Aesthetics of Selection Philosophy
Updated: Dec 1, 2022
I look at the plant from many different views, and sides. I circle my work and try to be introspective. When I first started it was recommended by JoJo Rizzo to have as much fun as possible. That’s what I’ve tried to do. I’ve tried to make it very interesting, exciting, and adventurous. I always had a love for the landraces, and the exotics. Even as a kid, smoking Panama Red seeds and all, squished up un-bricked flower was super exciting to me. That’s why I like to use different flavors on my palette. Right now, I’m working with a Panama Red, Congolese, and Viet Black.
This is about a good aesthetic. What is a good aesthetic? You don’t follow the herd with the Cookies crew and gassy crew or THC percent chasers. What I am doing is bringing interesting strains to medical patients and to people who need it in their spiritual work. I’m trying to bring cannabis that has real value, and I believe the terpenes are where the true value is at. The flavor, smells, the way they work together brings the true medicinal value and spiritual connection.
It’s not always how the plant looks but it’s the essence. The essence of what has been put in to those cannabis seeds. Who has worked the plant, who has touched it, how has it been worked. I’m going to tell you I’ve tried some seeds that other people did a really good job on but it didn’t work out for me too well. Maybe its the essence of the work, or what is meant for me, so I think its about essence and frequency and sometimes we are not meant to grow certain things. These are things I think about.
But back to the aesthetic, I think my aesthetic is building really phenomenal cannabis seed lines with very unique, consistent, and exciting properties within the offspring. I always encourage people to be creative, the same way I am creative. I will go out on a limb and grow any specialty, pure Afghani, or any Laotian, Vietnamese, Panamanian, Congolese, Angolan, Nigerian, and not to mention the Mexicans. When I was a kid that is what we smoked, but it was good Mexican even if it has sticks and stems, you’d still get a really high on it. You’d want to dash through any kind of situation so you didn’t have to do any kind of confronting because you were high as a kite. I’m really interested in bringing back old sativa.
That’s my aesthetic, my aesthetic is building upon and working with old masterpieces. These sativa landraces are masterpieces. I want to bring that to the world with my own mark on it. You can still taste landrace and my selection, they both influence each other. The trick will be to find complimentary parents, so one or the other doesn’t dominate. I’m not going to be F2ing these, that doesn’t really make sense for me. I’m mostly an F1 breeder but that’s aesthetic. I don’t think there are too many people out there with my aesthetic.
I love to backcross things and work the parental line such as the Wedding Cake Killer Malawi. If you really like a dominant mother or father it’s good to keep paring those traits. I don’t just stack genetics, I recapture them and add something new. I want to more or less expand the terpene profile and backcrossing a wonderful way to do this.
I’ve been told a lot of my genetics help people with chronic medical conditions. This has been my direction from the very beginning. I’m happy to be able to keep on my path. I remember asking JoJo for landrace stuff and he gave me a Chitral Kush. I must have had 1,500 plants that year. He also gave me a Crystal Locomotive and Mendo Montage. I had small baggies of pollen and would gently pollinate the lower buds by hand under the full moon. I also did open pollinations. That garden was where Grape Stomper and Mendo Montage were born.
Everything that was used to make significant cannabis genetics for the first Gage Green Group lines was given to me by JoJo Rizzo. If you know him, you know his real name. If you know his real name, you know what his bread and butter occupation was; it wasn’t breeding. The guy was well to do and he had a lot of connections, and he gave me some really great genetics. He and I remained friends for some time after that until he died. He was getting more and more wigged out, waiting for a liver transplant but still mainlining drugs.
Jeff “Keyplay” Selsor, founder of Gage Green Group and Seed Bank for Humanity, established Keys to the Kingdom to exclusively carry on genetic preservation and selection work in an all organic environment, and to test his new offerings before releasing.
I will be hosting an "Aesthetics of Selection" Zoom class Wednesday, September 21 at 8:00PM Eastern. You can register for the class here.