We’re completing this winter’s marijuana strains testing program, during which we grew 27 supposedly fire new strains we’d never grown before.

Most were mediocre. Some were trash. A few were incredible. One of the incredible marijuana strains is New England Rock Candy, made by Pure Breeding.

This article is a fun combination of grow report and interview with the breeder. Let’s start with the strain review:

New England Rock Candy (NERC) includes genetics from Alien Rock Candy, Sour Dubble, Alien Tahoe OG, Afghan Cherries, Cherry Crumble, and Wedding Cake.

It’s the first strain Pure Breeding ever released, and was recently upgraded to make it even more potent and high-yielding.

Our tester germinated five feminized NERC seeds; all germinated quickly without problems.

Grow phase plants showed impressive vigor and were ready for bloom phase 30 days after germination and three different topping cycles.

The topping created round, dense, symmetrical plants with sturdy main and side stalks that did not need external support even though internodes filled with medium-thickness buds. NERC plants can be shaped into beautiful, stocky, barrel-shaped bud machines.

Bloom phase stretch was slightly less than double original size.

By week five of bloom phase, the dark-green, tightly-packed buds frosted over with resin glands and sent out a seductive terpenoid scent.

These aren’t popcorn Kush buds. They’re longer, wider, and look like glazed candy.

We always push plants with a high-intensity lighting and feeding protocol. Strains that aren’t properly bred often can’t handle it: they may go hermie or otherwise fail to perform properly.

This is NOT the case with NERC. The wide array of heritage near-landrace Afghan genetics make this a very resilient, stable strain—because Afghani cannabis has traditionally been grown in ridiculously harsh conditions in its home region.

Given the strain’s name, we expected delicious terp scents, and NERC delivers. By week five, the buds smelled like candy, caramel, vanilla cream, warm, baked, fresh donuts, and other sugary munchies.

For us, the primary scent and taste is caramel candy, with hints of floral, desserts, and cherries.

The scent is so delectable it makes you want to eat the buds!

The copious coating of resin glands stayed crystal clear until about 50 days into bloom phase, when a small percentage started going cloudy.

Our harvest window was 56-63 days, a relatively narrow window, indicating phenotype consistency.

In fact, the five NERC plants pretty much looked and performed identically, so we’re not sure there’s more than one pheno of this strain.

There might not be, and that’s a good thing, because phenotype consistency equals uniform canopy height, bloom duration, and cultivation ease.

NERC buds were easy to trim after harvest because there are relatively few bud leaves. The buds not only retained their caramel candy scent in the jar, the scent intensified during curing.

Average yield was slightly more than two and a half ounces per plant, and there was no sign of gray mold, powdery mildew, or hermaphroditism.

Of course, it’s not enough to have easy-growing, sturdy plants that yield reasonably well and have nice terps. The high is all-important.

NERC’s high is surprisingly euphoric, enabling, and helpful, given that the strain is loaded with heavy Indica and Kush genetics that create debilitating sedative effects in other strains.

This strain makes you feel good even on a bad day, and has moderate, very pleasant body effects including pain relief and increased flexibility.

Unlike most Indica or Kush strains that are evening only, we use NERC any time of the day and enjoy it. Our estimate regarding the effects is 60-40, Indica dom.

Our cannabinoid testing indicates 25.5-28.5% THC, very little CBD. That’s strong, and you feel it.

My personal experience with the NERC high is it comes on fast, makes your head throb, your body tingles, but it also feels like heavy, happy-pill molasses has infused into you.

If you consume NERC sitting down and don’t get up within 5-10 minutes of getting stoned, you have a hard time standing up.

But if you get high on NERC and immediately do activities, the NERC stone allows you to feel energetic, not sedated. I’ve done plenty of athletics and other strenuous stuff on NERC.

This is indeed a versatile, multi-faceted high. It would be fun at parties, and also during an evening of romance.

And it’s also medicinal. I easily see the truth of what NERC’s breeder told me—NERC is favored by veterans and others who suffer from chronic pain, depression, insomnia, arthritis, PTSD, and other ailments.

