Originally Posted by
theexpress
lol....... i forsee a stringy 16-20 week flowering sativa in your future then....
thats the reason most of these straisn are gone now
I wouldn't really agree with that, at least not totally. Sure most growers do want shorter flowering periods than many of the old school strains had but I think there is more to it than that.
For one, some were DAMN GOOD and many breeders have major egos and they wouldn't want to release seeds from pure old school strains that would show up their handy work. They have to be see as being better breeders that Mother Nature or people would not see them as being the Gods of Ganja like many of them thrive on being seen as being.
Another thing is that when indicas and sativa/indica crosses became more of a rage many of the herb farmers heard of heavy producing indicas with shorter flowering periods and figured they would make some crosses and increase their yields and shorten their flowering time and not being at all knowledgeable or skilled while attempting to make something they could make more money on many of them killed the goose that laid the golden egg ... and it just got really hard to find the Real McCoy after a while.
It was the same with many pre-over-dried brickweed Mexican era strains. Many were really pretty good but they were destroyed when farmers tried to play breeder and made crosses that resulted in something that was pretty good ending up garbage and the real deal being impossible or almost impossible to find anymore. While most were not as potent as something like Colombian Gold or Panama Red what they had going for them was a totally different high. Many we just called giggle-weed. They got you good and high but they also made EVERYTHING hilarious. If you got high before going to your grandmother's wake and or funeral it was a major fight to not break out laughing over something. Strains like Colombian Gold made you more introspective. You could spend hours contemplating why butterflies were called butterflies. They did not make butter, they did not eat butter and they were not flies ... so why did someone decide to call them that .. and then you would try to think up a better name for them .. and God help everyone involved if the topic of does God exist came up or if there is alien life in outer space.
While those strains were more potent they made you think too much. At times it was better to be a bit less high and everything seem funnier than a Three Stooges episode or a Marx Brothers movie.
Another thing with some breeders was greed, combined with the wannabe rock star fame thing. In the past when many breeders breeding stables had numerous pure old school strains in them often times one would have a male of a certain strain and another would have a female. They wouldn't sell or trade cuttings or plants with each other and they wouldn't work together because who would get to claim the lions share of the fame, and profits, if they did decide to release them in their pure form? So each held onto their male or their female and only used them in crosses.
The large commercial supplies died out, what breeders had both a male and a female would not release them because their egos were more important than dollars and the few that would like to have released them only had a male or a female and could not or just would not work anything out with another breeder who had what they did not have.
When things reached a point where most people wanted 8 to 10 week flowering mostly or all indica strains it was seen as there not being a market for them so there was even less reason to release them or work with someone else to find a way to release them.
I used to have cigar boxes filled with seeds from Colombian Gold, Acapulco Gold, Malawi Gold, Durban Poison, Panama Red, Highland Oaxacan Gold and a few unspecified Jamaican, Thai and Laotian strains ... and if I remember right some Cambodian and Burmese too, though not nearly as many of them. What I would give to have them all now. Even after all these years if only one out of every 500 or 1000 seeds popped I would have more than enough to be set to start them all back up again. But then if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.