[Chimera]

Jacques was one of the first really good growers I met, someone that consistently produced top quality flowers. I met him, finally, after y sending flowers and seeds back and forth through a dealer friend.

It all started with a friend's dealer- our drummer grew up with this kid in a rough part of town, and Pat, the dealer, survived slinging lbs or weed and kilos of hash. He would pick up a few lbs or kilos and break them down to his runners, and tried to keep the best of the best for himself, operating with a lower quality (and higher margin) for the street. I got to know Pat a little, and he learned that I had too shared his penchant for the top end flowers and hashes.

Pat and I had a standing deal, and he would call me up whenever something truly exceptional came along and I would invariably take a few ounces if it was the top. I would always save him a few ounces of my recent harvest of the top shelf of whatever I was working on, and in turn he would put aside the best of whatever he came across- call it professional courtesy. Back then flowers of the quality I was producing were unheard of in our area, and when I would pull down a few lights it was all spoken for amongst my close friends and a network of dealer snobs that would all clamor to buy a couple of ounces apiece, their allowed allotment. The money men would try to get me to sell them the lot in some underworld coup to control the best, but I had more than their heads to think about- this was about keeping the headiest of my contacts turned on- the local hydro shop heads and owners always wanted to have the loudest, nicest, and most unique flowers to flash to their customers, and since they were all growing the same old Aff and NL mutt lines, they never had anything as special as I had in my stable.

These guys actually pushed me into it indirectly; without their stinginess, I might not be what I have become today; a maniacal seed popper and screener searching for true chemotypic outliers and plants with rare terpene combinations. I remember distinctly, approaching the local hydro shops early in my career, looking for clones and they refused to share... saying "it's part of cutting your teeth", hoarding their production plants to themselves. I'd been growing bag seeds like everyone else and subsequently seeds from head shops, and the hunt for truly elite specimens was not as easy was it it nowadays, there were no seed banks selling in Canada, no Seedbays or Seed-boutiques sending seeds in the mail, hell Al Gore had yet to invent the internet. Finding real gems that stood out took time.

By this time the tables had turned; I'd put in the work and found plants that were better than what these business guys were growing and selling. The upper hand was now mine, I had the kind and I would taunt the store owners with a few 'teaser' nugs while on supply runs- and they were now offering me whatever they had in trade for the elites; genes, equipment, etc. I'd drop $300 ounces on them and they would gripe and moan about the price, but they would each buy a single ounce which they would hide from their wives, girlfriends, and employees- smoking alone afterwork in the back of the store, fearful of the moment after a couple of weeks that would pass before the stash would run out, and they have to smoke their commersh again before I showed up. It was a small niche market, but that was where I found myself, providing high end ounces to the local cannabis 'elite'.

Pat would rarely call, but when he did I knew it was worth making the drive to go see him because at the other end would be some real Manali finger sticks, the real deal original Montreal Chemo, or a fresh batch of Qc purple Indica or Qc "Freeze", and eventually, the 'Jack'. Pat had the connects far and wide, making a living out of slinging cannabinoids, but he never made introductions. It was late '95, and I showed up at Pat's- then a shifty apartment in a roughshod part of town known for bikers and grow ops- a typical setting for Pat. He pulled out a lb of 'Jack', and tossed me a sample that I rolled immediately as we caught up and puffed. I recognized the quality up high and equatorial flavour in this predominantly indica flower, light green and frosty as hell; clearly the grower knew what they were doing and did it with love. I grabbed as many ounces as he would let me take, and headed back home.

I liked the Jack, it was a unique and happy flower and it came back every few months like clockwork. I asked to meet the grower, and wanted to trade genetics, but Pat said he was elusive and never wanted to meet anyone, he did his thing in private and kept to himself, only calling whenever he had flowers to move. In turn I sent some seeds and my best flowers back with Pat, an introductory business card so to speak, hoping Jack would check them out and grant me an introduction after seeing that I also did this work out of love.

Pat asked me to build him a grow, he had a house out in the boonies that had a large basement and they wanted to stick in a 12 lighter and get them up and running with easy to grow clones and a simple system. I ended up getting all the gear and plopped in a 12 light, 6 table ebb and flow system with 3 reservoirs. Simple, self maintaining and clean, and easy to plug and play. I had the whole thing built in a couple of days with labour help from one of Pat's friends, and within a week after we had a few hundred select clones vegging away and ready to flip. I had done up a feeding schedule and told them the parameters to maintain in the rez and it should all go smoothly, just keep an eye out for bugs and there should be no problems if they kept the numbers on the pH/ppm pen in check. They did and Pat showed up one day with a thank you 1/2 lb of the kindest from the harvest, and a request for another 300 clones.