This strain has mountains of bag appeal. Consumers buy it just for the scent. Properly dried and cured to retain enough moisture, the buds are like glazed, spongy cakes of caramel-smelling resin glands. Very sticky.

Also very tasty and cost-effective. Loading a gram of sticky NERC into a Storz & Bickel Mighty + precision whole flower vaporizer set to 394°F, you get many minutes of pure, dense, easy-inhaling vapor with multi-faceted swirls of taste.

High resin gland density makes NERC an ideal candidate for processing buds into concentrates, especially those like dry sift that retain terpenoid scent and taste.

Pure Breeding is a hidden gem connoisseur marijuana seeds company with a worldwide following, but we’d never heard of it before late last year, and most people have not…yet!

You’ll be one of the first, if not the first, to grow and market NERC in your area, and that exclusivity is worth money and creds.

Now let’s talk to the founder of Pure Breeding, Kyle. Our questions are in bold. His answers are in italics.

How did you first get involved with marijuana?

When I was 16 years old, my friends and I started experimenting with cannabis. My first high was so intense that I thought my life was over. Fortunately, it wasn’t. And during subsequent highs, I fell in love with cannabis. One reason was food tasted absolutely delicious when I was stoned; flavor profiles were heightened to the extreme. I also enjoyed the calmness and clearness of seeing life from a spiritual standpoint. It gave me deeper consciousness of my life’s journey. For those reasons, I bonded with cannabis.

What prompted you to become a marijuana seeds breeder?

For a long time, I was unhappy with my non-cannabis career and wanted to do something more fulfilling and worthwhile.

After months of analyzing this dissatisfaction, I realized my truest happiness came from helping people. Because a majority of my family had served in the military and I’d seen how PTSD and other ailments made them suffer, I decided to help veterans.

My research showed certain types of cannabis helps with PTSD, pain, and other problems veterans face.

So I started collecting heirloom and landrace cannabis seeds since I knew a vast majority of cannabinoids could be found in the original stock versus the narrowed, confused genetics of modern hybrids and bulk seeds.

This is how it all started; now my marijuana genetics cache ranges from the 1960’s all the way to the present.

How did you learn to breed cannabis strains?

From what I can tell looking at reviews of other seed companies, my cannabis breeding training and experience is quite extensive compared to other breeders.

I’ve studied botany books and video seminars, and done many years of breeding experimentation to improve skillsets and strategies.

 My skills are affirmed by growers worldwide. The plant photos on our social media are from connoisseur home growers and professional marijuana farmers around the world, including North America, Thailand, Australia, and Germany.

We’ve been selling seeds for many years, and have thousands of repeat customers, which is a testimonial to the quality of our breeding.

Our testing shows most marijuana seeds are inferior, poorly-bred, often with a tendency to go hermie. How can growers know for sure your seeds are reliably excellent?

Making a new cannabis strain is very complicated when the breeder is dedicated to creating the best strains.

Other breeders do it the simple, easy way—they just throw pollen on flowers and sell the results to make a quick buck.

That’s definitely not us.

What many marijuana seeds companies do is take two strains that have famous names and the flowers look good, so growers want those strains.

The greedy or unskilled breeder does simple crosses of those brand-name strains and sells the resultant seeds without doing quality control to see what those crosses will do in the grow room.

This is a horrible practice, not recommended.

At Pure Breeding, our strain design process considers every trait plants have—the traits we want and ones we don’t want.

We evaluate plant and phenotype uniformity. Are secondary shoots even and symmetrical? How do the plants handle stressors? Do they have abundant vigor, tight internode spacing? How do they handle heat, drought, cold, high and low humidity, light, nutrients? Do you get huge yields and fire potency? Do they resist molds and mildews, or attract them?

We’re especially eager to detect and eliminate genetics that have hermie tendencies.

With these goals in mind, we look for the best cultivars amongst hundreds, including from regular non-feminized rare, heirloom, and landrace marijuana seeds. Then we work those cultivars through inter-breeding, to see what we can create.

All the while, we’re doing massive stress testing to make sure hermies and other negative traits won’t be expressed even under the worst conditions. We’re one of few marijuana seeds breeders that does intense stress testing.

