UPDATE 27-Jan-20
Robert here from Deep Ellum Seeds… I hope everyone is doing good. I apologize for not keeping up with the boards like I should; I will make a concerted effort to keep up with tags and dm’s…
I was going to amend the previous “6 month update” post from last summer, but then after I wrote this I realized it was really long and too much to just add into the original post… didn’t want to add to the thread at the bottom as a reply either, because you’d have to scroll to find it… so its a new post altogether. I also saw it was made in Feb 2019, i thought i wrote in the summer of 2019? anyway, so this is like a 11 month update, LOL…
Thank you all for your support and love. We officially re-launched our public efforts in April of 2019 and since then, we have been overwhelmed by the positivity that we’ve received. We had been underground for 10 full years and were unsure of how, if at all, we would be received by the world. Everyone has been super cool and very welcoming.
As our way to say “thank you” to the community for all the support, we will doing another a Free Seed giveaway here on Overgrow in the Trading Post section. Just comment with your name. The giveaway is open until 02-02-20 at 1900 GMT. (feb, 2, 2020 at Noon mountain time in the states).
Since last time, a lot has happened. Here’s the Good and the bad:
The Good:
Dr. Dank and I have been working like crazy to sort through genetics. From Nov 2018 through Dec 2019, I did 24 pollinations, which is like 1 pollination every couple of weeks. That is really fast moving, for me… I stabilized current lines, created new lines, burned through a ton of gear and was able to advance several of our on-going projects.
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I had some setbacks in 2018 and I got relatively little done, in regards to breeding. So, I over-compensated by doing only breeding in 2019. I pretty much shut myself off from the world and bred for the whole year. I would wake up, go the grows, and then go home and go to sleep. I literally didn’t do anything but grow weed. But I’m proud and happy because I got so much accomplished.
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While I lost myself in my work and I shutoff the outside world, Dr. Dank did the opposite and went on a public relations mission to introduce us to the community in person. He made great strides by fostering relationships and creating a presence for us in the Colorado community. He made friends with dispensary owners and wholesale buyers, attended cons, cups and other events and did all the tedious face-to-face bridge-building work for us.
What Dr. Dank accomplished publicly was more valuable than the breeding I got done. You cant sell genes unless people know who you are, and he made sure people got to know us. I couldn’t be prouder of him. He loves people and loves talking, so he’s like: its not a big deal. But it is…
Dr. Dank also got our genes in the hands of some dispensary owners. I think he said Kaya was one of them… Hopefully there will some Deep Ellum retial weed available in the summer… We gave Viola some seeds also; not sure if when they would utilize those… but I think its cool that they would be willing to grow our gear, if only to test them out…
Grape…
Our most popular strain of 2019 was the Jolly Grape. We knew when we dropped the Jolly Grape that it may change but weren’t sure until we ran all the different scenarios with multiple potential line choices. It was re-release of the Grape Romulan we created in like 2002, using a select fem from the 2004 s1 gen as a starting point… which we dropped last year as a f1bx: (2004 s1 grape x (2004 s1 grape x NL5))
I had also had done it 2 other ways which were never released: as an ibl, going from f1 to f3, and cubed (going from f1bx to f1bx3)… After comparing and testing all 3 of them, and all the offspring, and thinking about it, we chose to go with the bx3 for 2020. We didn’t want to go directly inwards from s1 (ie: to s2 s3 etc) and chose to start a regular line and begin by going outwards one step away. and chose nl#5 because, I know NL5 the best of all and its predictable. And stable, like the grape. What’s different is that I just took it further by going back inward towards the original grape plant, from that point. We have just a few of the JollyGrape (f1bx) remaining, and once those are depleted, we will stock the new f1bx3 and call it simply “grape bx3.
