Importance of Keeping Old School Strains Alive

[Renfro]

So my buddy has been going to Amsterdam yearly for most of his life as he has family there. He was telling me that the weed there went to pot pardon the pun. He was saying that one of the coffee shop owners was telling him that they have inbred their lines too long and the genetics went bad. The coffee shop owner said that we have better weed now because of all years of underground growers cloning from clones. My buddy said he kept using the term monoculture. I thought that term referred to cannabis being the only crop in the grow not a single strain of cannabis or single phenotype, and without having been there I don't know what the guy was trying to communicate. My buddy is not a grower but he loves to smoke weed.

I am not sure if he is right about that being the reason their weed went downhill but it is plausible. I think that the genetic diversity would be at risk if cloning from a clone as the sole means preserving a strain but I do see how keeping the old pure deal around using cloning would be beneficial for back crossing your strain that has been perpetuated by seed, sort of bring it back up to spec lol.

I have always thought it important to keep the pure old school phenotypes around, cloning from a clone, to prevent any sort of issues from inbreeding. I don't believe in genetic degradation from cloning as I have run strains for over 7 years and I have a buddy that has run some over 20 years with no issues, he still has them. I also think if a genetic degradation happened, it would happen to one clone, not all of them and it would be noticed and tossed out. I think that inbreeding would be more likely to cause issues as the coffee shop owner from Amsterdam was saying.

What does everyone think about this issue?

Disclaimer: I am high, as was my buddy and most likely the coffee shop owner.

 

[DaFreak]

That's basically what you hear a lot. Original mothers and stock were lost and since they call came from a handful of lines anyway that they lost the purity. Used to be that a strain would go back one or two generations on their description and you'd be like, "I know what this is." but now the mothers and fathers are completely unknown. I am actually looking forward to genetically modified plants because that's when they will be able to design back in these things. So they haven't been lost, more like buried.
I for one mono cropped for 15 years or so. So I believe there are still people out there with original skunk somewhere. The Godfather of all.

 

[Renfro]

Some of the best weed I ever grew was Shiva, had a ten pack, 8 were female, very stable as there was very little variation. A pure landrace from the India Pakistan border. Can't find it anymore. Just crosses like Shiva Shanti or Shiva Skunk, That pure Shiva was the strongest indica I have ever smoked. Yields were stellar. It is the only strain that nobody could ever build a tolerance to. Even after 7 years of smoking it, one hitter quitter, like the first time everyday. Everyone said that about it. Had the town of Lawrence on lock for a long time with a guy that would sling it all to the college kids spending mommy and daddys money.

Things like that are getting lost. I even contacted the seed bank I got the Shiva beans from back in 2003 and they said they can't get it anymore.

 

[DaFreak]

What I find surprising are the people who say weed is so much better these days.

 

[Renfro]

What I find surprising are the people who say weed is so much better these days.

They probably didn't have good connects when they were young. lol

 

[RolandBurnem]

I even contacted the seed bank I got the Shiva beans from back in 2003 and they said they can't get it anymore.

Which "Shiva" and from what seed bank? Which coffee shop?
The seeds are still available because I'm sure they're still somewhere, in a drawer perhaps, somewhere,in america.

 

[thumper60]

What I find surprising are the people who say weed is so much better these days.

trust me any one smoking in the late 60s early 70s would never say that

 

[Renfro]

Which "Shiva" and from what seed bank?

Was from Nirvana in 2003

 

[conor c]

Was from Nirvana in 2003

Not 100% sure and its a old thread/old genetics but i think this is related to the shiva rsc sold a while back maybe ask angus if this ever be reproduced or available again i could be wrong but it wouldnt suprise me especially when u look at nirvanas description

Shiva (Nirvana Seeds) :: Cannabis Strain Info

This strain is named after Shiva, Hindu god of transformation. Shiva has genetics from India giving it a pungent Eastern spicy aroma. Shiva is a bushy plant with good yield and quality. Shiva is vigorous and pest resistant making it a good choice for...

en.seedfinder.eu

Garhwali Shiva (The Real Seed Company) :: Cannabis Strain Info

Region: HimalayaGenetics: Pure Himalayan Charas PlantLatitude: 30NRegional Harvest: mid-October - first week NovemberYield: 1kg - 2kg outdoorsAroma: spicy and tangy, incense, hashCharacteristics: soaring high, vigorous, great medicinal potentialA uni...

en.seedfinder.eu

 

[PadawanWarrior]

