I sure can! Ill try to make this short, as the history is quite extensive.
My Father and his close friends were part of a group that grew her back in the day. Pops kept it around for years and eventually he passed away. His close buddy started to get too old to live alone and his family made plans to move him into a retirement home. He had old seed stock, and an old plant he had kept around from my Pops. I was asked to take over caretaking for the plant, and found that she treated my Fibromyalgia and PTSD really well. Eventually word kinda spread around of what I had, and people started asking me for a cut.
I came to find out that she was pretty hard to find these days, so I started a little campaign to give her away. I sent cuts to Dark Heart Nursery here in California, and they are going to be eventually releasing her in clones all over the state. I also gave away cuts to all sorts of breeders and growers. TGA Will from Subcool inquired about me helping to get Romulan back into their hands, and James Loud and I have tentative plans to do some collaborations together with her, among several other growers/breeders that I am trying to work with. My overall plan became pretty simple: get her back out there as best I can.
Dad had a very special connection with her, and it kind of hit me hard that it was my job to take care of this plant.. and I myself found her to be extremely special. She is basically all I want to smoke anymore, and is the only strain that keeps my Fibro at bay and me out of bed, not racked in pain. The clone only cut I have is not Joe's cut, but is what I am told from the same familial generation and could be considered to be Port Alberni Pinebud or Romulan. She has a very similar look to Joe's Romulan, but has a higher yield and a more complex taste and smell with a skunkiness added in with her pine. That cut is what I call my special girl, because she is the one that treats my issues very well. I sent her off through a tissue culture lab in February, and have just started to repopulate my grows with the cultured cut. She has what seems to be more vigor now, so I am really excited to see what transpires with her flowers. I am planning on making an S1 version of her, because her potency and medical properties are truly off the charts and I know one day it will be difficult for me to keep around as clones all the time.
The old seed stock I struggled to get anything from until I learned about cracking the seeds open first. The proper information on them was lost a bit over time, but I was told that they were what Joe's Romulan was from. Once I had males and females to pick from, I began to search through them over a 6 month period, growing out probably 50-75 plants in the process. Eventually I found what I was told I should be looking for, pink pistils at the onset of flowering and a strong pine taste/smell, in a female plant. And then I found several males that were really great. I bred regular seeds from 2 parents, and then tested them in several different batches. I found they all had a really strong pine scent and taste. They all had massive trichomes, and a few plants had purple traits that showed without any colder temps,. And they all have an extremely potent high when smoked. So I sent off flower samples to some growers and breeders that I respect and who know far more than me, and they reported back that I had done well. So I eventually started selling seeds through a website I had someone help me make, and since then have been contacted by a few seed banks who want to help distribute them. And that's about it for now.
All in all, I never thought I'd be where I am now.. a USMC Veteran in his 40's growing cannabis. I grew up around it, had a few tiny outdoor grows in my younger days, and spent a good few years of my late 20's running weight all over.. but I was certain that I would never get the chance to grow my own with full control and in an indoor environment. Now here I am just falling in love with it all, and if I didnt have the grow rooms to visit every morning.. Im not really sure what I would do with my life. I've got a great career, doing something totally unrelated, but outside of that I have a pretty shitty personal life with the physical issues Im left with after my service.
