To Dan, sorry, I definitely jumped the gun on blaming growers over clubs (gets a little heated talking about something you care about haha). On strain name yea of course but what I'm saying is that you find it incredibly consistent that say, a strain like Romulan or Grapefruit kush is low grade, and I mean EVERY time!
I've personally grown Grapefruit Kush mindblowingly amazing.
Looking up Romulan, I'm seeing 7 tests of outdoor Romulan testing out over 20%, one over 25%.
http://www.sclabs.com/scl-tested.html?samplename=romulan&Cannabinoid=Select&sampletype=Flower&filter_order=a.DateTested&filter_order_Dir=DESC&task=public&limit=10&start=20&Itemid=352
While I agree with you that it's not a great strain in general, with the right grower it can be very good.
Even worse, three of the absolute best strains I've ever had were imported from mendocino county and I only believe it because they were the highest quality strains I'd ever had, if not quite the strongest (Mendocino Woody Kush, Purp, Mendicino Purple kush) and everytime a club has had something with Mendocino in the name it is of course low grade or not special.
90% of the bud coming out of Mendo is midgrade. Almost all of it is grown on large outdoor farms and almost all of it ends up in LA or being exported out of state. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying people in Mendo are bad growers, quite the opposite, they are the best in the world at what they do. But what they do is to put out the largest quantity of outdoor possible focusing on yield and bud size. They aren't trying to grow top shelf bud out there. Most of them anyways. The other 10% of the bud coming out of there is absolutely incredible, and 10% of the bud coming out of mendo is more than 100% of bud being produced in most counties.
So yes, while you can get awesome bud out of mendo, you're more likely to see their outdoor cash cropping bud.
It makes you want to smash your head against the wall when trying to discern fact from fiction when you don't have the time or space to grow out a gazillion packs/clones.
Well, what happens is a broker goes up to Mendo and buys a 100 pack for 1200 per pound, then brings it down to SoCal and sells it to dispensaries for $1500 a pound. They then turn it around and sell it to you at $40 an 1/8, making a $3600 profit on it. So yeah, they're buying that stuff because it's cheap and they can mark it up higher. It's another greedy dispensary thing...
So how do clubs decide what's in?
Based on what people buy. If they buy a pound of something, and it sells real quick, they get it again. The clubs don't really decide what's in, the customers do.
Is it really just hightimes magazine?
Not really. I'm a professional who keeps up with the trends and I haven't even looked at a hightimes magazine since highschool. It's irrelevant to me.
I never saw girlscout cookies in socal until it had an article in HT and then BOOM all of a sudden all my favorite clubs have it.
I just googled it. Looks like that hightimes article was Oct 9th. I did a site: search, and the first time it's even mentioned in hightimes is in June. You'll see that I started a thread in a desperate attempt to search for girl scout cookies in March, months before hightimes was aware of the strain. It was already a crazy then. I made that post after several months of searching for it. I've met people who said they starting growing it last summer. It was already a trend a year before girl scout cookies even hit hightimes. It went through the bay area like an unstoppable force of nature. It just took a little longer to hit LA. I don't think hightimes was a relevant factor in it's demand. People were going absolutely nuts for it long before hightimes was aware it existed.
Also, I know it's grower skill so then why are some clubs ok with accepting such inferior quality and selling it topshelf?
Clubs will sell bud at whatever price people pay for it. If they can buy shitty cheap bud and sell as top shelf they will as long as people buy it.
This is of course an extremely short sighted thing for clubs to do. It's amazing how badly most clubs run their business. They don't seem to understand that if a customer goes to their club and pays for top shelf bud and it's not top shelf quality, those customers likely won't return to that club. But they don't see it that way. They are only concerned with profit margins and how fast it sells.
Or better question, are all the skilled growers just growing out what's in demand?
Some are. If I know of a strain that's in high demand I sometimes will try and mix it into my room. I'll chase down high demand genetics. It's always better to have something people will buy based on name recognition. You get more money for it. But that's not what I'm doing right now. Right now I'm doing strains that were really popular 3-5 years ago and have kind of fallen off the map. That's why I'm running AK and Casey right now.
One place I frequent they had say 5 strains tested and MK Ultra was one at 21%. MK Ultra is supposedly a very powerful strain (memory is failing this late but isn't it somehow related to/an offshoot of the chemdawg family or diesel?)
MK Ultra is fire if grown correctly.
Yet it smelled like basic chronic, or hay, and was tasteless and bland in high.
Bad grower. It's either old, improperly stored, or your tasting the nuts. Likely it's the nuts. If it was fire bud to begin with it likely would have sold before it had a chance to get old.
Seems to be a common grower mentality that if you pump a plant full of as many nutrients as possible you'll end up with better bud. But that's bullshit. Nutrients are literally for nutrition. You can't get better bud by overly fertilizing your bud. It'd be like if you went to the gym and needed protein to build muscle so you went home and ate 20 steaks. If you do that you're not going to get 20x stronger. It doesn't make you more healthy. But for some reason people think that the trick to growing plants is to give them way more nutrients than they need. Well, it just doesn't work that way. But it's common wisdom that it does for some reason, so a lot of growers like to pump there plants with as many nutrients as possible. The result is a lot of shitty tasting bud.
I know not to trust thc testing,
It's generally accurate within the same lab, but completely inaccurate if you compare results from one lab to another. Different labs use different equipment and have different standards. And yes, some labs are better than others.
Steep hill is a good example. Nothing there ever has tested out above 25.6% thc. But other labs test out strains at 28% on a regular basis. Generally 20% bud at most labs will test out at 16% at steep hill. Of course I've had the opposite happen. My trainwreck tested out at 17% at SClabs, but then on steep hill's equipment it tested out at nearly 22%, so IDK... Basically I'd say never compare test results with one lab to test results from another lab. As long as you're only comparing tests from the same lab they are generally reasonably accurate.
it's just frustrating when I have had a strain before (even repeatedly) that was outstanding and everytime I have it legally it's just a terrible representation.
More than one dispensary I've vended to would buy my buds sell them for a few days, and then swap them out with a shittier version of the same strain to trick customers into buying overpriced crap. I've stopped vending at a few places because of this.
This whole clubs capping price thing seems really one sided since I'd heard younger starting clinics and clubs are really likely to getting shut down quickly? I wasn't sure how things ended legally speaking with the various ordinances and measures getting voted on, but I thought I'd heard that only clubs that'd been open two years could LEGALLY stay open (clearly not the case). Anyway still open to any suggestions on the places to go.
Sorry, I'm not familiar with your area, I'm south bay area. Anything east of Oakland or south of Santa Cruz might as well be on another planet as far as I'm concerned.
