Yeah indeed, different case than the chocolope.
Thanks for the french snippet, apologies to you FieldEffect for the digression.
Kinda see what you mean. Thinking too that if you’re in that state of mind, maybe that’s in the education and progress of others (and sampling of their findings 
) that you can get back some good vibes. Hope so in any case.
I’m trying to comprehend this but it’s like the planes shits way over my head lol. Great information @Fuel @FieldEffect and @funkyfunk
Nailed. And this apogee of our scene is missing as fck for me.
People are too used to see the shit show of the previous gen, thinking that a shark tank is the model to follow. Or think (like in our lands) that collective mean “dictatorship” and “being transparent” behind the collective. It’s totally wrong, friendly emulation is necessary to keep evolving and it exist as much comfort zones that it exist souls.
I can see the punk in you is raging 
Playing collective isn’t always easy when there might be business down the line. It’s also difficult to see the collective parts of ops when things are so blurred and hidden by the prohibition. So that’s not the main available example. As with other life matters, I think that’s still the best option rather than lone wolf ops. But it has its own traps, firsts being ego and greed as usual.
It’s quite a subject that maybe need a deep debate 
, but to stay short it’s for me only the lack of experience with the real leverages of the business. I mean, we have even blockchains and NFT tokens now to push transparency at the higher level possible. The US scene teached me a long lastly about this aspect and i’m not talking about the concentric circles but more about considering the money just like a tool for the common interest.
A simple regular event by example (almost impossible to set at international scale, with all these important garden’s planning beneath). If the collective is reunited around a table filled with the best buds of the season, just this once a year … and it’s an unstoppable bulldozer. To pay the plane of those struggled, to pay the reservation of a chill “weed friendly” place, food, to quickly replace a led panel melted of one in the shit, to make insane group orders on seeds … you need cash. No cash, no philantropism because you can help nobody. That’s the crude reality behind the faith.
Those that can’t stand to don’t be “the best” one season over another, just have no place in a collective. They search something else that breeding in group can’t deliver, not even the business or the money lol Those understanding that each weed have its proper time, are set to stay valuable for the group on long term.
update : The destroyer is actually the best example. A long time she stayed not rated and under the radars, now a bunch of people hunt it.
If one make more “sales” than another one year, the collective have to celebrate it. It’s a victory and a medal deserved as a group. And there is no “give back” obligation, it’s fully deserved. The part thrown in the collective is a secondary purpose and i think that the perfect model is the French Association Loi 1901. Sincerely.
lmao You’re both mapping me, whats better proof that you have something to say in the scene ^^
I don’t have enough time to reply to the whole discussion but a few points that stuck out to me.
I think you know that’s the case, the mentality. None of this is half-throttle, learning is something I do quite seriously. And that’s what I view this as. Results? Well, that’s catching up but the baby steps have been quite deliberate and intentional.
That’s the same conclusion I had reached 
I’ll get back to this later when I have more time to digest. Very much appreciate the dialogue and advice.
You need to grow a white beard to accompany the gesticulation
100% 
This is very valuable information. I guess we’ll be finding out.
Fascinating distillation of most of the online/legalization goings-on. And you are absolutely right. I spend lots of money on seeds for varieties that were generated 20+ years ago, almost lost already. With desperate hopes of finding the old “fire” to paraphrase the kids these days.
Many of these discussions are philosophical and quite applicable to anything in life. I sound like a broken record at work, but it’s propagating. Not like weed plants, the mentality of doing something with all you have. Passion. True excellence doesn’t orginate from anything else. It’s just funny to read these things that I say in such a wildly different context to the “padawan” engineers running around at my work.
It’s not likely I’ll ever be “professional” making seeds or growing weed. But, it is something I (and most of the folks that read this stuff) are PASSIONATE about.
LOL I need some Chocolope
Holy shit I didn’t realize @funkyfunk had a thread. I’ll be in to raid that when I finish here 
I see mentions of Destroyer. I’ve been interested in that for a while.
