Jerry's seed company was Exotica seeds, I believe I posted that earlier in this thread. Jerry's Orange Spice was a combination of Afghanica and sativa. Jerry would be a wealth of information regarding the lines they imported to California, from Laos, Thais, Viets, Lumbos, Mex, Indians, Afghans, Kushes etc. Jerry is still alive but in poor health these days.
BTW, how are you doing BH? I got some pics of the Purple Thais just starting to flower and show off the purple traits.
Also with regards to Romulan, there is a cutting in Arcata/Mendo that I've tried which is something special. The taste is very sweet and not piney, the high is very clear and social with an absolute clear euphoria. This might be remnants of the original Romulan.
Sorry I missed that info you posted, I'm only as far as page 46 out of 53, it's a long thread!
I know Jerry B is ill, that's a real shame, his book is really good, not sure all of it is 100% true, but I think the bulk of it is and the variation from actuality is probably more due to the vagaries of memory and attempts to protect identities etc. than any bad motives. A mutual friend passed a message to me from Jerry a while back, I've since lost all interest in the historical research I was doing due to personal problems, so I never followed up on it, it would have been great to pick Jerry's brain, but life got in the way.
My own health has been slowly declining since I got out of jail in Holland, so things aren't very good for me right now, I'm also without a computer, just I happen to be house-sitting for a friend this weekend so I'm taking the opportunity to play with his fancy Macbook!
Glad to hear the Purple Thais are doing well. I lost the bulk of my seed collection and the original Purple Afghan stock is gone, as is the Purple Thai work. I did try growing out the remaining pure Thai seeds and only got three to sprout, two were crappy with hardly any vigour, the third was a monster that refused to show sex regardless of light schedule, I eventually tossed it after nearly 6 months of patiently waiting! If anyone still has some Purple Thai seeds, I highly recommend making f2s as there won't be any more of them and there is a lot of potential for great plants in that line, roughly 75% of the females I've grown or seen grown by others were purple, and there were some excellent individuals. I always planned to further work that line as I saw a great deal of potential there.
I expect the original Romulan is still around, but I doubt it will be easy to track it down. When things in Cali started turning sour in the late 70s a lot of the bikers who were doing much of the breeding and growing got on their bikes and went north, some of them to the remoter parts of Oregon, some of them kept going until they hit Vancouver and the islands, they were the guys who started the indoor growing scene in the PNW, the Vancouver scene was started by bikers, they would setup in barns and other remote buildings, DIY recirc dwc systems (the infamous 'biker buckets'), they'd dig a hole in the ground to put the res in and keep it cool, setup a couple of dozen buckets, hang 40-50 lights in bare vertical fixtures and grow trees. Krusty and doubleds have documented this style of grow in great detail, if you ever saw any of Krusty's old threads, that was exactly how the bikers were doing it. These were very crude setups, they'd use whatever they could find, plastic packing peanuts were a common medium for the baskets, as was river gravel (lots of rivers and streams in that part of the world, lol) and they used basic nutes like powdered 20-20-20 all-purpose with some 0-50-30 mono PK powder. Of course, there are still loads of guys up there still doing this kind of thing, where do you think the bikers get their bud from?
Anyways, Romulan came out of that early biker bucket scene up in the islands of Vancouver and I expect it can still be found up there, but it will be closely hoarded and unless you're a patch-wearing member with the right connections I can't see it being very easy to get close to getting hold of a cut.
I wonder how many orders Neville got from guys who had moved north from Cali and discovered the seeds they took with them weren't suitable for indoor hydro growing? The sativas that flourished in the Cali sun weren't going to work in a biker bucket setup in a barn in Vancouver or Oregon so they needed new genes. Things like Northern Lights were bred in the region to enable indoor hydro growing, but I expect that a lot of those guys sent some greenbacks to Neville for new seeds. Quarter of a century later, Neville would probably love to get hold of the original Cali genes the bikers discarded when they moved north, funny how things have changed.
Incidentally, there is a guy in Canada called doubleds who really rocks one of those recirc DWC bucket setups with bare bulbs, he was one of two guys who invented a motorised sifting screen, it was featured in HT and they reckoned they took two of them to Amsterdam for the first cup in 1987. The story is one was to be a prize for the cup, they say the other one was given to Neville in exchange for cuttings of his two best indicas - G13 and NL5. Doubleds still has both cuttings and has done many detailed grow threads showing them grown as huge trees in his recirc DWC system. Just wondering if Neville remembers this and can confirm it's true. If it is, it means doubleds still has the original G13 cutting. Few years back I sent doubleds some seeds that were an inbred derivation of 'Pacific' G13 x ('Airborne' G13 x Black Widow) a line that was notorious for producing mostly male plants (the few females to be had were killer) so that he could make a cross to his G13 cutting, last I heard he had grown em out and selected a couple of choice males but hadn't had time or space to devote to pollinating the G13, I should get in touch with him, I'm sure the original G13 is something that would be worth preserving and spreading.
P.S. Sorry for taking things a bit off-topic!
_~
