Questions for Sam the Skunkman on Hindu Kush Indicas

[Bumble Buddy]

real skunk from the early 80's, was the best damn dope around. 99 out of a 100 people still agree to this day. the super stinky stuff. no doubt at all about this.

If you are talking about the road kill type skunk then I agree wholeheartedly (althougth I know that maybe a couple prominent members of this community would disagree, "proletariat smoke" heh). Whenever I detect the smell from an actual skunk animal nowadays it immediately brings on a rush of good memories from those days, the same is true of my friends from back then.

 

[Sam_Skunkman]

To tell the truth I don't want to write anything longer then short posts. And there is no chance I will bring out an old RKS anytime soon, it is old and uninteresting to me and I only work on what is close to my heart. If RKS was the best I can't help but wonder why no one has a clone of one, the RKS was around for years as seeds after clones were introduced in the late 70's? Then it would be easy to STS the lady and get pure RKS, not even real breeding work......
BTW, when I had RKS varieties I used to enter them in California Harvest festivals and won first place many times, all the time I was smoking Original Haze at the festivals, but because my OHaze was super stretchy It had no chance in the contests which was part a beauty contest of how the bud looked bagged, the OHaze looked like shit, but was way, way, better pot in my book.
There are many people who like the dankness of the RKS, often they prefer Indicas with knock-down couchlock, over up soaring strong as hell but clear Sativas, I do not.
No disrespect to any of them I am a firm believer in different smokes for different folks, but they need to solve their own supply needs.

Hashmasta-Kut,
Maybe the people you know, but not the people I know, they prefer the sweet skunk#1 maybe 3 or 4 to one.

Steele,
I don't remember the names of the Japanese hemp Varieties I grew, 5 or 6, I could look it up.

-SamS

 

[Guest]

Some males have resin on the leaves around the flowers, many do not. While all have some resin on the male flowers.

-SamS

Just wondering Sam, is selecting males by their resin production a good way of finding the most potent male from a given selection from a certain variety?

 

[Guest]

Just wondering Sam, is selecting males by their resin production a good way of finding the most potent male from a given selection from a certain variety?

Selecting anything by its appearance alone is ill advised. The best way to select a male in my opinion is to smoke it and find out exactly what it has to offer. At the end of the day, its all about the smoke. Bag appeal can only take you so far...

 

[Guest]

I agree about selecting based on visual criteria, making kif from males has proved enlightening to me in the past, I found a truly exceptional Blueberry male by making kif from all the BB males and smoking it to determine flavour and potency, I found one that made hash as good as that from the BB females in taste and potency, he happened to have the strongest smell, even in veg and the best health and vigour so that choice was a no-brainer. I nly knew he was truly exceptional when I got to grow out his progeny, so far everything I have grown that was fathered by him was superb.

 

[Sam_Skunkman]

To be honest I don't smoke males they are just to lightweight for me for any sort of proper judging. I will test an unknown male with GC to confirm the THC/CBD ratio and % then smoke the progeny from the male and find the best result. It is what has worked best for me in the past, so I will continue to do so.
And no a male with lots of resin may or may-not have any THC at all, I understand why you folks are smoking males I am just glad I don't have to, I am willing to do a lot for Cannabis improvement, but smoking males is a bit to far for me. Remember I don't like to even smoke buds, but I will when needed, I smoke resin.
-SamS

 

[GroovySituation]

Very interresting thread...thanks for all the infos and clarifications...

 

[Guest]

Ah yes, smoking males, what a pain in the ass, smoking male flowers is not a particularly pleasant or tasty experience, hence I collect the male flowers, dry them and shake them for kif, this seems to work okay for me. I would dearly love to be able to GC males, one day I hope to have such technology to work with. I wasn't talking of using visible resin to select males from landraces, I was thinking of fairly stable, truebreeding IBLs - F5s and F6s where all individuals produce similar levels of THC, surely then, where there is comparatively little variation, would visible resin on males be a valid selection criteria?

I recall many folks at the last icmag cup expressing their amazement at Sam's smoking of resin, the conscensus was something like 'that cat must have one helluva tolerance to smoke rips of resin like that' and knowing the potency and quality of Sam's resin, I must agree! lol

Sam the Resinman!

 

[cway]

'that cat must have one helluva tolerance to smoke rips of resin like that' and knowing the potency and quality of Sam's resin, I must agree! lol

Sam the Resinman![/QUOTE]



That should be the qoute of the day.. Has a catchy ring to it.. I take one rip of my Dry Kief and Im on cloud 9 for the rest of night..