Well. Thanks for clearing the smokescreen. And the wikis. 
Interesting take. One that is easy to agree with.
Just received some of Dutch Passion’s take on this. Throw a few outside next season. Evidently CBG still has some for sale. Small world.
Frequently takes me quite some reading and re-reading to try and catch the plane. You and me both 
What a pleasant discussion to occupy my afternoon. Cheers!
That’s a pretty nice sum up of the core of this discussion 
Even if that’s a complete ripoff of CBG’s work, still have chances to find something good 
Next season will definitely be epic!
It’s funny because what have attracted me to CBG is not only the good work they have output with original genetics on par with the Dutches and US/CA, it’s also because I think Charlie Garcia has been a driving force at some point to infuse this collective idea in the Spain scene. He helped a lot of people. Burned his wings too when Spain became what it is and with some dubious associations.
Can’t wait to have honed the skills enough to put that destroyer on the bench., even if I’ve never tasted it yet 
But definitely my kind of shit anyway.
Have a good sunday with the fam!
I will traduct in English some portions of an interview I’ve made with Kaiki in 2007, in Catalan lol I think it’s a good reminder if i add some retrospective ^^
Fuel 2024 : The interview was published for an ultra-private Swiss group only, and not supposed to leak. I still can’t publish some portions today.
Hy Kaiki ! I will start this interview by a classic question : Tell us what was the main thread of the Cannabiogen project at the start.
During 2001, a group of members from Cannabiscafe started to think about opening a seedbank that will introduce the landraces we were using in our grow and hybrids projects.
In seeing what was offered in the market, not much appealing for us and a sad lack of sativas, it pushed us to start Cannabiogen and to go public.
(censored big portion #1 by the breeder about sourcing, before publishing)
Keep in mind that we had already some lines at this point, patiently collected : Thai, Jamaican, Uzbek, Mexican, Colombian, Lesotho …
Here, the Destroyer is quite popular here which is quite rare for a sativa line. I see that this line, with the Taskenti is the ones you estimate the most in your catalog. I know it’s for their singularities and their concept, but also that they are the ones that asked the most work : can you give us more infos on theses non-F1 releases ?
The Destroyer is a 100% sativa made from : Thai “Meao”, Mexican “green lime” and a Colombian landrace.
This strain started with 9 pure Thai females and a few Mexican x Colombian fathers.We analyzed the 9 females then we worked the progeny accordingly to the blueprint aimed :
One hybrid with Thai influence in the high but that was able to be harvested in a reasonable time; the finishing touches were intended to give it a good yield and a fast growth. It was very hard to reach the actual balance.
The Taskenti is a F9 hybrid based on a pure Uzbek line. It’s a marvelous line giving an excellent Charas. We started the project on a base of NL Sensi then we applied a methodic selection to make it express the best traits of the ouzbek part.
In F5, the hybrid started to be BX with the most potent female i had. Until the F9, it was only a constant work of stabilisation. Its maturity isn’t the fastest of our catalog, the price to preserve the organoleptic qualities and the high of the Ouzbek. I was also very concerned to maintain the exceptional quality of the Charas it was able to produce. The methods of selection were quite quantitative and demanding at a time.
What do you think about the installation of a bunch of Dutch breeders around you ? Soma, Serious and even Georges Cervantes that i respect a lot has answered to the call.
The spanish market is very important for the seedbanks. A lot of pros understood this point to make more volume. Our lifestyle please a lot also, and push them to install their infrastructure here.
Smoking a cone here don’t make riots, our people is used or just simply smoke. In the facts, a lot of people have tested cannabis one day and figured out themselves that it’s not as dangerous in regard of all others drugs.
Today the turnover of seed’s sales increase each year. Big magazines like Yerba, Canamo, Spannabis or Softs Secret are national publications availables in newsstands and they are boosting sales.
