I grew up. Either you bought the standard or jewish hash from some older guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. It was kind of hard work and a lot of waiting. Still remember the few times we got weed instead of hash. We were so happy about it but most people would call it either Northern Lights or White Widow. This was early-mid 90s and both those names were the stuff people would put on “good weed” to sell it. It wasn’t always NL or WW at all but most people knew those names. It’s like Skunk to the UK or Kush to California I guess at some time.
The first seeds I got came from Holland. A few obscure little tobacco shops would have odd magazines like High Times and we would get one between maybe five or six of us. Hunkering over the magazine like it was a porno were these five or six guys in a boys room all looking at the back-cover where the adds for the seed companies were. In the mid 90s I remember that Greenhouse was one of those I liked. We had to put money into an envelope and send it off to Holland then hope, pray and wait for some seeds to come with returning mail which could take weeks back then. When you found something that worked like for me most of the Sensi and Greenhouse things worked well in those days. I saw the Skunk#1, Super Skunk, NL5 x Skunk#1 and later Super Silver Haze with Great White Shark from Greenhouse. Silver Pearl, Silver Haze and Jack Herer from Sensi. Those were some good days. Other friends tried other seed companies and we would trade. Serious Seeds were usually good with their AK47, Bubblegum and later the White Russian which I liked more than the AK. I remember one friend went with Dutch Passion so I got to see some of their stuff through his grows and trading some seeds with him. Another bought some of TH Seeds early offerings so I got to see their version of Bubblegum and also the SAGE which was good if you picked a good one.
C99 came to me via one of those friends I had been trading with during the early years. I had done my military service and not been growing or around growing as much for about a year and came back home at the end of 1999. My friend showed me these new seeds he bought off a website in Canada called Heavens Stairway. I was blown away as before I had gone to places like Amsterdam and Christiania to get both cannabis and seeds as well as ordering from the old catalogues but I didn’t trust the internet at all back in those days. He showed me stuff from companies I had never heard of though he had grown and smoked the same stuff I had earlier and he said this was good stuff. He had ordered some Spice of Life where Sweet Tooth, Shishkaberry and Adventure Mix were some of the packs I remember off the top of my head. He also had packs from this american company called Brothers Grimm and it was C99.
From getting the HS site address from my friend I went online and soon found Cannabis World and later Overgrow where a lot of the newer companies with some of the older ones were posting information and people were talking about different types of seeds. It really was a time of change for me and I tried to get to know everything I could about this new thing my buddy was growing, Cinderella 99.
Since this time I have grown a lot of different versions of C99. I saw and grew that first released which were P94, the third backcross to the Princess female. This was the whole reason it was called “Cubing” as the first backcross is bx1, the second is the squared version bx2 and the third would be the cubed version bx3. It makes sense when looking at it like this. I know the new MrSoul says that the original C99 was P97 or the 4th backcross to Princess but that is not how I remember it. I still have some of those old Cannabis World quotes from the old MrSoul and Sly.
I tried a lot of other peoples versions of C99 as in 2001/02 the second release of C99 came out and those were the 4th backcross. MrSoul even stated this himself that he didn’t get the same results as with the 3rd backcross and he was going back to releasing the P94 version but that never happened. In 2002 he and his first side-kick Sly they were gone from CW and soon after most of the Brothers Grimm offerings were sold out. This is where another friend found FET who would go on to release a lot of BG lines like C99, Apollo 11 etc. making his own versions from the BG seeds. Spice Brothers was the name of the company. I also grew Joey Weed’s version of C99 and AK47 x C99 as well as a buddy of mine grew the Blueberry x C99. His version was pretty good. It was more stable in expression than FET’s version but FET had a special phenotype that I saw and loved in the original release that I didn’t see in Joey’s version.
I later grew Mosca Negra’s version of C99 BX-1 as he called it (there was something called F1 as well from Mosca but I never grew that one). This was a nice representation but again it didn’t have that special phenotype I was looking for. From 2004 until 2009 that special one we found in FET’s version of C99 was cloned and grown by many of my friends and me. I wanted to find it in more seeds so in case we lost it I could germinate some seeds and find it. In 2013 I got some seeds from a friend in america. He sent a lot of his own crosses that I grew but he also sent me five seeds in a zip that had just “C99” written on the bag. I instantly asked him what this was and he told me it was a version of C99 from an english seed maker called Old Timer1. I got three of the seeds to germinate and they were all that special phenotype I had been looking for.
Here’s a picture of one of the females. I had two females and one male that regret everyday not using the pollen from. I grew the females for a few cycles before life had me have a short break in growing and none of my friends that I gave the clone to kept it so I could get it back.
