Thunderfudge Genetics Vault Drop will be on Sunday, September 29th at 8pm CST.
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Buy Thunderfudge Seeds Here
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Thunderfudge’s story reads like a slow, winding journey through the misty Pacific Northwest, where he found his way into the cannabis, not through grand design but a quiet pull. Over time, what began as a hustle turned into something much deeper and more personal. By the '90s, Thunder had found his mission, learning cultivation at a time when danger was high and secrecy was key.
The turning point came with his work at Exotic Genetics, a wild and electric period that laid the foundation for what was to come. Thunders heart was always his own, and he began shaping his personal legacy beginning with the Sour Larry line—a project rooted in patience, persistence, and love. Through the triumphs, setbacks, and the rise of flashy Instagram breeders, he's stayed true to his craft. Now, with a drop at The High End and a collaboration with Inkognito Genetics on the horizon, Thunderfudge Genetics story continues, not with hype but with the same steady rhythm that’s guided him all along—a love for the journey, for the plant, and for creating something real.
We sat down with Thunder and discussed a wide range of topics, from his early years, to his time with Exotic Genetics, as well as breeding methodologies, forums, and his upcoming collab with Inkognito Genetics. The result is a long but fascinating read.
Enjoy!
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Buzz Jackson
Lets start with the early years…when did you find cannabis?
Thunderfudge
I'm here in the Northwest, and I think smoking pot was just synonymous with so many things: music, skateboarding, BMX. I've always been a fan of all those. I I had some neighbors that lived behind me that piqued my interest at an early age, smoking weed on their deck in the late mid to late '70s, and I could smell it. I had a friend at my grandma's that lived next door at about nine years old. I remember him asking me, 'Have you ever smoked pot?' I was like, No, what is it? He's like, Man, it's this thing...It makes chocolate taste better! It makes everything better. I was like, wow, chocolate could be better?
Buzz Jackson
Tell me about how you got into growing and what brought you to that point.
Thunderfudge
I was just a hustler. I always had it in me. I started selling reefer in high school, it was an economic thing, man. Back then, the prices were way different and you could actually live off it. I was always that guy trying to rub two pennies together to make a nickel. In my late teens I had a lifelong friend that I had grown up with that says I met this guy. I work with him and he has the most amazing weed…I’ve never seen anything like it.
I come to find out he was just a few miles away and that he had some friends that were pilots...Cessna pilots and mechanics. They were running it all over the place. I begged and pleaded with them to let me in.
Buzz Jackson
Eventually they relented?
Thunderfudge
Haha yeah. It started off with being able to buy grams and I would sell whatever I could get my hands on. Be it Colombian or local green bud just to be able to hook back up with this guy and get this amazing, incredible flower. It was one of the really few super dark green cultivars I've ever encountered. I had to have it. It was just so amazing. It was so potent. I mean, we have no true identification on it, because back then there was no strain names. I mean you might hear a lineage here or there but it was rare.
Buzz Jackson
What year would this have been?
Thunderfudge
Probably 1990 or so. Not a lot of strain names yet. Growers really weren't out there volunteering this information. Most guys mono cropped one variety and that was it. Everything was hush hush, it had to be. You could get followed home from the grow store and get your door kicked in and get everything confiscated. It was a dicey time, so they really didn't want to let me in too far. Eventually though I started buying $280 ounces all the way up.
Buzz Jackson
You were in.
Thunderfudge
They had mouths to feed and they had places for it to go already. I was just an extra wheel but eventually, after being persistent and doing a lot of Washington type things…going shooting and four wheeling…after four or five years I worked up to being able to pick up pounds and then actually getting whole harvests out of them. One of the guys had a brother that had one of the largest documented busts in Washington history. That got NORML really interested in him. They said they really want to make his case an argument for cannabis, and we'll cover your legal fees and do everything we can for you.
When that door opened more strains came into play. A lot of the stuff from the University of Washington. That was the epicenter of everything… everybody was calling it the UW.
Buzz Jackson
The famous hash plant.