Add to this all growshops offering seeds, grow equipment, nutrients … everything to grow. It’s a big market for the companies specialized in cannnabis.
Let me loop on Cannabiogen. Will you turn your futures releases on works like the Destroyer and the Taskenti ? Will you add some F1 to the catalog soon ? Any exclusivity to share with us ?
We want to finish some projects like you know, we always lack of time. And the deadlines are often postponed.
We have started a collab with ACE Seeds and spent a lot of time and efforts to create new hybrids for them. Which made us late.
At first glance, the next will be the LIF. It’s a work started in 2003 with a C99 x Haze, with Jamaican / Pakistani / Ouzbek genes.
Also one F1 Nepalese x Mexican is on the go with a Congolese x Pakistani actually in F5.
We try to finish some new hybrids aside with our last accessions : Nepalese, Nigerian, Panama and Congolese but i prefer to stay quiet. Not all decisions are taken yet.
We can’t create in 6 days like some in the game, we need several years to model, select and finalize our hybrids. We don’t run after a big catalog and we want to maintain at top the freshness of our seeds retailed, it’s impossible with an enormous catalog.
We work also for the preservation of landraces and some old exceptionnal cultivars and heirlooms. We just finished a line of old Haze from OT1, a brittish that maintain it since the 60’s/70’s. 3 years of intense work now.
We have studied and preserved with the ACE collective a lot of lines coming from various lands : Nepal, India, Cambodge, Thailand, Congo, Panama, Jamaican … that will help to enrich the genpool in the future.
In reading this interview you can believe that Spanish at this time were seed’s ogres as local market. It’s not the case at all. They were addicted to growshop’s clones, sold between 10 and 30 euros by arrays. A single little growshop was able to dilute a few thousands of clones per week. Letting the customer taste the weed over the counter before wasn’t strange or uncommon.
The whole Spanish market was relying on the French customers mostly, since early 2000’s. Not only seeds but grow equipment too. Being hot a long time, everything was crazy expensive and very risky to get for frenchies. A lot of growshops were on radars, some even worked with the authorities to snitch about their customers while milking them at a time.
2000 - 2005 was a golden era in France for the weed scene, at all levels. I was doing the same thing there that i’m doing here but les openly, a bit like English clubs. A lot wasn’t ready to handle the pressure and the money involved, it turned fast in a pathetic shit show with a couple of cases of competitors snitching to get an edge.
The smarter ones spreaded like a plague (lol) internationally. Mostly as little hands, but not only. TH Seeds by example totally revived from ashes in welcoming a French of our private circles as Lead breeder. Sensi gulped a lot of skills too in buying quickly the biggest board of France … well it’s easy to see this unexpected impact of this period on the international scene in digging not so deep. Even in US ^^
In 2019, with the CBD/hemp rush in France, it generated a grey area that permitted to Frenchies to open wholesales in grow equipment and seeds that were more protected from bastards and also more efficient that Spanish offers. It destroyed the so called local market in Spain, a lot of growshops felt specially at the borders (east and west). Still bloody today.
That’s the noise of the non-professionalized circles we talked about privately. Not the reality.
And it’s not because you sell seeds to your friends that you can be considered as pro. We talk about companies that pay 6% VAT on seeds, with invoices, bills and taxes on incomes. I know you grind your teeths in reading it and i understand why (it’s 100% sincere), but … it’s an important wall of smoke to dissipate. Also to understand what was the psychological leverage at this time to wrap some projects (doomed to die) with such a “white knights storytelling”. It’s a resonance on my speech about the need to structure a pro-active collective able to be sustainable to get more torque and influence on the market, without forgetting that everybody have to pay the bills and eat.
Same with ACE, i saw a lot of bullshitting. Without Kaiki, no Ace. Simply. It was co-founded and it wasn’t only for the glory. The changes at the head is a different story, one wanted to put on fire the retail and the other followed another angle at different levels, on different volumes and actors. And both were right.
