Big Sur
Well-known member
interesting, so Mazar-I Sharif Afghani, do someone have experience with that landrace and can confirm it stinks alot ?
i'd be curious to see such pictures if someone still have it.
what is mendo jo role in all of this adventure ?
thanks for sharing ( love your signature ) was already saying it before seeing it
haha
good day
IMO, Mendo Joe was just a courier (as Nevil calls him) like Watson was. The more I read and see and talk about it with old friends in Central California, Watson just took local bag weed seed to Holland with him or got beans from others like Mel Frank and Jerry B's ex wife. Skunk, Cali-O, Durban, Haze, etc. Mendo Joe, apparently a friend of Watson's, likely did the same. The story I heard from several bikers in the Santa Clara Valley was that Mendo Joe (aka: Alaska Joe) got a cut of Romulan from the South SF Bay area bikers, which was brought in through Ft Ord by some army guys which they brought back from Korea. Ft Ord was the home of the 7th Division in Korea at that time. Makes sense to me. I never heard anything good about Mendo Joe, and I never heard anything else to support any other source for the Romulan strain. I may be wrong, but the bikers loved Star Trek aliens. They named a 50:50 mix of vodka and antifreeze a Klingon. They would likely name a weed strain Romulan. I did not hang with the bikers long back in 1975, but long enough.
In my experience, skunk was a California phenomena, likely from several breeders in NorCal derived when Afghani seeds hit the NorCal scene in the mid to late 1970s. It may have also popped up in Holland at that time from what I have read. Skunk was all over and in several grades from super stench on down to light skunk smell. Which Afghani was it bred with? I do not know. I was a sativa landrace grower then and I am a (mostly) sativa landrace grower now. Past F1s, I have little interest in hybrids. I do not grow many indicas.
As for early sinsemilla and seeds in bag weed during the early 'home grow' and larger scale grow days in the mid to late 1970s, few knew much about growing sinsemilla in NorCal early on. Nor did we know about herms. Most were landrace sativas grown locally, and typically it was lightly seeded weed up through about 1980. Similar stuff was coming in from Mexico, called "highland Mexican" now. Maybe 20-30 beans per oz. Compared to 200 beans in a typical oz of Colombian, or 100 seeds per oz of Mexican. That was what I typically saw in NorCal anyway. Some early sinsemilla was completely seedless, and sinsemilla became more seedless as time went on. Purple and skunk were all the rage. So people grew it. But skunk reeks and growers were put off by having to mask the smell or get busted or ripped off, and the stench was bred out in the Emerald Triangle. By that time large scale growing had all moved north to the ET.