Six months passed without a word from Pat, and then I got a call that would change the way we did things. All he said was "Jack's back, can you come and see me?". It turned out Pat had been under investigation, and another mutual friend had also been popped. Pat had tightened ship considerably, and was on edge after an early-morning raid which he somehow managed to have no plants on product on hand- he'd been tipped a few days earlier and moved the plants at the house, and was now running a really tight ship. He wanted to meet me at a coffee shop about an hour from our regular spot, and it was a bit of a trek but I agreed. I parked my car a few blocks from the spot, and walked in from the rear keeping a tight eye. When I showed up, Pat was sitting with an old farmer looking guy and a biker at a table in the corner. I was definitely the odd man out, and the biker and farmer looked at me with doubt as I approached them with my coffee. "This is him? A little young don't ya think?" Pat said he built and designed my house, and assured them that I knew what was up, and we hopped in a Van and went for a drive, dropping the biker a few blocks down the road.

Then Pat turned around in his seat and said "So this is Jack", which surprised me as I wasn't expecting to meet anyone, I just came to grab some flowers. "He saw the work you did at my house, and wants you to come and help with a project at his place". Jacques said gruffly, "so I 'ear you are the seed guy. I want you to help me take this plant and make it better. I grew out the seeds Pat brought me from you and they are good, very stable, much more similar to each other than the ones I got in Amsterdam. But my guys all want this Jack, its all they want me to grow but its too tall. I want it to grow like the ones you sent, and Pat says you can help me grow them like that". Jacques had a thick, quebecois accent, so I answered him in French which seemed to surprise him. We continued in French, and privately between the two of us never spoke in English again unless Pat was around.

I agreed to check out Jacque's place wanting to see his grow, and we took and trip out to an acreage outside of town. We pulled into an old farm off a concession road, drove past the house and barn and down to an old Quonset structure in the back of the property, set in a small gully away from the road. It was the biggest show I'd seen at that point; two separate 40 light rooms on flips, all larger plants of tall jungly Jack Herrer, which was one of the newest things out of Holland at the time. The Jack of that time was all over the place, with no two single plants looking alike, and didn't have what I now know to be the classic high terpinolene profile almost completely devoid of most other terps, that defines what I consider an authentic Jack Herrer. Jacques had kept 5 different clones from their seed selection that were now in production. 3 of them were really tall and overgrowing even this large garden, keeping the workers occupied full time staking. "We're getting rid of these ones after this crop, because they are too much work. This one here is a great producer but the bud isn't as good. And this one 'ere, this is what Pat has been getting." This plant had a long dominant single cola plant with moderate side branching. The flowers were identical to what I'd been buying, it was unmistakably the same plant. "She's just not 'eavy enough, not as big as the ones you sent me. Can you make it bigger like the other ones and keep the flower the same?" Jacques looked over his glasses at me, waiting for an answer "I can try" I said, "but were going to have to look through a bunch of plants to find it, and that's going to take some space which I don't have right now. I've got my own projects going." Jacques just laughed, "boy don't you worry about space, we got lots of space" and he chuckled, "you just find me that plant, and we'll make sure you have room to work."

"OK, well I'll need a copy of this plant to start with, in three months I 'll send you seed to start and we can take it from there, it'll take that long to make enough for you to select from." Jacques sent his worker to get me a small 18 inch plant in a 2 gallon pot. Pat and I loaded the plant into his van, and got ready to leave. Jacques followed behind and passed me a few ounces of flowers and said "ere, Pat says you like my buds so smoke this and we'll see each other after new years hopefully you have lots of seeds then. Just don't give this plant to anyone else, you understand? We don't want anyone else growing the same stuff, we have to keep the market pure." he winked as he passed me the bag. "Compris , ce n'est pas un problème- merci pour la cadeau" I said as I winked back.

Pat drove me back to my car and tossed the plant in the truck and headed back to my place, keeping an eye out for anyone watching or following. All was clear so I headed by my grow spot and brought the plant inside to the quarantine zone and sprayed her down as a preventative. I let her go for another week just to make sure it was clean, and cloned the lower branches to preserve the genetic, and popped it into flower with my best NL line, what became the pollen input for the Frostbite, GFxNL and Aurora lines.

....to be continued

Wow great to finally hear about your friend Jacques.

