About Snowshoe Joe

The Art of the Craft

I started this site as a way of introducing myself, and my seeds, to the cannabis community with the goal of being able to obtain a license to legally sell my cannabis seeds to the community at large. This website is another step on that journey.

If you are a cannabis grower and have a Canadian address I’ll send you seeds for no charge, I’ll even pay postage, if you agree to do a grow log and post it online. This offer is limited to the first 25 growers who agree to do an online grow log.

Welcome

I started my journey with cannabis in the late 1960s as a teenager in Kingston, Ontario. From my first experience, cannabis fit with who I was and the life I lived. Since then, I’ve been a daily user of cannabis throughout my adult life. I’ve achieved success as an athlete, student, and career professional and I believe cannabis has enhanced my life and helped make me who I am.

As a young man, the world beckoned, and I went looking. I lived in Europe in my late teens and early 20s, then found my way to southern California in the late 1970s. All along the way, cannabis was a part of my life.

There was a lot of red and blonde Lebanese hash in Canada and Europe in the early 70s, Thai stick came along after that and then sweet California sinsemilla.

In the 1980s and 90s, I was a ski instructor at Mammoth Mtn., California and part of the newly emerging indoor growing community focused on growing high-potency Kush strains. Those were great days; cannabis and skiing are a natural fit. I think that’s what chairlifts were built for.

There is a solid subculture of cannabis within the skiing world. There’s nothing like smoking a J and dropping into a bowl of deep powder on a bluebird morning or smoking a J on the lift and pounding slushy moguls on warm Spring days.

I really stepped up my growing in the early 2000s and began my search for the best cannabis in the world. California has been a leader in developing high potency and high terpene cannabis. I was right in the middle of the explosion of growth in the cannabis world from the early days of medical cannabis right through legal recreational. For the good and bad, I was there as cannabis came out of the shadows and into the light.

I learned to grow indoors with HPS and Metal Halide lights in tents in my garage in Orange County, California. I had access to high-quality clones at the local medical cannabis dispensaries, Cali Connections seeds were for sale, too. I had a lot of fun honing my craft and surfing the cannabis wave. I learned a lot, met some cool people, and made connections that last today.

A few years ago, I moved to Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada and live on an organic fruit and vegetable farm with dogs, cats, goats, alpacas, bees and chickens. We practice sustainable farming and run a closed loop of feeding the animals weeds, grass and hay and then use their waste to fertilize.

In Canada, cannabis was federally legalized in 2018. I am an Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes (ACMPR) patient and am allowed to grow cannabis for my medical needs.

I have transitioned to LED lighting technology and grow under HLG Scorpion R Spec lights with great success. I have a large room equipped with 5 x 5 Gorilla grow tents.

The main room has a heat pump to maintain an ambient temperature, and the room is also equipped with an industrial-capacity Anden dehumidifier to maintain a steady relative humidity. I keep temperatures in the 75-78 Fahrenheit range and humidity at 52-56%. Growing in tents instead of a larger room allows me the flexibility to have different strains at different stages of vegetative and flowering growth.

Growing organic cannabis, free of any chemical pesticides and fertilizers, not only provides me with high-quality cannabis for my medical needs but is also a highly interesting hobby that is calming and gives me peace. My garden is a source of both physical and emotional healing.

In 2019, I did my first seed cross with a female MACV2 and a male Banana OG x GMO TK SK. Call it beginners luck but that was an excellent cross. The plants from that cross produced long spears with close nodes of sticky and stanky buds that tested at 28.2% thc and 2.8% terps. That was it for me. I was hooked. I had a jar full of killer seeds and wanted to do that again.

Pheno hunting for the absolute best males and females to bring together and then to grow their seed cross to see what’s there has become my interest and fascination.

Since then, I have searched for the cannabis genetics that most interest me and produce the type and quality of hybrid cannabis that I am looking for. I pheno hunted through hundreds of seeds from many different packs of seeds from the best breeders out there and have amassed a store of genetics that are the core source of my ongoing seed crosses. I will grow more of the seed crosses I have already made and less of other people’s seeds.

I created Snowshoe Joe Seedcraft to share the art of growing the high potency, high-THC, and high terpene plants that cannabis connoisseurs appreciate. I’m a humble pollen chucker and do not lay claim to being a breeder. I give much respect to the real breeders out there; Capulator and Exotic Genetix are two I admire.

My skill is the ability to select stable male and female plants that possess the desirable traits I am looking for and bring them together to create magic. I know what I like, and I have spent considerable time, effort and money acquiring the elite-quality cannabis genetics and strains that I use in my seed crosses.

I’ll post grow logs of completed strains and a current blog of whatever is going on in real-time. I will also share with you the grow techniques, equipment and fertilizers I use.

I hope you’ll follow along,

My process.

Cannabis strains have a genotype and a phenotype. A plants genotype is it’s genetic composition, that’s what is handed down genetically from the male and female parents used in the cross.

The phenotype is what those genes look like. There is genetic variation within each plant that has the potential to be expressed differently. That’s why when you plant ten seeds from the same plant each of those ten seeds will be a little different.

I’m a pheno humter and germinate a lot of seeds as I hunt for the best cannabis plants. I look for female plants that have a good high, lots of frost, strong smelling terpenes and a solid plant structure.

It’s easier to select female cannabis plants because you grow those to maturity and choose the plant phenotypes you might be looking for. The male plant selection is not as easy. I pick male plants that have a good structure and I look for plants that have a sticky feel and strong smell when I do a stem rub while the plants are in the vegetation stage.

The only way you’ll really know the quality of the male is after you have pollinated a female plant and grown out those seeds to see what that cross is like.

There’s definitely a bit of luck involved when pheno hunting for males and females. I was lucky to find the female Red Runtz that I’ve been using in a lot of my crosses. She crosses easily and produces stable offspring.

I’ve also had good luck in selecting males. Lately, I’ve been using pollen from a Jelly Mints male that has produced fantastic seed crosses with everything it’s been used on.

I am not in a hurry, I take my time to tend to the garden.