Legendary Hawaiian Strains

Origin Story

Hawaii’s most potent and legendary strains likely have their roots in Mexico.  In the early 1970’s Guadalajara Cartel co-founder Rafael Caro Quintero started producing high quality cannabis at the infamous Rancho El Búfalo. He is the godfather of strains like “Panama Red”, “Acapulco Gold” and “Oaxacan”.  His work dates back to when he was a young boy.  Prior to the massive Rancho El Búfalo project, high quality imports were a rarity in the States.  When good product was obtained the seeds were typically cherished.

Although no one really knows for sure, it’s a high probability that one of these origin genetics from these high potent sativa variants were the starting point to strains like Kona Gold and Maui Wowie in the 1960’s.  While we know very little about Maui Wowie’s lineage, other than the island from which it eventually emanated from, we do know that Kona Gold, from the Kona coast on the Big Island, was a “local” sativa bred with Thai genetics.

 

Hawaii’s Natural Tendency to Favor Sativa Plants

Due to the geographical location of the Hawaiian Islands, the seasons are tropical and the light cycle has very little variance.  In order to grow indica cannabis varieties here in an outdoor setting, one has to artificially extend the light cycle each day while the plant is in it vegetative cycle or else it will not grow big enough to produce many flowers. 

Sativa plants, by comparison, take a significant period to flower and will be far more sensitive to the 13 and a half hour days in the summer vs the 11-hour ones in the winter.  And since their flowering cycles are also much longer, I would imagine the Hawaiian ganja farmers of the 60’s, who probably didn’t use any artificial light at that time, used the season to maximize their output.

Now, consider a grower of the period throwing out seeds that came from really good pot. Both indica and sativa plants as well as many hybrids.  Essentially, the Hawaiian light cycle would have weeded out the indica dominant species in favor of the sativa plants.  All the skunk type varieties would have been way too small.  The males would have released their pollen prematurely on account of their naturally short growing cycle.

Juxtapose that against massive six-foot tall (and bigger I’m sure) sativa plants and it would not take long for the resulting hybrids to all start trending towards this dominant variety.  This process would have been organic and most likely would have occurred naturally given how little was actually known about marijuana horticulture in the early sixties.

From this genetic soup came Maui Wowie and with a little deliberate genetic intervention by using a known Thai species for completing the cross breed, Kona Gold.  These varieties are highly sativa dominant as logic would dictate, they would be as close to pure as one could really get without getting your hands on a realtively weak authentic landrace.