B
Bear
- 7
- 1
Hey folks!
My name is Shawn, otherwise known as Bear, and I just recently moved back to Southern California with my seed stock that I've been collecting and breeding for the past few years in diverse locations such as Spain, Great Britain, Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Hawaii.
I started growing 22 years years ago at age 16 - right about when I attended my first Grateful Dead show, they seem to go together - and, have been a professional guitar player on the psychedelic scene since then when a hand injury a few years ago forced me into what I hope is only a temporary retirement.
Let me go back a few years, I attended UC Santa Cruz in the 80's and became familiar with the work of a distinguished breeder by the name of Robert Connell Clarke who'd published his senior thesis as the book 'Marijuana Botany' and the fertile growing community in the Big Sur mountains whose produce went hand-in-hand with the descriptions of new cultivars in this seminal work. All this slowly came back to me as they were pumping me full of morphine at the hospital and with the help of my old friend, Cannabis, I was able to kick that habit and begin a program of holistic healing.
So, I re-focused my creative energies back on my first love, growing and breeding Cannabis, and armed with a basic knowledge of Mendelian genetics, some pure landraces I've collected, and the blessings (in seed form) bestowed upon me by a homegrown network of Cali growers from Eureka down to Chula Vista, I've been quietly creating my own strains - my objective here is slightly different than many of the excellent breeders whose strains I've been fortunate enough to sample.
Some breeders aim to put in seed form some of the incredible OG genetics that SoCal is notorious for and Swerve & Ograskal are the two I admire the most in this valuable endeavor. They are preserving for posterity this amazingly fruitful period in Cannabis horticulture as well as making these strains much more easily distributable (ever try mailing a clone?).
What I'm trying to do with my strains, however, is to take the best of what the SoCal Medical scene has to offer and bring in some of these old world genetics into the mix to add some hybrid vigor and broaden the 'genetic bottleneck' that happens whenever a particular variety's gene pool takes over the marketplace. An example of this would be the Skunk #1 offshoots in the 80's, the 'White' varieties in the 90's, and various OG cultivars in the 2000's.
I've grown in all kinds of setups - residential, commercial...from tree-grows in huge plastic trash cans filled with earthworm castings and bat guano to vertical PVC column SOG's with tiny netpots and yet I continue to learn from every other grow journal I read. The internet has been an amazing boon to our industry!
Anyway, as you can tell I'm long-winded and can go on forever. I just wanted to introduce myself to everybody, offer my help to anyone who might need it, learn from whomever is willing to teach me, and say that I'll be looking forward to seeing some of you at the World Cannabis Championship in Los Angeles on April 24th!
Peace, and happy yields!
Bear
My name is Shawn, otherwise known as Bear, and I just recently moved back to Southern California with my seed stock that I've been collecting and breeding for the past few years in diverse locations such as Spain, Great Britain, Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Hawaii.
I started growing 22 years years ago at age 16 - right about when I attended my first Grateful Dead show, they seem to go together - and, have been a professional guitar player on the psychedelic scene since then when a hand injury a few years ago forced me into what I hope is only a temporary retirement.
Let me go back a few years, I attended UC Santa Cruz in the 80's and became familiar with the work of a distinguished breeder by the name of Robert Connell Clarke who'd published his senior thesis as the book 'Marijuana Botany' and the fertile growing community in the Big Sur mountains whose produce went hand-in-hand with the descriptions of new cultivars in this seminal work. All this slowly came back to me as they were pumping me full of morphine at the hospital and with the help of my old friend, Cannabis, I was able to kick that habit and begin a program of holistic healing.
So, I re-focused my creative energies back on my first love, growing and breeding Cannabis, and armed with a basic knowledge of Mendelian genetics, some pure landraces I've collected, and the blessings (in seed form) bestowed upon me by a homegrown network of Cali growers from Eureka down to Chula Vista, I've been quietly creating my own strains - my objective here is slightly different than many of the excellent breeders whose strains I've been fortunate enough to sample.
Some breeders aim to put in seed form some of the incredible OG genetics that SoCal is notorious for and Swerve & Ograskal are the two I admire the most in this valuable endeavor. They are preserving for posterity this amazingly fruitful period in Cannabis horticulture as well as making these strains much more easily distributable (ever try mailing a clone?).
What I'm trying to do with my strains, however, is to take the best of what the SoCal Medical scene has to offer and bring in some of these old world genetics into the mix to add some hybrid vigor and broaden the 'genetic bottleneck' that happens whenever a particular variety's gene pool takes over the marketplace. An example of this would be the Skunk #1 offshoots in the 80's, the 'White' varieties in the 90's, and various OG cultivars in the 2000's.
I've grown in all kinds of setups - residential, commercial...from tree-grows in huge plastic trash cans filled with earthworm castings and bat guano to vertical PVC column SOG's with tiny netpots and yet I continue to learn from every other grow journal I read. The internet has been an amazing boon to our industry!
Anyway, as you can tell I'm long-winded and can go on forever. I just wanted to introduce myself to everybody, offer my help to anyone who might need it, learn from whomever is willing to teach me, and say that I'll be looking forward to seeing some of you at the World Cannabis Championship in Los Angeles on April 24th!
Peace, and happy yields!
Bear