When we’re starting with a strain project, and monitoring finished strains, we do at least two years putting that project’s plants through living hell to see how they react.

This includes harsh climate conditions from 45° to 110°F. We purposely create plant torment, including nutrients overload, lockout, over and underwatering, negative and positive air pressure, rootbound conditions, and many other cruel things you shouldn’t do to marijuana plants.

This testing is rarely if ever done by other marijuana seeds breeders, but here at Pure Breeding it’s essential and ensure our strains are near perfect, as perfect as a seed strain can be, given the limitations of Nature.

It gives us the opportunity to create and sell cultivars that do not go bad under less-than-ideal conditions.

Based on evidence, we have a 99.9% success rate in creating superior, reliable strains and seeds.

The most important thing is selection, selection, selection! If you have a cannabis variety that responds to stress by going hermie, that trait is passed to all future generations. Even if that strain is fantastic in all other ways, if it contains hermie genetics, it’s not what you want.

What’s the use of big, fat, sticky buds filled with seeds from hermie pollen? No use.

As we’ve stated many times in this magazine, most marijuana seeds sellers are scammers, including even some famous companies. Give us your insider assessment of the marijuana seeds industry.

We constantly hear complaints from growers saying before they discovered Pure Breeding, they grew crappy strains that gave them so much trouble, created too much extra work in the grow room.

It’s disappointing that these days it’s hard to find cannabis seeds strains that live up to the description the seller gives them.

So many people are lying about strain genetics, or they’re just not well informed, so they lie by default.

What growers eventually realize is that most companies are using bad genetics to begin with.

Or, they use good genetics but aren’t paying attention to whether those genetics work well together.

You get these bizarre strains in which the seeds contain a sloppy soup pot full of genetic lines from all kinds of parents with no attempt at perfecting the strain or making sure the seeds produce a reliable, limited set of phenotypes.

When you buy from most companies, you can’t trust what they say. You won’t really, truly know if that strain is actually a true Afghani from Afghanistan or a real Durban Poison from South Africa.

In many cases, the seller just slapped those names on them, and had no idea where the origin genetics came from.

It’s obvious most marijuana seeds companies are just doing simple crosses of name-brand strains and immediately selling the outcome seeds without checking what those seeds do once germinated.

This is why so many growers end up with hermies, or plants that won’t thrive no matter how professional the grow room is.

Fortunately, you can avoid all that. You want to buy your seeds from people like us who are passionate about cannabis just like you.

Let me tell you this straight from my heart—our life purpose is to be authentic and ethical in our seed breeding and selling.

What we hear from everyone who grows our seeds is we’ve set the bar for cannabis breeding. Our mother plants are absolutely stunning and we’re careful every step of the way. If a breeding project starts well but we see even the slightest hint of genetics problems, we give up on that project.

We don’t follow hype about the latest allegedly fire strain that wins big awards. Just because a strain’s buds look really good, that means very little when it comes to the strain’s chemotype—how much and what kinds of cannabinoids and terpenoids are on board.

Our seed stocks are true originals and definitely one of a kind. We source rare seeds from all over the world, so something amazing is always coming in.

We’re giving you high quality and total consistency. Our seeds are feminized so you don’t waste space on males.

If you have males and want to breed, our females are the most stable you’ll ever use in breeding.

The main thing to remember is we care about you and your growing success. That’s all that matters.

What new strains can we expect from you in the near future?

We’re developing enhanced terp-rich, loud-smelling cannabis lines. We have some new and revised strains on our website right now.

We’re always going through our genetics vault and intend to release rare genetics such as old-school authentic Panama Red, Black Leaf Afghani, Colombian Gold, Alaskan Thunderfuck, and other strains, some of which have not been seen since the 1970s.

Get in touch with me at PureBreedingMa@gmail.com, take a look at our website, Instagram and Facebook. We have something special for every grower.

And now, as an added bonus from us here at the magazine, enjoy this trippy Primus Claymation video, which is eye-popping & appropriate after hitting cannabis candy like NERC. Rumor has it that Pure Breeding founder Kyle is the candyman depicted here, so take a look…

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