It’s a blazing hot 92-degree (33°C) day at the Casa Flor farm in Willits, California, and the first attribute of the towering cannabis plants that I take in is their ability to shade me from the sun. Two days after the autumnal equinox, the coolest place to be is down in the dirt among the stalks, listening to the drip of the irrigation. I’m part of a fact-finding tour to discover the world’s best weed, an annual expedition hosted by the Humboldt Seed Company.
The mission for myself and the international group I’ve joined is to gather data on which cannabis plants look, smell, and produce best. By the end of my journey, I will have traveled nearly 500 miles, driving through Northern California towns shaped by lumber mills and the fortunes made by dredging things out of the earth in mines. And, in the end, I will have joined an exclusive group—pot prospectors of the modern era, searching for something almost as precious as gold: hash.
At the close of each outdoor cannabis season, Humboldt Seed Company hosts a tour that takes visitors to the farms they work with to show the methodical and time-consuming work that goes into creating new types of cannabis and selling seeds. Cannabis plants are rare among flowering plants in that they don’t reproduce in one form; male plants have pollen sacs, and female plants have the flowers we smoke.
Cannabis gains traits from both sides of its lineage, male and female, and just like with sisters who share the same parents, the genetic results of a coupling are similar, but not identical. Creating cannabis in seed form means growing out and inspecting different phenotypes, or versions, of the same cross, picking the best one, and then stabilizing the …
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Author: Ellen Holland / High Times