The original grape in case your wondering was an ,(afghan/mexican/ federation’s 7of9 and federation’s mikado). I made s1 seeds in 2004 and those are the starting point for the whole reissue project. The original does not exist. All the backcrossing and such was done with s1 from 2004 as the anchor point…
Marshmallow Cookies:
Also, last year we dropped a f1 poly called “Marshmallow Cookies”. It was popular and I liked it myself. I chose to select an f1 and bx to parent, so when the remaining F1s are gone, we will stock Marshmallow Cookies as an F1bx. This will mean slightly more uniformity and predictability than the F1 provided. It would have been simpler and a whole lot less costly for me to just make more f1s; however I chose to bx so that the consumers would have something a bit more solid to work with…
MarshmallowCookies is (exotic mike’s thin mint/gg4) crossed to the Texas cut of (ic mag cookies x gg4).
Old School:
We have a few oldschool strains lined up, including an early 90’s texas hash plant that’s great for humid and moist climates, and our favourite Mexican hybrids and some inbred landraces, among others.
One I can tell you about will be a reissue of the Santa Marta Gold that we strain-hunted for in Columbia in 1970. We did it a few different ways; and settled on a hybrid of original stock bred to some ‘72 columbian that Dr. Dank picked up, and then backed to our 70, then linebred off of that towards the 70. I also have a pack of a different ‘72 from Sinister and we will crack those and see how those compare. I want to see how the 70/72/70 and the 70/72/70 x 72 will perform, and compare the results before we make a decision. As I write this, someone else said they had some 72 columbian or 74? Idk, but Dr. Dank is securing some of those seeds for us to play with also.
Another oldschool one will be an Afghan, based largely on the Afghani that we brought to America nearly 50 years ago. IDK yet until I get of them grown and tested… any retail seeds would be Fall 2020 at the earliest. We have an idea of what we’re doing… but to cover all the bases, I did crosses with our Afghan line and the SSSC afghans we have (m4 and m10), and sssc versus 71 kandy. We’re doing tests now of everything… hopefully soon we’ll have a better idea of where we want to go with this. And by fall we should have something… We’re mixing pure and true-breeding strains, with a million times more integrity than modern gear, so I don’t anticipate the normal 2 year wait for something stable…
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Skunk #18
Another project we are working on is with the Comacus Skunk18 beans we got from here. I’m told the ratio of roadkill is 1:20…
We got 100 seeds, and noticed there were 3 distinct sizes. That could mean all sorts of things, including nothing at all… but i thought it was interesting enough and worth noting…
I’m going to keep it simple. I will tell you I will do it… So I start with the 100 beans… I figure 50 will be females, and two of those should be roadkills. (1 in 20 ratio). Once I find them, the plan is to select one and cube backwards for smell. I figure that once I crack the 100 seeds, it will take me 22-30 months to get a true-breeding roadkill.
This is all assuming there is roadkill in the sk18 at all. If not, thats ok, we have secondary and tertiary plans of action… It seems from what ive read that most of the attempts were with afghans or working towards afghan side. .Dr. Dank and I have believe the skunk smell comes from Mexican. We could be wrong, which is why we plan on working afghans as well as our legacy Mexican sativas into this sk18…
I really wish that Nature farm or whoever, didn’t do an open pollination… IDK why they would do that??? anyway, Dr. Dank and I have a few potential things we can add into sk18 that we think would make it stink… but educated guesses can only get me so far… I wont know until I grow out the possible combinations and formulas for myself. This is another project that started internally as a passion project, but if we get it down, then we will add it to our retail catalogue. Again, by doing different scnarios concurrently, we hope to have a real skunk weed strain in seed form available in about 2 years…
Northern Lights.
Northern lights is the most special strain to me. It was the first proper dutch gear I ever got and it was game changer. We maintain a handful of NLs but the 5 is the one that is most special to me when it comes to breeding…
This all started around 2015 when Dr. Dank and I recognized that we should probably replace our house NL5 male, as he’d been around for some time. I could’ve taken a cut for our current male, and got a new male that way, or I could’ve just inbred my male 5 x my female 5, but that would just be more of the same…
The plan was acquire a different 5 from either the PacNw or from old seed bank stock, choose a male, and pollenate my female seedbank 5. Then from the resulting f1 offspring, choose a male to replace my current male and become the new “house nl5 breeder male”.
