If you read the article about the history of White Widow on Seedsman
I have, but it has been a long time (and I was probably high).
website they mention Dutch Passion and Nirvana being the only guys that got packs of seeds from Shantibaba
A lot of those guys used to work together. Seems like the relationships are kind of convoluted - reminds me of a bunch of strippers passing their boyfriends back and forth. Many breeders bought (and continue to buy) other breeders' strains in seed form, which means they ended up breeding from F₁s of the strains. At other times, some of them managed to get clones off one or more of the actual parent stock. This was probably more likely back before Scott (Shantibabba) opened his own seedbank, but I suppose that there is still some degree of cooperation among various groups/combinations of people today. But those statements are meant in the general sense, not in regards to any one specific strain.
Here and there a breeder gets busted, p!sses off a partner (which probably explains why Greenhouse only seems to sell feminized seeds these days, lol?), or for other reasons ends up losing one or more parent plants. I've read about that happening for a couple breeder's white widow parents, and that this has caused them to have to "recreate" their version of the strain by way of other breeder's seeds(!). But I do not remember which breeders that applies to - which means that I don't know which breeders are still selling the same version of white widow that they sold as recently as 2005, let alone years before that. Those waters are murky, and I am kind of crispy around the edges anyway.
I have heard that Mr. Nice's (Shantibaba's) Black Widow is the version that was originally sold at Greenhouse back before everyone got mad and took their ball and went home (so to speak). But I was thinking that Mr. Nice was one of the breeders that I had heard lost some parent stock (I don't really know, though) - which really worries me, because I would like to be able to purchase "a few" packs of Nevile's Haze at some point in the future, go on the maddening hunt for "The One," and have at least some hope of succeeding again. And I don't know if Nevile Schoenmakers - who I always considered to be the King of Cannabis, regardless of what that <BLEEP> Arjan Roskam calls himself... after all,
Nevile used to live in the Cannabis Castle
- is even doing any breeding work again. I heard some time last year that he was having health issues, dealing with hepatitis C (et cetera). Another strain whose parents have been lost, AfaIK. But someone told me, IDK, five or six years ago that the (then) current version was "pretty good." IIRC, the keeper that I used to have took 18 or 20 weeks to flower, so (contrary to seedbank descriptions) at least
some "examples that take longer than 16 weeks to flower..." really ARE worth considering, heh. Wish I had spread cuttings of that one far and wide, but no one else (that I knew locally) wanted the hassle of growing it; everyone sure came around at harvest time for some reason, though :rolleyes3 .
I guess the "simple" answer is to hit the lottery and buy a bunch of packs of all the "old-school" (and close to it) breeders' versions of WW and grow them all out, then pick the one(s) that suit me best.
From everything that I have heard, you didn't miss anything... good.
I was going to get drafted so I enlisted.
Two (IIRC) of my uncles followed that strategy. Didn't work for them. But back then, boot camp would have been a significant step up for all of my family (who chose to enter the service) - getting to eat something every day, not having to walk to the nearest creek for water and then carry it back, and they didn't sleep all that many more to the "bedroom" in the service than my aunts/uncles had to (okay, that last is an exaggeration). Oh yeah, I almost forgot - flush toilets! But...
the cost.
Had family members in the army, (brown-water) navy, and air force over there. The
least of them was a better man than me. They're all gone now. The one that died earlier this month... Today, Mom recalled the story of when they were little kids. Their neighbor whipped them off his property for picking up apples that were rotting on the ground (at a time when the kids were starving with little or nothing to eat, as per usual). So Mom decided that she was going to sneak back and ride the guy's horse - and took her little brother along. They climbed a tree (being too small to "climb" the horse, I guess) and were going to jump onto the horse's back. Her brother was afraid to jump, so Mom said she'd go first and to jump right after she did. She jumped... and when she landed, the horse took off, so her little brother ended up jumping out of the tree onto the ground, lol. I guess it wasn't the first time he'd ended up getting knocked out tagging along with my mother... Err... Methinks the term "white trash" wouldn't have been one that they would have even heard - something like that sort of loses its relevance when the person living on the other side of the holler (hollow
) is considered to be rich because he owns a radio - and has electricity with which to power it. But... you get the picture. I'm sure that, when they learned that there was a need for people in the service, they weren't thinking about fighting "for their country," or even the relative merits of volunteering before (the rest of them) got drafted - it would have been the chance to eat more often, and to send money home every month.
Just call me the ramblin' man...