It’s been a while since we have had a journal entry from the grow, I’m happy to be reaching out to you now and hope you are enjoying this sunny Summer season. The retail teams in Grand Rapids and New Buffalo continue to chug along, through the gyrations that is the Michigan cannabis scene. We remain committed to our customer service and local option, and thank you so much for all your support over the years!
Today, I hope to shed a little light into our grow operations. We continue to refine the processes and offerings from the grow. For us that means sowing new seeds from time to time, to keep our flower flavors fresh , fun and evolving. Recently we purchased three packs of Coolio seeds from California. Coolio = Capjunky (female) x Caps Frozen Oranges (male). I prefer to germinate seed under a full moon, we seem to have the best germination rates in those conditions. From there about 35 Coolio plants sprouted , a mix of male and females. These 35 plants had unique:
Geneotypes – think genes that seedling plants inherited from their parents. What’s on the inside of the plant.
Phenotypes – characteristics you can see with your eye, observable by changes in the environment and driven by those heritable genes.
We grew all 35 plants not knowing what mixture of genotype and phenotypes we would encounter come the flowering period. This is what I love about growing from seed, the unique varietals you find along the way.
Once in flower approximately half the plants were male. Those were discarded because we are were in hunt of female flowering plants only. The remaining ~ 18 females were flowered over 9 weeks at 12 hours of light on , 12 hours of darkness. It was in that period where you get to observe each plants genotype & phenotype come to life. We number each plant, photograph it, and document its characteristics. For us as a commercial cultivation facility we look for plants with phenotypes that check primarily three boxes:
- Aroma – Smell of the plant and flavor of the smoke
- Testing results – including THC and terpene content
- Ease of growth – how picky the plant is, branching, ease of propagation, ease of trim for post harvest.
So here they are! Our top 10 Coolio female plants. We feel these ladies have all the ooey gooey genotypes and phenotypes we like. From here we’ll test, smoke, and re grow the plants. Results of those rounds will help us further refine down to our favorite plant, there can only be one.
When we have our next harvest (60-70 days from now) I’ll try to shoot out an email. Hopefully you can stop down and try the unique phenos of this killer plant, Coolio. Thanks for reading!