Thunderfudge
Yes. They had a G13 hash plant, something called Speedway, which was a fast flowering, dainty sativa type that might have been related to Permafrost. Not the largest flowers, but super frosty and super potent. By 2000 you could actually go online and see studies they had done and strain rosters at the University. Unfortunately as soon as medical cannabis came along in Washington they just took the whole website down. It was just gone. A lot of that information has been misconstrued and stories mistold over the years. I'm still waiting for some of those people to come out of the woodwork and really set the record straight.
Buzz Jackson
Was it around this time then that you started growing?
Thunderfudge
Yes…my buddy was getting married and knew I had a young son and offered to get me set up in a house with equipment. The usual arrangement back then was half your harvest for a year and then you can keep all the equipment and the strains. I probably paid 30 grand for one high pressure sodium light ballast that buzzed like hell. Two, 3x5 ebb and flow tables, a couple half gallons of nutrients and a rack of clones.
Buzz Jackson
It must have been tough to source genetics…let alone great genetics.
Thunderfudge
Back then you really wore your genetics like a family crest and people didn’t share them. If you lost your clones, you were in real trouble. There wasn't an open network. The internet wasn't out there popping the way it is now. It was tough. You had to find someone that had seeds and then hunt them…and who knows where that was going to take you because you never knew the origin of the seeds. They were just bag seeds. So it was tough. I got robbed once right around 2003 and I deemed my spot unusable because I knew the lady that did it was still free and out there doing whatever she was doing. So that place was soiled.
Buzz Jackson
That must have been a huge blow.
Thunderfudge
I had to shut it down for two plus years…and then, when I got set up again, it took me probably nine or ten months to get clones. They weren't out there like that…there was no internet to hop on. Well, there was…but I was still afraid of it, you know.
Buzz Jackson
So then what came next?
Thunderfudge
I've always been a construction guy and one of the general contractors we worked for always bought and loved my pot. I told him, these new digital ballasts are coming out and I'm looking to upgrade and 'll sell you my old one. Well, he ended up liking it so much that he quit a hundred thousand dollar a year job to open a hydro store.
Over the course of a year and a half..It was probably 2008 by then, his store just got huge. I would go down there and shoot the shit at the counter and hang out for hours. That’s how I met Exotic Mike. The store owner put us in touch with each other and said you guys should run a room together. That started a big shift in my life.
Buzz Jackson
2008 was rough time for a lot of people. Was it necessity that brought you guys together?
Thunderfudge
The housing market crash…there was no use for carpenters and life was tough. I had put some money away in case of a rainy day and I ended up going out and buying a huge stack of plywood and insulation. Mike handled the debt at the grow store and brought plants over. He also brought me a few trays of clones because I was broke. He bailed me out of a really bad situation. Bringing me clones and saying to just get on Craigslist and sell them. That’ll put food on the table and keep the lights on. So props to him for that. Eventually I got a couple of good harvests in and got my life back.
Buzz Jackson
When you and Mike started working together, what were you growing and how were you sourcing genetics?
Thunderfudge
Everybody wanted OG Kush and the Cali Connection gear. He was big at that time as well as OG Raskal. There were very few seed banks. Amazing Seeds sold the Raskal gear. There was BC Bud Depot who basically owned the back page of high times. They had the Mendo Purps and The Black. Vancouver Island Seed Company, you ordered direct from them. Send them the money by mail, and you crossed your fingers for the next two or three months.
Buzz Jackson
Was Mike making seeds by this time?
Thunderfudge
He was and I was always supportive of the crosses Mike had made back then. He was a huge TGA fan which, if you were interested in breeding, Subcool was the guy who was open about his breeding techniques and was the guy writing the papers on it. What to look for in a male, what you should be doing, what kind soil should you should be using.
We were growing some of these crosses that Mike made and by this time I was now online. We had a local site, the Northwest Green Thumb and I started pushing Exotic on there and hitting people up saying, “hey, test this” or “hey, I've got seeds…anybody want to grow them?” We just kind of built the following from there. Then in 2011ish, the Starfighter from Alien came along, and that was the ultimate game changer.
Buzz Jackson
The infamous Starfighter drop.
