By Amari Emani

Your friend just gave you some “premier” seeds. 50 to be precise, from an intentional or unintentional cross breeding incident combining some really heady strains. And so you’d think that if you successfully sprouted all 50 seeds and chose to focus on the twenty strongest, healthiest females, which you were able to pick out of a line-up, that each of these 20 plants would eventually blossom into flowers of similar color and structure, trichome formations and terpene profiles. Serious breeders know that exactly the opposite is always the result of an unstable cross breeding incident, no matter how meticulous a grower is about keeping every variable constant and consistent with each of the resulting sprouts through finished flower. What surprised us most is the depth and breadth of the variations across the board and the grab bag differences of the resulting F1 phenotypes (sprouted seeds from the same plant).

Danny and the home team at Oregon’s Uplifted recently sprouted 240 seeds (24 seeds from 10 different cross-breeds). Based on the surprise value of its characteristics, we chose to focus the lens on “8541”, an unstable cross from Pat, the breeder at Heroes of the Farm, named after his first grow house address. The “8541” hybrids pictured are the resulting females of the Raspberry Kush and Guinness cross. Guinness is also Pat’s baby, however it is a stabilized phenotype of an intentional Scooby Snacks/Mystery Machine OG cross. Pat is the breeder behind popular cultivars such as Galactic Jack, Jacked Up, Loco Motion, Space Candy and Marionberry Kush.

Nine of the 24 seeds in the Rasp-Guinness case were female and the variations between the nine F1 phenotypes pictured are as diverse as the humans that cultivated them, from top to bottom–cola structure, node spacing, leaf and flower size and color, trichome formations and amounts and terpene profiles–each with varying medicinal and psycotropic effects too. Each of the phenotypes was uniquely stoney and really we needn’t say anymore but rather leave as much page space as possible to present the evidence. Thanks again to Danny and fam at Uplifted for tuning us in and sharing this harvest with us and the rest of the world-we stuffed hundreds of bowls at Canna Con in Seattle with the resulting cured nugs from this photoshoot–give thanks.