I’ll take a great home cooked meal over an expensive restaurant meal any day of the week. The love that a skilled home cook brings to the table and the attention to the details that matter almost always makes the dining experience amazing. Coincidentally, the same is true of the skilled home grower, throwing down fire that would put most dispensary top shelf gear to shame.

Neither the home chef nor the home grower are limited in what they choose to make and this key distinction opens up a whole world of possibilities to explore. In the 80’s I moved from California to a decidedly less green state and good weed was really hard to come by with the exception of a small grower I managed to hook up with who would drop a run of flower called “The Chrome” every couple of months. The Chrome was beautiful and some of the strongest weed I had ever had – hard green nugs coated with crystals (hence “the chrome”) with a really harsh, unflushed flavor with no real taste. This was as good as it got and people were fighting over Z’s every 2 months and they were gone in minutes.

Then I went to Amsterdam and my whole perspective changed. I spent a whole week smoking at every coffee shop in the city, with pockets stuffed with small baggies of nugs from all the different shops. This trip was repeated every year or two until the late 90’s when I finally bit the bullet and started growing my own – and then shit got next level…

Once you start growing your own, you become an immediate pot snob, especially when it comes to new genetics – seeds or clones. Stuff that would have been coveted and hidden from your freeloading smoker friends in the past was now “shit” freely given to anyone without your newly elevated definition of “top shelf”

But along with this new depth of understanding comes the passion to try new shit – the problem is that most of us have certain space and/or plant count limitations that prevent us from trying more than a pack or two at a time, and now that we are hard core pot snobs we are way too picky to use up the space for anything but the best of the best. So how do you choose?

Like food, great weed starts with great ingredients – the genetics. If you’ve got great genetics that went into the seeds you are thinking of growing you are more than likely to have excellent results when you grow them out (not always, but more often than not this is as a result of one of the parents being an outlier and not similar to it’s siblings). So what does this mean for you? It means that if you get a bag of weed that’s killer and it has a few seeds you may want to consider popping them. Or if your friend who has been growing for 20 years makes some seeds of his two favorite plants you may want to pay attention. Or if you’ve got nothing but fire in your garden and you end up with some seeds in your nugs… – I think you get the idea. If you want to purchase seeds, I suggest sticking with vendors that have either been around for a while or whose gear you’ve already had a chance to try – because you’re a pot snob now and you deserve the very best. I’ve paid over $1,000 for seeds that were just okay and I’ve paid $20 for seeds that were absolute FIRE. Try not to buy into the hype. If you find some breeders you like and you get tired of their shit, ask them which breeders THEY like. There’s so much to try, so many different flavors, so many different types of highs and effects – this is the greatest hobby in the world.

Thanks to everyone that tags me in pics of Katsu gear – I love seeing it – keep it coming! Stay green, stay safe, and keep those nug jars filled with sticky goodness!