Browsing: Growing

Natives, try not to get flustered at this admission: It took me about three years of living here to realize that February was Colorado’s worst month. If it weren’t for all the stouts that breweries pour in February, the month would turn Denver into a cold pit of despair for those of us who aren’t avid snowboarders or skiers. Thankfully, March brings some warm stints and sunny reprieves, but I’ve learned not to get suckered into thinking spring is here in March, either. That doesn’t come for certain until fucking June.

To make sure I didn’t get lulled into a false sense of summer-bound security, I went with a strain called Snowball during a recent trip to the pot shop, to remind me of the impending dumps that Mother Nature will take on us in March and April. Consider me chilled and refreshed, though I’m still not certain I’ll be able to walk for another week after getting frozen to my couch.

Snowball is a cross of The White and Chem 4 OG (a hybrid of Chemdog and San Fernando Valley OG Kush) from Ethos Genetics, and it’s name is well deserved.

Have you had ice wine? The sweet dessert wine is made from grapes frozen on the vine, requiring a large labor force to harvest the entire crop within hours after the first morning of adequately cold temperature.

Outdoor marijuana farmers in Colorado had to use the ice-wine harvesting method after an unexpected snowstorm hit much of the state last October. “We ended up having three days of freezing rain and snow last October. In that time period, we had all of our facilities filled with plants,” recalls Bob DeGabrielle, CEO of Los Sueños Farms, a 36-acre cannabis farm in Pueblo County. “From a bud product prospective, we felt like we lost about $7 million last year.”

Get out your tiny violins, because you’re about to hear a complaint from a spoiled cannabis consumer: Shopping for weed can be sort of difficult after a long day. With so many strains, smells and highs available, sometimes you just want the simplicity of a weed dealer telling you to “take it or leave it.” All I needed on a Monday night was some classic, skunky nugs that reminded me of a different time, back when we returned for the same bag for months in a row because it was the only kush plug in town. We didn’t know which strain it really was, but we knew what smells to look for.

Citral Flo smells, looks and smokes like some of that classic mystery dank — only we know what it is. A cross of Sour Flo and Citral Skunk, Citral Flo’s throwback smell and flavor are almost like going back to a hometown hangout. It doesn’t take long to trace the strain back to Flo, Citral, Skunk, Sour Diesel and OG Kush on the family tree, and those genetics combine for a beautiful blend of Eastern and Western cannabis varieties.

While the cannabis industry’s appetite for energy use is already widely documented, we’re still learning more about other forms of legal pot’s impact on the environment, such as packaging and extraction waste, as well as how growing nutrients affect soil.

One environmental factor we didn’t see coming? Terpenes.

Terpenes are molecules responsible for the smells and flavors of cannabis, hops, pine trees and every other plant aroma. As growers began to breed cannabis to achieve flavor profiles that taste more like oranges, grapes or pine than weed, terpenes quickly became all the rage in legal cannabis — to the point that they’re now extracted and mixed with THC concentrate for a more flavorful dab.

In sports, the super team is usually disliked by the masses. We want our best athletes to put a team of role players on their backs, and we’ll poop on any collection of superstars who’d rather win faster and easier by joining forces. If we felt that way about cannabis breeding, we’d never have Durban Kush.

A hybrid of Durban Poison and a Chem D and OG Kush cross, Durban Kush is the equivalent of a big three in basketball. But in every big three, at least one of the stars has to make significant sacrifices for the team’s best interest. Ray Allen did it for the Celtics. Chris Bosh did it for the Heat. So which one of Durban Kush’s big three takes a back seat for the greater good?

Soda was recently cut out of my diet, but giving it up wasn’t hard; candy, pie and cereal are much more important to my sweet tooth. The few times I do indulge in a pop, however, I like to go with the old-school varieties, like root beer, cola or red, orange and original cream sodas. Black cherry is another great choice, highly underrated and hard to find — to the point of having to buy it in an overpriced glass bottle at the grocery store.

Or you can find an alternative for your favorite flavor in the cannabis world (or at least fool yourself into thinking that). So I was interested to see whether Black Cherry OG would provide a worthy substitute for that old soda flavor I craved.

Unlike fruits and vegetables at the supermarket, organically grown marijuana doesn’t have labels announcing the clean growing practices used to produce it, because the plant is still federally prohibited. Tired of waiting for national acceptance, the Cannabis Certification Council, a Denver-based cannabis sustainability and fair trade organization, has announced its own organic certification process for legal marijuana growers.

According to CCC board chair Ben Gelt, applying for the program’s organic certification is similar to applying for traditional organic growing certifications: After the CCC receives the application, third-party certifying entities will conduct inspections and audits for several months before deciding whether applicants become accredited.

o many Sesame Street characters are iconic. Bert and Ernie. Oscar the Grouch. Back in 1977, Big Bird was on an iconic Sports Illustrated cover with tall, shaggy-haired Detroit Tigers pitcher Mark Fidrych. Elmo was responsible for an all-time toy craze in 1996. And still, none of them compare to Cookie Monster.

Toddlers loved that blue fur and simple vocab. We envied his diet, and some of us still do. But as parents start watching the show with their kids and reconnect with Cookie Monster, some see a sad reflection of addiction and America’s sugar intake — or maybe that’s just the ranting of someone stoned off his ass on Cookie Monster, a Herculean strain with alleged Girl Scout Cookies and OG Kush origins that I’ve been smoking a lot lately.

Two of Colorado’s most popular party favors are teaming up to reduce carbon emissions. Denver Beer Co. and the Clinic, a marijuana dispensary chain with several growing operations, have partnered in a recycling program aimed at reducing carbon dioxide waste across both the craft-beer and cannabis industries.

Unveiled by Governor Jared Polis and the state departments of Energy and Public Health and Environment on January 29, the new pilot program allows brewers to capture the CO2 byproduct of their brewing processes and then ship it to marijuana growers, who will use the gas as a supplement to boost their plant yields.

I had eleven family members in town for a week during the holidays, and about half of us smoke pot. Safe to say, I made a lot of dispensary runs for edibles, which are are still exotic foreign goods to out-of-staters. During all of this shopping for candy bars and gummies, I couldn’t help but notice the same weed-jar label at four or five stores around Denver: Bazookies.

Bazookies isn’t named after the giant à la mode cookie sliced like a pizza (that’s a pizookie), nor is it the same as Zookies, a mix of Animal Cookies and Gorilla Glue #4. No, Bazookies is a hybrid of Bubblegum and Girl Scout Cookies, in which old and new genetics meld into a relaxing yet productive high that works almost any time of day.

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