Thunderfudge
Back then you had like three huge drops in a year. That year you had OG Raskals Whitefire, you had Stardawg. It might have been TreStardawg by that time, from Top Dog Seeds and then you had the Alien Starfighter, Tahoe Alien drop. I remember being on the phone with Mike and he was up in Seattle, and, we had just popped this huge room of The Hog from TH seeds and Crazy Train. There was some Apollo in there and I think Plushberry. So it was, you know, 75% TGA and a huge room.
So Mike ordered the seeds. The auction winner didn’t pay so he got them. The seeds were in the mail and Mike was waiting for them like crazy…he had also ordered seeds from the Top Dog drop from Logic as well. The Alien beans never showed up. He contacted Logic and he says they got lost in the mail and its not my problem, hit Alien up about it.
So Mike reached out to Alien and he said no problem, dude. He ended up sending him 30 beans instead of the 11 he would have gotten. It turned out that it was the number 29 and the number 30 out of those seeds were the winners, the ones that he made the F2s with. Five or six months after that he put the F2s up for sale and the rest is history. After that it was SoCal, NorCal, Seattle…winning cup after cup.
Buzz Jackson
What was it that made that line so special?
Thunderfudge
Thats tough, man. We always thought the Lemon Alien Dog side of that line, which would have been Lemon G to Alien Dog was not the best. It wasn't the most desirable. There was a lot of what we call dinner terps, chicken and rice, like an herb Rice a Roni almost. It wasn't a very pleasant experience.
There was a lot of females that smelled like grass clippings. It was that 29 and 30, which he called a Tahoe Alien combination of genetics, if he had to break down, is what made it so great. It brought amazing frost and color and just made that male so special and the female…he always said, is a Tahoe Alien representation. It has nothing to do with the Lemon Alien Dog. He did his best to make seeds of all parents, all the leaners. He had a set of Lemon Alien Dog leaners and a set of Tahoe Alien leaners.
He did keep the Lemon Alien Dog side alive, but separate. His heart and everyone else's leaned towards that Tahoe Alien phenotype and so that's what he concentrated on. It's what he made the ix's out of...that and The Cube. That was all the Tahoe Alien side of that line. I think he worked it for almost four years until 2016 when he started working with the Green Ribbon, which was an outcross to the Starfighter and that made the Hulk. He then he obviously bred the Hulk back to Green Ribbon.
Buzz Jackson
So at what point did you decide to go your own way?
Thunderfudge
By then I was really intrigued by the Chemdog family and the Sour family and that kind of stuff. The Starfighter and its progeny was always 21% to 26% THC, but then a lot of goose eggs across the board for everything else. No CBG, no CBD, not much delta. Just kind of a hollow effect and I think that kind of haunted Mike. It made great frost. It made epic, cup winning dumpers as far as the hash went. But the effect for a lot of people was a little one dimensional and I think at a point he didn't want to pursue that anymore. He was really intrigued by Cherry Pie and he got some Cookies cuts, and that was more to his liking chemically. It gave him the effect he wanted, you know? He had worked that line for 4 years religiously. You always get to that point where you think, well, okay, what more can I do with this that I haven’t done…how can I make this better? And maybe you can’t. He was a perfectionist…he did great work.
He found some amazing plants, amazing males and he could see them early as well. I remember he traded a bunch of beans to a guy named Seeds of Compassion. And that's kind of where my Elite Genetics stuff kind of comes in. We got some bulk beans from Elite and I had gotten some Sour Diesel IBL and some Bubba OG. I went hard on the Bubba’s, found a really nice male and ended up crossing that to a few things. The White, the Predator Pink, Forum cut Cookies, the BlackBerry kush that made Kimbo and some other things. I ended up going through a population of a hundred.
I remember Mike coming in when these plants were a foot tall and spotting this male and saying ‘that's the one right there’. And it was, man, it was a spitting image of The White. It was The White in male form. I ended up passing that male to him and he did use it in some crosses. I think he probably made seven crosses with that male. I actually did more work with it later on and just felt like everyone loved it. I still have some of those seeds and I cherish them and break them out every now and then.