Thanks Chimera!

So Jack is a Herrer hybrid. Cant wait to hear more.

On the edge of my seat with popcorn in hand great story so far!

[Scrappy-doo]

I love a good story. Gonna grab me a seat.

[Chimera]

Flash forward 3 months, and the Jack was full seeded an harvested. The following generation was Jack Herrer X NL; I contacted Pat and said it was time to meet Jacques and get the beans growing for the selection.

Since Jacques had been growing for a long time already, he understood the importance of keeping clones from the best plants for production, but he had never done any breeding on his own. We met on a few occasions and they brought me out to a couple of different shows, so we could scope the right place to test the new variety under development. I explained that we wanted to really make the selection in the environment in which they would be growing the plants. It turned out that they not only grew indoors, but also had some blackout style grows they called "rinks". On a few of their farm properties, they would build hockey style ice rinks with boards, and they would stick in small plants that had been topped young to encourage multiple branches, and these would be filled with hundreds of small plants from clone and planted May 24th every year and already be flipping with large blackout curtains from mid-july and they always harvested by mid-August before the helicopters were flying. They did this really effectively, and as a group were harvesting hundreds of pounds of the same flower early in the season, and were done their outdoor runs before the searchers were even looking, and while the growing season was still favorable.

It was decided that we would start plants indoors, and narrow plants down by vegetative characteristics, and make clones of the best in batches (5 per plant), and then flower the plants inside to see which worked the best indoors, and then also have an opportunity to flower out the clones outside allowing for a double screening- one indoors and one outdoors, allowing us to see which plant performed the best under both conditions. I showed him how male plants could be isolated in small grows to collect pollen, and this could then be used to fertilize the plants that showed the most promise in the selections.

Jacques was really into growing for one main reason and that was keeping his family fed but he recognized the importance of having a consistent good quality product that was better than everybody else's. He understood that having the best was more important than having the most, and took great pride amongst his friends and associates of always having grown the best. They grew a lot of bud from clone, but he always had his testing patches and would grow out crosses of the jack line, and even some back crosses to the mother eventually. He became one of my most prolific testers growing seeds I sent him year after year always being brutally honest and telling me which ones worked well in the rinks, and which ones didn't. Jacques truly became a breeder in the sense that he actually worked on this family of plants over a period of about 15 years seriously, continually selecting towards his ideal type and striving to create something uniform and true to type. In that sense, he actually did a pretty good job because the plants were relatively uniform and had a pretty stable floral phenotype, with most people not being able to tell one plant from the next. Sure Jack made some money, but more importantly he kept his own community growing - he had helpers and trimmers, and like many of you he supported a whole community of people that benefited from his work.

Jack never wanted to sell his seeds, preferring to keep it alive for him and his friends to grow, thinking this allowed them to have something unique that nobody else was growing; he didn't want anyone else on the market to have the same flowers as he did.

I moved to BC, and would mainly keep in touch with him by mail and would visit whenever I went home, just to check on on him and his lines and see how life was going.
Sadly, Jacques got cancer a few years ago, and passed in late 2013. I knew he was nearing the end and we'd keep in touch with his wife and send flowers and tinctures from BC, he loved the high quality hashes and we'd always send him some whenever we had it.

I missed the funeral, but decided to go out and see his wife, Sophie, and offer my condolences in person when I was home shortly after his passing. Sophie was really surprised to see us, and a few of our old friends got together and had a meal, and remembered all the great times we had learning together. She revealed to us how much Jacques came to love the work we shared together, and that making the seeds and progressing his lines year after year became one of his great passions and hobbies in life; that it was more than just growing a plant to pay the bills, it was something that he spent a great amount of time and effort and care into, from harvesting the seeds along with his harvest every year, indoors and out, and planting new generations the following spring. He came to love starting his own seeds, and every year planted and made selections, throwing away the least desirable plants, and cloning and sharing the best with his circle.

Right before I left Sophie and Jacques' farm for the last time, she said she had something of Jacques' that she wanted me to have. Before he died, Jacques had put aside a collection of his seeds from what he called his best vintages, in a series of small containers and made her promise that I would get them when I came back to visit. She gave me this shoe box and in it was a hand written note from Jacques that simply said "Vous souvenez-vous quand j'ai dit ne pas partager cette plante? Je comprends maintenant que ce était mon erreur, et je suis prêt à les partager. Si vous pouvez aider à faire ce que cela voudrait dire beaucoup. Jusqu'à la prochaine..."