Not 100% sure and its a old thread/old genetics but i think this is related to the shiva rsc sold a while back maybe ask angus if this ever be reproduced or available again i could be wrong but it wouldnt suprise me especially when u look at nirvanas description

Shiva (Nirvana Seeds) :: Cannabis Strain Info

This strain is named after Shiva, Hindu god of transformation. Shiva has genetics from India giving it a pungent Eastern spicy aroma. Shiva is a bushy plant with good yield and quality. Shiva is vigorous and pest resistant making it a good choice for...

en.seedfinder.eu

Garhwali Shiva (The Real Seed Company) :: Cannabis Strain Info

Region: HimalayaGenetics: Pure Himalayan Charas PlantLatitude: 30NRegional Harvest: mid-October - first week NovemberYield: 1kg - 2kg outdoorsAroma: spicy and tangy, incense, hashCharacteristics: soaring high, vigorous, great medicinal potentialA uni...

en.seedfinder.eu

Ren's gone bud.

 

[RetiredToker76]

How far back are we talking?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/health/cannabis-anicent-dead-marijuana.html

Human's have been using Cannabis for at least 2500 years. I seem to remember finding an article they'd found a silk road traveler with 3 lbs of dried cannabis back to 3000 bce but I can't find the article, so until I find the article I'll go with 2500 years ago. By 500 bce we were well into our way of hybridizing crops, if we were smoking weed back then, we were probably hybridizing it. Chinese hemp back to at least 4000 bce. We might have far superior technological controls today, but they weren't exactly slouches back then either and were already breeding for preferred traits in most plants.

There's already genomic research going into cannabis. It will be interesting to see what they find out about its genetic history once they parse it into layman language. I personally didn't smart smoking weed until the mid-90's and then quit for upwards of 15 years. So I have a very limited perspective on what 'old school' strains would be, but I'd venture to say that I've not had any truly old-school strains. I remember in the 90's old guys who smoked in the 60's complaining that 90's weed wasn't even close to the same. <Shrug> No frame of reference, I wouldn't know a 1968 Thai Stick strain if I smoked a lb of it.

Much like the banana, we'll probably never actually know what the original genetic profile of the plant was. Even before humans were on the scene wind and animals were crossing the different genetic strains of cannabis.

GMO weed will be interesting but I bet the first target is going to be mold and pest resistance, followed to by flavor and potency bumps. Genetic archeology for the connoisseur will probably be on the back burner for a decade or more to come.

 

[TheWholeTruth]

So my buddy has been going to Amsterdam yearly for most of his life as he has family there. He was telling me that the weed there went to pot pardon the pun. He was saying that one of the coffee shop owners was telling him that they have inbred their lines too long and the genetics went bad. The coffee shop owner said that we have better weed now because of all years of underground growers cloning from clones. My buddy said he kept using the term monoculture. I thought that term referred to cannabis being the only crop in the grow not a single strain of cannabis or single phenotype, and without having been there I don't know what the guy was trying to communicate. My buddy is not a grower but he loves to smoke weed.

I am not sure if he is right about that being the reason their weed went downhill but it is plausible. I think that the genetic diversity would be at risk if cloning from a clone as the sole means preserving a strain but I do see how keeping the old pure deal around using cloning would be beneficial for back crossing your strain that has been perpetuated by seed, sort of bring it back up to spec lol.

I have always thought it important to keep the pure old school phenotypes around, cloning from a clone, to prevent any sort of issues from inbreeding. I don't believe in genetic degradation from cloning as I have run strains for over 7 years and I have a buddy that has run some over 20 years with no issues, he still has them. I also think if a genetic degradation happened, it would happen to one clone, not all of them and it would be noticed and tossed out. I think that inbreeding would be more likely to cause issues as the coffee shop owner from Amsterdam was saying.

What does everyone think about this issue?

Disclaimer: I am high, as was my buddy and most likely the coffee shop owner.

Alot of the seed industry is based on early work done in holland. It became illegal to grow weed to make seed in about 1995 and by 1997 2003 alot of the actual mother and father plants making the first generations of most of the strains we know were lost. Then you had a situation were replica parents or further generations were used and sold under the original strain names. And also many people jumping on the band wagon early 90s onwards were they wasnt realy breeding but taking strains and just inbreeding them to later generations and releasing them under well known names aswell as just renaming things. It all led to an eventual decline . In the early days with the best breeders you could find many keepers in a very small amount of seeds. A pack of 10 regulars were maybe 3-5 would be male and the rest female you were sure to get a few good keeper plants.
Even now not alot of breeders dont know how to breed but instead just cross hyped clone on to hyped clone.