My thinking was that since any pure inbred NL5 that I would find would be 30+ years apart from ours, would’ve be inbred separately by unrelated people in a different part of the world, which would mean there would be minor differnces and variances between any one I could find and mine. I thought that there may be just enough minor “regional” variances present, that when another nl5 and my nl5 were recombined, the resulting f1 would have vigour… … Obviously not “hybrid vigour”, but would at least be more vigourous than you would get if I had combined some other male and female siblings from a 30yr old inbred line that never left my sight. And more vigour than if I had simply crossed my 5 into my 5.
So that’s what I set out to do…
I grew many different NLs over the pasy few years… and eventually, last summer, I found a legit NL5 from Sinister.
Out of a pack of 10, 9/10 cracked and all 9 sprouted.
But, I only got 3 males. One male was the runt of the pack so he wouldve been discarded anyway… I was left with 2 identical males. I chose the slightly more smellier of the two, and that’s the one I selected. I discarded all 8 other plants…
I took Sinister’s PacNw male and hit my female seedbank 5, making 5x5 f1’s.
Out of the resulting 5x5 f1’s, I chose a new male to become our “house breeder male”, and now we’re good to go.
This was a huge accomplishment for us and we’re glad the search is over and can use the new male to finally advance some projects that had stagnated. I had a few more 5x5 seeds than I needed to, to find a male, and we’ve chosen to give those beans away here.
Currently we do not have any plans to add NL#5 to our catalogue. If u want NL#5, u can try for free seeds through our giveaway on Overgrow, or simply buy it from Sinister.
In our search for a legit 5, it became painfully apparent to us that NL1, 2 and the 5x2 were also hard to locate. The people that claimed to have it, were hording it… Seeing how there isn’t any much legit NL that’s readily available to the general public, we have chose to stock the other three popular NLs… I don’t anticipate a huge demand and im sure they won’t sell like new gear does, but we chose to begin stocking NLs because if someone does want them, they won’t have to go searching…
Look out for an NL#1 and NL#2 in the coming months. Also, a 5x2…
I haven’t decided to drop a (5 x 5x2), or as a (5/5 x 2), or just make a F1 of seedbank 5 crossed with the #2. Probably the latter… so we will probably carry the f1 of seed bank 5 crossed to the seed bank 2, or flip it and do it as a 2x5… I need to grow the possible combinations and see, before we can consider adding anything to our catalogue. I still have my old seedbank male (haven’t discarded him yet) and I have the new 5x5 male that I made. And we have the seedbank 2 and SSB 5x2, so I have some choices. Althohg I am leaning towards the idea of a straight f1 hybrid. (I can call it f1hybrid because all the NL p1 that I have is true-breeding (and/or “pure” depending on who is defining “pure”.) so any hybrid would be a real, actual F1hybrid.
There was a seed-strain of 9x1 that Nevil sold in 86 and in 87, and also clone-only 5x8 in Holland back in the late 90’s, which Dr. Dank and I both think are lost strains… We have tried to locate both of these and cant find them anymore. If we ever do locate them, we will totally be stocking them for everyone…
We do have plans to restock our house-NL, the NL#4. We re-released it in 2019 using 2002 stock. Look for those sometime in late summer.
New Stuff:
We have plenty of newer gear coming up soon also, some cookie stuff and stuff with modern cali gear. Yes, most is hype, however some is legit… There is a difference between “hype” and being “popular”… not all of the new stuff is hype. Most of it is hype, and goes to shit when u breed with it, like cookie fam debaucle or when cap tried to make mac seeds. But some new stuff, like I got some dying breed and cannarado and some other stuff and some of it is turning out to be really killer to work with… we’re having fun crossing old stuff into the new gear… look for some new-blood hybrids and old/newschool mashups, around the 2020 holiday season… here are some results so far.