For those of you that don't speak french, that essentially means "Do you remember when I didn't want to share this plant? I now understand that it was my mistake, and I'm ready to share them. If you can spread these seeds it would mean a lot to me. Until the next..."

I'll never forget the look on Sophie's face as she passed me the box. I said I couldn't possibly take these seeds but she insisted that Jacques had put aside some for his own kids and grandchildren, and that it would be a great honour for me to have the seeds to grow and share.

This is the intention of the Jack crosses available now; I have hit everything Canadian of value I have in the library and a few things that Jack liked as well like the Bubba and the Purps and the Incense Haze. There aren't thousands of each of these, but I hope that somehow they find a sunny patch somewhere in your gardens, and continue to provide you with the same loving relationship that Jacques came to have with the cannabis. If we can learn the lessons that Jacques learned, and can develop the type of relationship with the plant that Jacques had at the end, then I think we'll all be better off and that cannabis will also become as free as Jacques one day.

[Galactic]

Thank you

Inshallah

Beautiful Chimera!

[Chimera]

Now that you know a little about Jacques, it's time for a little more info about the plants...

The Jack Herrer line has morphed since it was first released, and the huge variation comes presumably from the poly-hybrid nature of the top cross which became 'Jack Herrer'; it has been bred and grown by many different hands each putting their own spin on the line. Like I said above, to me 'Jack Herrer' is a line almost pure in terpinolene with very few other terps adding the flavour and scent, and this gives a uniquely 'dutch' quality to the nose... its a smell I associate with walking around between the Damrak, Singel, Lilegracht and Bloemgracht, from De Nieuw Kerk area just north of Dam Square westward to the BloemMarkt near the Anne Frank Huis. To me it just typifies dutch cannabis.

This line I call "Jack", is obviously a little different due the the NL influence that we infused back around '96. I recently tested a batch of old GFxNL seeds (half siblings using the same NL pollen inputs) that we ran through the grow and analytical lab, and I was amazed that such a cross could have such a uniform terpene profile/ finger print between siblings given how the GF throws such variance in a backcross population. Give or take a small degree of variance with respective terpene levels, the overall fingerprints of the siblings were almost identical- the chemist hadn't seen such uniform profiles from any other crosses to date. This was the result of the extremely true breeding nature of the NL that was used in all of the above crosses, including being the pollen input for the line I call 'Jack'.

Overall, as a plant, if I were to make a comparison... it would be in the same family of plants that as a class include C99. That mostly terpinolene and myrcene profile, with the little limonene spike and about equal levels of alpha and beta pinene gives a citrusy nose that some describe as grapefruit and others associate with pineapple - in fact one of the names the jack got in our group locally is PineappleJack.

The almost total lack of sesquiterps (beta caryophyllene and humulene mainly) really takes out any spicy or woody component and leaves a nose that to most, land squarely in "fruity". It's a clear, non-muddy experience that allows you to keep functioning, and the entourage keeps the clear-minded and functional perspective. On her own, I find the plants to be day-time smokes, and are easily tolerated by people that don't smoke as often as some of us. They are very easy growing plants on their own, and the only real drawback from them for some is their slightly less rigid stems that can become especially floppy in low light conditions, or if you don't have sufficient wind to strengthen the branches.

I'm not trying to confuse anyone with the name 'Jack', but this line is really no longer what I typify as 'Jack Herrer'. It's shifted into it's own family for sure, and doesn't fit the variety profile or terpenotype of the original. I can tell you though, that grown right, this one is productive and has irie vibes, bringing positive thought and open-minded expansion of thought.... its not dumb you down, flog you mentally cannabis. For inexperienced growers that can keep a good solid environment, this makes an excellent hybrid plant that tolerates abuse and will power through most f-ups. They tend to come in on the early side of approximately 8 weeks, which is what I consider the absolute earliest cannabis should ever be harvested. We've had a few limited reviews so far, but I know what these plants can do and I'm looking forward to seeing how these perform across a range of gardens; I know we're going to see some impressive results from Jack while they last.

-Chimera

[Lester Beans]

That is a great story! I wish more people grew with love and respect for this great plant. Sounds like a good friend, am I am sorry to hear he passed. His genetics will live on though, mine are on the way, and are slated for a very sunny patch of garden!

Thanks for sharing Chimera!!
Best,
Les

[Krausen]

This the the thread we've been waiting for! Thank you chimera! Jacques should be proud to see his work spreading across the globe. I look forward to seeing more grows of the jack - he's been kind to my garden.