 

[guest3854]

Sam , I'm happy to hear that I'm not tha only one who doesn't smoke males . IF GC isn't available , what other criteria do you use for selecting males ? I think what folks are trying to pick from your brain are ways of getting around having to grow out progeny to select tha best father . Over tha past couple yrs there has been an influx of folks lookin' fer pure breeding material , wondering if you have any plans on releasing anything like that ? We've become interested in seeking for a killer South Indian among other thangs ... Would you say that ALL Japans plants growing , are hemp ? That is what I gather from your response . If so , I'm glad I'm not tha one spinnin' my wheels . If you would , list those varieties , always love to learn on a subject as passionate as this . On tha subject of CBD & CBN , wouldn't tha best way to maximize those would be to grow out quality cannabis with high THC levels and cut 'em late , past peak , when CBD levels are rising as THC is degrading ?

Londinium , you've seen tha "Skunk" thread . Obviously NO ONE on tha boards knows where to find tha RKS . And anyone who smokes tha Skunk#1 knows that it's a up high , but with medium potency . Nice smoke , but need to smoke a grip to get that "plink" hit . You know what I'm sayin' .....

Much Respect ,
Steele

 

[Pops]

Steel, I think you are confusing CBD with CBN. CBN is the degraded form of THC, whereas both THC and CBD come from CBG. Under certain acidic or alkaline conditions, CBD can be converted to THC. If you leave high THC strains to go longer or let them cure for a very long time, the THC will degrade into CBN through long term storage or exposure to light and air. Other than treating insomnia, there are few medical needs for CBN. On the other hand, CBD in a neuroprotecter, anticonvulsive, antiemetic, anti-inflammatory and relieves anxiety.CBN is mildly psychoactive and CBD is non-psychoactive.

 

[Bluebeard]

Steel, of course I'm not sam, and I seem to be answering questions addressed to him. I suppose you wanted an answer from him or else you wouldnt have addressed it as such, but these are things I like to discuss. So, forgive me if I'm butting in.

CBD is not created, at least not in any significant way by the degradation of THC or any other process involving THC as a precursor. CBD is more of a genetically predetermined alternate to THC from the same precursors.

As for the question about Hokkaido landraces, it depends on what you mean when you say hemp. If you mean that it has a history of being selected for fiber or seed production, then yes it is hemp, but that is unrelated to potency. Japanese landrace can be quite variable, and some are definitely not bred for fiber production, but more likely have a background of being selected for seed production while others are bred for fiber. Some of the Japanese cultivars average about 3-4% THC in the female floral clusters, which is a little above the median for mexican bricked grass, a weaker sensi durban or about half as strong as skunk 1, or probably the same as some lowryder samples.

"A survey of the THC, CBN and CBD content of hemp from all parts of Japan was reported by Dr. Keizo Watanabe. Marihuana from Tochigi and Hokkaido regions contained a 3.9 per cent and 3.4 per cent THC, respectively." From the UNDCP

Interestingly, The Tochigi and Hokkaido samples (both of which are on the island of hokkaido, kind of like New York or Sao Paulo which are both the name of a state and a city it contains) I have are taller narrow leafed plants, as opposed to the wide leafed afghan types such as the Obi or Dosanko. Depending on who you talk to THC levels of this sort would be considered ditchweed by some, but since there is no background of breeding for potency, these levels I'm sure can be increased with some proper male selection. Levels of this sort are comparable to the most potent feral plants in the tropics which are unselected for potency, and on par with many South African varieties bred for potency. This makes some Hokkaido varieties a far far superior option for breeding fast northern varieties than using feral hemp, or Ruderalis which typically contain less than 1/10th of these levels.

I feel that vigor is selected for too heavily by most breeders when selecting males, especially breeders which don't find an objective way of selecting for potency or resin production. High cannabinoid or resin levels take a lot of energy away from the plant. As I eluded to before, time and time again plants allowed to go feral in even some of the sweetest climates lose potency and tend to revert to levels below 4%. This suggests that natural selection which favors vigor and hardiness tends to select against potency. I believe that population conditioning where a population of well selected plants out of a large population, and not removing traits which have little to no significance, but still having the highest standards, and placing the majority of your efforts on selecting males, is the best route to take.

Aside from smoking the males, I select based on the size, density and frequency of glands which form in precise rows on the pollen sacks, the resin production on the leaflets subtending the flowers, and the production of nonglandular trichomes which have been shown to be directly proportion to the frequency of glandular trichomes in the females of many varieties. This proportion of nonglandulars to glandulars varies substantially from one variety to the next doesn't really hold true, but it does tend to hold true within a specific variety. The nice thing about this is that nonglandulars not only develop very early but their production requires less resources, and seems to stay true to the genotype despite environmental influences.

Using this technique for male selection, potency can and has been improved in almost any line. Also, in just a few generations, noticeable glandular trichome production starts to occur on many of the males, which then makes selection even easier, allowing one to easily gauge the terpenotype as well as have a very good idea about the resin production, almost as if it were a female.