 

[conor c]

Ren's gone bud.

Thats a shame oh well its there if anyone ever wonders where nirvanas shivas from at least cheers mate

 

[Thundersnow477]

So one of the reasons I'm here is this topic.

I had purchased seeds (Northern Lights) from the seed bank and was in the super sativa club from High Times, yes in the olden days. Actually corresponded with a guy called Nevil who was the dude back then.... It was one of my first gardens, a wooden hydroponic table lined with fiberglass and the standard 1000w metal halide bulb on a garage door opener track. I had also reached out to friends to give me their seeds, which of course we all threw out from the rolling tray.

I see some posts that laud all the strains we smoked in 70s 80s as great. Truth as I remember it is there was some really killer smoke but you had to pay up. Much was compressed, or super seedy Mexican that was dry and shaky. The good stuff, was perfumy. Haven't tasted stuff like that since. I feel the Vietnam war was bringing us the Thai stick and other quality sativa. I remember the Super Skunk that came along later that stunk the whole house up triple bagged. But whatever the source I added all my friend's seeds to my grow.

After spider mites, occasional floods and completely arbitrary day to harvest I came out with the best tasting garden I have ever produced to this day in 2022. I'm not going to go on about the good ole days here. But I have in the last 5 years or so got back into growing, paying the top dollar for genetics and getting disappointed every harvest. The variety and taste in that first communal garden I started was out of this world. Even the Mexican turned out super piney. The Northern lights looked better than the teaser picture in the catalog and tasted like heaven. The subsequent seeds I purchased from seed bank where exactly what they said they were and made me a very popular guy when harvest time rolled around.

So where are they? If the genetics have truly been lost because we are all a bunch of high on's , so be it but there has got to be landrace breeds available. Or new ones that are comparable to maybe a Super Skunk, Thia stick......

 

[xtsho]

So one of the reasons I'm here is this topic.

I had purchased seeds (Northern Lights) from the seed bank and was in the super sativa club from High Times, yes in the olden days. Actually corresponded with a guy called Nevil who was the dude back then.... It was one of my first gardens, a wooden hydroponic table lined with fiberglass and the standard 1000w metal halide bulb on a garage door opener track. I had also reached out to friends to give me their seeds, which of course we all threw out from the rolling tray.

I see some posts that laud all the strains we smoked in 70s 80s as great. Truth as I remember it is there was some really killer smoke but you had to pay up. Much was compressed, or super seedy Mexican that was dry and shaky. The good stuff, was perfumy. Haven't tasted stuff like that since. I feel the Vietnam war was bringing us the Thai stick and other quality sativa. I remember the Super Skunk that came along later that stunk the whole house up triple bagged. But whatever the source I added all my friend's seeds to my grow.

After spider mites, occasional floods and completely arbitrary day to harvest I came out with the best tasting garden I have ever produced to this day in 2022. I'm not going to go on about the good ole days here. But I have in the last 5 years or so got back into growing, paying the top dollar for genetics and getting disappointed every harvest. The variety and taste in that first communal garden I started was out of this world. Even the Mexican turned out super piney. The Northern lights looked better than the teaser picture in the catalog and tasted like heaven. The subsequent seeds I purchased from seed bank where exactly what they said they were and made me a very popular guy when harvest time rolled around.

So where are they? If the genetics have truly been lost because we are all a bunch of high on's , so be it but there has got to be landrace breeds available. Or new ones that are comparable to maybe a Super Skunk, Thia stick......

You can get landrace seeds. There are lots of people growing landrace strains. Might want to check out these threads if you haven't already.

The Real Seed Company (RSC)

Haven't found another thread on here for RSC, so here's a quick post on my experience. I bought a few packs off seedsman of sinai, parvarti, and nanda devi. Started the Sinai thinking it could be a cool landrace. I used 1gal cloth pots and prob let them get too dry, but the males all started...

rollitup.org

Ace seeds

Are ace seeds suppossed to have hybryds who are more pure than og kush, purple kush and strains like that i mean if they are less genetically modified than modern strains like more close to landrace.Because they have hybryds but i guess those are more pure?

rollitup.org

 

[Thundersnow477]

Thanks for the links. I will investigate.

However I failed to make my second grievance clear. I do not trust current seed outlets due to my experience of late.

I guess I'm left with traveling to Amsterdam as poster does.

Also have no wish to hyjack thread here, it's been years since I've posted on a forum lol.

 

[Nope_49595933949]

In hoping my AK Bean Brains gear has that old school funk.