We shared this with Kaiki : retailing is a pain in the ACE ^^
I don’t know what happened to CBG or why they closed. It’s unfortunate. I’d buy lots of things. Destroyer, Caribe, Jarilla Sinaloa at a minimum.
^^This is beautiful.
@Fuel, please pardon my American ignorance, how did France become so influential in cannabis? I mean, we always hear about the Dutch and Spanish. I had been unaware of the heavy French consumption.
I know of France’s scientific advances and engineering capability, very strong. Same thing?
Reading a bit now, interesting Cannabis in France - Wikipedia.
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State of the Beans
Left tray top is a whorled Juicy Woo with 3 leaves. Below that is the good Chocolope. I had placed a small fan on the tray that stressed some of them out (the intent being to develop some stem strength). They are adapting to my low RH.
Middle tray is Juicy Woo, to the right is the isolated post-surgery Chocolope.
Not great. We’ll see I guess. The other thing that is not great are the beans in the paper towel.
I sent Dave an email about my problems, seeing if there was any way for me to get some more of the beans. I would undertake a much more careful approach to popping more beans if I managed to get some.
The choco don’t made it, at this point you should see some green hue due to the light. You can insist in dropping each day a very diluted H202 drop on the cotyledons (+ very diluted K if you can). Sometimes early hairy roots make miracles.
I personally always have random seeds that don’t pass calibration in a drawer to test new technics and to stay sharp. When you start to work with your own seeds, it become too easy overall and you lost a bit the kung fu as well. It’s very important to stay sharp when you re-visit the catalog of Sensi by example ^^
They stopped to retail fast simply because it was less sustainable that providing genetics at others levels. The nutrients line lasted until the economical situation and the competitive paradigm changed.
The influence belong mostly to the customers. France is an historic black hole for all kind of drugs, due to the strategic situation first (hexagon borders) but also by the insane consumption on site. The volumes of stuff never leaving the territory is just insane to believe, at least something on which we maintain the leadership since decades lol. It’s partially why we have so crazy rude laws, even on stuff you can publish on cannabis with the infamous L630 law.
The grip of frenchies is just a consequence of a golden era in term of transmission. You can’t believe how hard we were at this time with our padawans, without any pity. All newbs were forced to learn and read all tutorials (my walls of text included lol) and to show it in their first grow; or they were scorched in public place. Very different with the actual era in many places ^^
The pedagogic pleasure was real too at this time, the content produced was as big that constant. Until the first wave of suckers trashed the dynamic without respecting any code or etiquette, those claiming “money is evil” but ready to everything to make little money. It devastated our scene, so the real “bankable” skills gave up and focused on living from their passion more. It’s why you can see this presence so spreaded, zero influence and just people searching a job to feed their passion and their family. It’s cultural also and very close to our local equation with Auvergnate “pubs” tradition (i’m talking about a multi-centenary structure).
Dutch stay the masters in the game, worldwide. They have learned to everyone out here how to dial the grey areas and economically they don’t hide behind their fingers. I think that if something is done fast with American breeders, we can break the US/NL cycle before Dutch stop to rush Thailand. It’s not only about chains of dispensaries and “weed friendly vacation”, it’s also about enormous facilities of production (at low costs) to change scale and eat everybody. They prepare a bloody war, and absolutely not like Jodrey is expecting it ^^
Spain is/was just a platform, without being harsh or mocking. But on the cultural presence of cannabis, specially on hash, they have the leadership since a while.
Just like Swiss just before. Or CZ now (Overgrow is Czech, not american and a lot forget it too fast for my taste ^^).
The suckers i’m talking about just in up, some come from this universe. They saw the light and was thinking that theory was enough to bang the market and gave lesson to the real people lasting in this game. They all took the wall of the reality in plain face. It’s not because you can write on a paper a chimera that look like a perfect strain, that you’re able to make it in reinventing the wheel of praxis that shown their efficiency and reliability.