 

[Londinium]

Londinium , you've seen tha "Skunk" thread . Obviously NO ONE on tha boards knows where to find tha RKS . And anyone who smokes tha Skunk#1 knows that it's a up high , but with medium potency . Nice smoke , but need to smoke a grip to get that "plink" hit . You know what I'm sayin' .....

Hello SteelSavage,nice to make your aquaintance.
Yeah I have read the RKS thread(I was just being obvious,its an English thing)and it was very interesting and fun in its rightful place.But as I said b4 I have nothing aginst any type of cannabis and wasn't telling anyone what to smoke.If we had any RKS I'm sure u r right and it would be stronger than a sweet skunk1,I never said it wasn't I just said I liked it better thats all.
The point I was really making was that continually asking another breeder to do work he said he doesn't wanna do is quite rude! Especially when that breeder has siglehandedly done more for Canna than anybody,Dont you agree with that?
Anyway Sam has already had to come to the Kush thread to repeat himself again about RKS again so I did waste my breath...Oh well....
How are your Ladies growing anyway? Whats tickling your pallette on the kush side of things? Any Faves SteelSavage? JBo

 

[Guest]

Great thread, I'm learning lots, thanks for sharing the knowledge guys!

I've never been to Japan buyt I have visited the Czech Republic and studied (in no scientific way at all I must add!) the wild, feral cannabis growing in the Poltava region ofMaravia, this is a feral population descended from crops planted by the Romans from Scythian hemp seeds. The plants are quite varied, I visited in early September and there werre both 6-7 foot large plants and foot tall tiny ones alongside. I rubbed a small ball of charas from the nicest tall female I found and it was fairly potent, certainly it got me high as I hadn't had a smoke for a week at the time. The dried buds I collected from the plant were bad, the taste was shockingly awful and upon examination under my 40x handheld viewer the trichomes were pretty widely spaced, nowhere near the density you see on indoor grown drug cannabis and many of the triches didn't have heads - were just stalks or were just heads with no stalks.

I only collected buds from 4 females and all tasted awful, the taste was so bad it wasn't possible to smoke enough samples to really get a feel for their relative potencies, but one sample was probably very low in THC and high in CBD as it made me tired and not high, one sample did actually get me high and if it hadn't tasted like dirt I am sure a few joints of it would have done the trick nicely.

I brought loads of seeds home and a friend grew about 20 plants from them indoors under 3 x 400w lights. I've only seen a few bad boile phone pics of his crop but he said that some were pretty resinous and quite potent - he compared the potency to Top44 and Hollands Hope grown outdoors. Some weren't very resinous and had no potency he said, and he reckoned with some selection you could get a fairly potent line from those genes. He was looking for autoflowering plants and didn't find any.

What I think these Moravian feral plants represent is cannabis sativa that has been introduced to an area many centuries ago by man and has adapted to the local climate. Further east in Europe in Hungary and what is now the Ukraine, the feral cannabis is classed as ruderalis and is low in potency and often autoflowering. Moravia has harsh winters but in summer enjoys a mediterranean climate - it was 25 degrees in early September when I was there and I got a nice tan in a week. So the feral cannabis here hasn't had to adapt to conditions as harsh as further East and is a little bit closer to it's original form than the ruderalis varieties, but whether it should be classified as cannabis sativa var ruderalis or cannabis sativa var indica I don't know. I reckon there must be some plants that AF as I saw tiny, single stem plants that were probably autoflowerers as they were dying off at the end of flowering when the tall 6 footers were a week or two short of being fully ripe and wouldn't start to die off until the end of September when the little plants would have died and gone.

I don't think these Moravian plants are of much use in breeding drug cultivars but the fact they are unselected for THC/CBD production is interesting if you wanted to find CBD producing plants. I know there are also feral populations further south in Romania and Bulgaria and that the Balkans and Greece also have feral populations. A member posted here at icmag that his grandfather told him the old hemp crops they grew in Yugoslavia pre-1948 were very resinous and the female flowers could get you very high, although that's anecdotal evidence and I have no idea whether the feral populations descended from these old hemp cultivars produce any THC or not, it's not really safe to go exploring the Balkans these days and the last decade of lawlessness has meant there has been lots of illegal outdoor cultivation in the former Yugoslavia and Albania, judging by the quality of the Balkan weed I bought in Milan a few years ago, they certainly weren't growing modern commercial genes, it was probably a local variety of some kind and I wouldn't have smoked it if there had been anything else available. I scored some moroccan hash the next day and tossed the Albanian schwag.