THE BAD:
Our most pressing impediment is our plant-count. We have yet to secure a tier plant-count high enough for us to be comfortable and really go at it. ,. So we are limited on how many plants we can grow at any given time. We had to get clever with our current limit and had to utilize our own personal medical allotments, since all of our “caregiver” plants had to be seedless. This will change soon.
We had hoped to acquire more land by now and ramp things up. However, it’s proved to be more challenging than we had anticipated. We should close on some land in the very near future. As long as we have more land by April and have it prepped by snow, we’ll be good to go.
The January 2020 Indo Expo in Denver came up too fast and I forgot about it until around Christmas. We were unprepared and too late to get a table, however as I said, Dr. Dank attened on behalf of both of us. He handed out a few dozen packs of seeds to people; he made lots of friends; everyone was so cool… We will be more prepared and we will get a table at the 2021 indo expo.
Website:
We had our website shut down suddenly after like 6 or 7 months of being up., with the hosting service NameCheap citing the Ryan Act against us. Even though I hadn’t set-up a shopping cart or payment gateway yet, and seeds are not drugs; seeds cannot get you “high” and seeds aren’t even a scheduled substance. In fact, the UN’s world-wide drugs schedule specifically exempts hemp seeds from classification and from scheduling. (Article 28, paragraph 2 of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs treaty.)
We had no recourse. We lost all content and text. This taught me to back-up my shit up on a portable HD. Don’t type directly into the site editor; type it on your laptop and copy/paste the text to your website… or you’ll lose it like I did. NameCheap also locked our domain name, even though it was paid for through Feb 2020, and wouldn’t not allow us to transfer the domain. So we had to buy another domain and find a weed- friendly host, which I did. The new website is on the Deep Ellum instagram page. I contacted everyone but I think some haven’t changed it. Like, seedfinder I think still lists our old web address. Once my old domain becomes available, I will buy it again and make it re-direct.
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Challenging Strains:
A few strains are turning out to be more difficult than expected. For polys, I am less stringent because they’re not supposed to be stable. But the gear that I put years’ worth of work into, I have a high standard which sometimes proves difficult for plants to live up to.
Hazes
The hazes I hoped to have done by this time (jan 2020) aren’t solid enough (IMO) to release.
This one old haze, heavy sativa leaning hybrid from texas, was what we wanted to drop first but I cant get it the way I want it. I did it 2 ways and then went 2 ways off of each. This slowed things down,… which slowed down all the sativas and stuff like that, because I had grouped them all together. Because I group plants by flowering time… the hazes and sativa-heavy strains got pushed to winter 2020.
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The Black…
smh. Working off old stock and coming up with something that encapsulates the original is not easy. I did it a few different ways and still cannot get full purple. I can get leaves and some calyxes but not all flowers…
I want it to breed true or at least come close (>80%) for total purple. Its not there yet. That’s why u haven’t seen hardly any photos or anything. We really want this one to be right. Depending on test runs we do, we may send some out over this coming summer. Its too early to know for sure.
We have limited space but what really slows me down is time. I can only have 1 active pollen-source at any given time. To avoid accidents, I give myself a buffer of 2-3 weeks inbetween pollinations. I use different males, and even though my seed gardens are separate from one another and the chance for error is slim, I am too afraid to have more than one male shedding pollen at the same time…
Big breeders have the advantage over small guys like us, because the big guys will simply use 1 male against dozens of females, or they have multiple areas running concurrently, each with its own male and set of females. Until I can get more indoor spaces, and more room outside to test stuff, im stuck going slow…
So, there you have it. We’ve been working away and have some cool new things slated for 2020 release. Follow us here and on instagram for updates on releases…
You can DM me here or through IG, or contact us through our website. Again I apologize for taking so long to get back to the boards… I get busy and time gets away from me… I love all of y’all and on behalf of Dr. Dank, we sincerely appreciate your continued support.
Cheers,
Rob