But yes, i will be hypocrite if i don’t say that the access of any level of information is a paradise and don’t helped me greatly as autodidact. Specially on hemp, we have centuries of momentum on it and our genetics still highly considered at industrial level.
It don’t explain at all these 5 years of colonization and i will not, it’s just to present the real ground. More fertile that it look.
Yeah was not speaking at the business level. They tried to setup a business model with good faith and willing (seedbank+community with a forum, duplicated for tropical seeds for example), but sure that wasn’t realistic economically. More of a passionate initiative than a real business plan.
It’s the practice of DP I’m grinding my teeth on really: shameless rebranding of and S1 of another breeder.'s work This realm is really is a wild wild west.
That landscape you’re picturing is horrifying @Fuel, the worth being it sounds likely to happen.
I hope dave will reply positively @FieldEffect. Still have the Woos to play with, but a bit more chocolope would be nice. I feel you, I’m battling with seedlings at the moment too. It’s not such a simple task.
Some had my phone number, the door open and was even able to visit me in Catalunia to talk true in person. And this after have done everything they can to push me to hate them. They never understood why, and it was their fall.
At one point common interests should prevail, not dogmas built in a losted island far from realities.
Dutch Passion scaled so hard so fast because they early adopted a peer-to-peer structure. Way before Nirvana with its thaïs. No, it’s not what you think and trust me selling a genetic to Dutch Passion is a kind of recognition in the real scene. Better than a cup. Their Blueberry isn’t a rip of too, and it’s why you can see DP genetics clearly on the DJ short catalog on the “Newberry”.
It’s stimulating for me, as fuck Your share of the Jodrey’s video re-fueled my vibes that started to vanish. It’s why also it’s important to have a true diversity in allies, to push me far from the communication tasks also lmao.
But yeah it’s more than happening and we don’t have much time in front. The big presence of Barney by example in the american setups should already convince you that it’s too late to be frightened.
Ah so that’s what I did not get from your 1st comment then, that destroyer has been sold. Changes the whole thing. Thanks to correct my misinterpretations of the events.
Indeed Barney’s heavy come back is a clue. The legal market is scaling up fast and there’s lot of people on the starting blocks. The next decade will be quite something…
Destroyer taught me a painful lesson. i put off buying it for a long time. they weren’t even expensive seeds! world-class stuff at bargain prices, and i STILL f*cked it up.
It may still be available (caribe too btw @FieldEffect)
Maybe I’ll start doing this. I think I saved a bunch of less-than-great seeds from last year I can practice tough situations.
The pedagogic pleasure…
I was curious about this. They actually seem quite reasonable to work with. At least it didn’t seem like DJ Short was sour with them, and IIRC Breeder Steve was mixed up somehow at some point. I’m not a good historian of weeds but was aware there was some legitimacy behind at least the Blueberry dealings.
Side note, the video you posted somewhere about RQS was interesting. Is Barney’s similar? I assume lots of fuel to the marketing budget, work with white label suppliers but likely have leverage to get good ones. I’d think these guys would be dumping cash into massive development. Who knows. Lots of smoke and mirrors impossible for me to decipher.
@funkyfunk did you get in touch with Rafa? I remember seeing that thread but at the time but decided to not jump on it because something sketched me out about it.
This whole thing about the weed industry, breeders is crazy. I think I’ve saturated my 2 remaining neurons with this stuff for the last two days and it’s hard to understand what is actually true. The next few years will be interesting. Shit, I think the last 3-4 years have been interesting. USA seedbanks have popped up just in that window of time. My last order from the Vault UK was 2021.
Yep I did, got my beans from him.
My neurones are in the same state right now 
Let me guess i’ve again committed a butchery in English, right ?
Barney’s is on the old model, peer-to-peer. Now both know how to work in good intelligence.
RQS still have far better infrastructure, skills and tech now. They also possess Soft Secret and Seed Finder.
Not a butchery at all, rather poetic actually.