Given then hash production was only banned in Greece in 1932, I wonder what remnants of those old hashish crops remain? I saw a hillside covered in foot tall, brown-green plants that were just starting to flower on the island of Kos in 1995, no idea if they were planted or wild, I imagine they would have ended up as 3 foot single cola plants when they finished flowering, reminded me of pics I've seen of plants in Morocco - lots of brown and yellow tones because the soil is thin and poor and there isn't a lot of moisture. I suppose they could have been descendants of some old hashish cultivation gone feral but to be honest they could equally have been planted by someone as a guerilla crop.

I wonder, does anyone know if there are wild cannabis populations that are high in THC without careful selection of the best individuals? I'm guessing that the wild populations in places like South America and Africa will be fairly potent sativas, or is it the case that all cannabis, when not maintained by man and gone feral reverts to low potency? I've read about rubbing charas from wild sativas in Nepal and Tibet, is it really the case that they rub quality charas from wild plants or does all the high quality charas come from cultivated plants and charas made from wild plants is low quality?

 

[jimbroker]

British_Hempire: Thank you for sharing your traveling experiences and how they relate to cannabis! From your experience, it sounds as if there are lots of landraces that are domestic to certain locales but that have not been cultivated for potency in awhile. I also think your experience attests to the high adaptability of cannabis to its environment.

 

[Guest]

Hehe I'd love to hear some fo Sam's travelling experiences, but like he said, he doesn;t like writing long posts, sadly....

Any plans to ever write a book Sam?

 

[Dalaihempy]

Hi all this questions for sam or any that may know.

When you test an unknown male with GC to confirm the THC/CBD ratio and % then smoke the progeny have you ever found the male to be a poor selection still after the testing.

I am asking becouse i know from watching this program on cannabonoids reseptors in the brain there is a lot of research going on now and from what this researcher sed was in short they realy dont know that much as yet on the topic and could that be a factor why some people like sativas and others like indicas.

I my self smoke test males i do it after they have shown sex and i take the small leaf from close to the flowers to smoke test.

I like most use to cull my males unless i planed on making seeds soon as they would show sex.

I worket out by chance years ago males can be potent when i gave a friend a male plant to mix with his hash the next day i get a call he tells me to come over so i went saw him as i got there he sed that leaf you gave me is realy strong you dont need to mix hash with it to get high i thort bull shit and told him so he sed smoke some.

Long story short i smoket some a party cone worth and to my suprise i was nice and high from that point on i always smoke tested my males.

Your not going to work out if it will carrie across taste or smell but you can sure tell the type of affect it has meaning high or stone or something in the middle but most importently the potency as you would smokeing a flower/bud but it tastes like grass clipings.

The thing i worket out by testing my males like this in hybreeds was fem plants as in keepers can be found in a small number of seed if the strain is a good line ( a strain thats infact been breed and tested ) even in a quolity line not all fems are equal some are okay but some are just special but findind a potent male is way harder to find.

 

[Sam_Skunkman]

Dalihempy,
"When you test an unknown male with GC to confirm the THC/CBD ratio and % then smoke the progeny have you ever found the male to be a poor selection still after the testing."

Sure all the time. Maybe it does not have good combining ability with the chosen female, maybe the progeny are not uniform, or the taste sucks, or the effects are not what you are after, lots of things...

How about if you smoke the unknown male does it mean you will like all the hybrid progeny, or are any poor selections?

I understand why breeders might need to smoke males, but when anyone tells me that a male is good smoke I wonder what they would say about what I smoke.....
I do know lots of people that won't smoke my dry sift because it is just to strong, they say, they mostly smoke a bit of Cannabis with a bunch of tobacco, must be about like smoking strong males pure without tobacco....

-SamS

 

[DocLeaf]

Nurturing nature!

Nurturing nature!

In retrospect, I think we are kind of saying something similar. I believe that through selective breeding many of the broader wild varieties and possibly some feral and domesticated varieties can be bred in the direction of Indica or Sativa, just as you are suggesting was done in Yunnan. It is just a matter of population size, population breadth, and selective breeding. I also don't believe that the full distinction between indica and sativa phenotypes was something that completely occurred in the wild but is a man made phenomena, something that it fully repeatable using the right population and selective breeding.

Nurturing nature - like Durban Poison - which is a sativa that flipped to act like an indica, by a reduction in photoperiod geographically and via heavy selection... way back when.

In general:

Plants from Afghanistan / Hindu Kush come in a variety of shapes and sizes.
In certain cases some plants could be described as indica/sativa (mixed).
Several sub-species / cultivar are also recorded from Afghanistan as "tall" and "growing wild",,usually in an aqueous setting. Although to which extent these plants are domesticated / managed / irrigated is often unknown.

peace
dLeaf

 

[DocLeaf]

Hi Sam

Got a quick question for you please

From which region of Afghanistan did the 'Afghan' in 'Skunk #1' come from?

Many thanks in advance

Peace
dLeaf