Buzz Jackson
You mentioned Elite Genetics.
Thunderfudge
So that puts us right around 2014. There was this guy Surfer on this breeders site offering up Alien Starfighter F1s. He had hundreds of them at the time. Alien had given a bunch of seeds to guys like Snowblind and Delay 632…it was kind of a clique of the cool kids on THCFarmer. Motive 303 in Colorado, Surfer, Doc Greenthumb. Most of them are gone now.
Surfer wanted to sell or trade those seeds badly and I also really wanted them. He told me, “I only trade for Top Dog and Elite”. I had never heard of Elite back then so I made it my mission to find out where I could get his seeds and I got looking online and saw he worked with a bunch of Rez’s gear before Rez got busted. The Strawberry Diesel, the Sour Diesel IBL and the Chem D. A lot of Swerve gear, the SFV BX, which, you know, all the old schoolers will tell you was absolute fire. Swerve did some amazing work before he was a big seed company.
I finally got Elite Genetics seeds and I think after the Bubba OGs, I grew the Ultimate Chem 08 and it was just so reminiscent of stuff that I had smoked years before. I just went head over heels into it and that is when I said I need to do my own breeding. I don't want to work with the alien technology gear anymore. it just wasn't my thing. You know, it was great, it was a game changer, but it wasn't the game changer for me. Chemdog was. I had a chance to get a Sour Larry clone that I had really wanted for a long time. The beans that Elite used in the Ultimate Chem 08, which he's famous for. The sour Larry. He actually back crossed the Larry and made Sour Larry back to Larry.
Buzz Jackson
For those that aren’t familiar, what is in the Sour Larry?
Thunderfudge
Sour Larry was Larry OG to Sour Diesel IBL. Elite hit it back to the Larry when he found a suitable male. And being that he had the Ultimate Chem 08 which was Chem 91..maybe an S1...don’t think it was the real cut. Who knows? Only he does. So Chem 91 back crossed to Chem D bx, he had hit that to Sour Larry which made the ultimate chem 08. He hit it to swerve's SFV BX which made the Ultimate Chem SFV. And then he also made an Ultimate Chem 91, which he had bad herm problems with. He also had the Twisted Purps, Lemon Larry, Sour Larry, and Double Dipped. Back in the day you would send them your address, your name and you’re order on a regular piece of paper and he would look at your little ticket that you made, pack the seeds and send you your piece of paper back. When he got busted, he actually was going to the post office.
That freaked everyone out because everyone figured they were compromised at that point. I want to say it was $300 for ten seeds and $150 for four. This was the mid two thousands. I mean, he was expensive. Later on, we found out that he was breeding in solo cups and probably not getting more than 100 seeds per plant, so that's why the price was so high.
Buzz Jackson
He seems like he was quite the character.
Thunderfudge
Yeah…it just depends on who you talk to. Raskal joked about what a hellion he was back in the day. He's been out of jail maybe six months in the last 10 years. It's sad. Then when he did get out, he pulled a lot of sheisty stuff just as far as taking people's money and either sending them premature seeds or not sending them seeds at all. When he was sober and in the halfway house getting ready to be paroled, I had some great talks with him. He told me the origins of a lot of stuff and the true lineages of a few things. His head was on straight, but he just has a problem walking the straight and narrow. It's sad. But he was a cool guy when he was sober and doing well. I always wish him the best. Every time he gets out I send him a bunch of seeds.
Buzz Jackson
At this point, you had the genetics you wanted and you were ready to start your own work.
Thunderfudge
That's what took me down that road. I've worked the Sour Larry for a decade. I've taken it from Ultimate Chem 08, which was half Sour Larry back to the clone. And then I made BX1, I did BX2. Unfortunately, I was keeping the Sour Larry at a dear friend's house and he killed it. I don't think there's anyone that actually has that cut left besides my work, which was diluted a little bit.
I did a BX2 F2, and then I ended up taking the BX2 to the BX2 F2, and then doing the BX2 F2 IX, the in-cross of it. I took Sour Larry to BX2 F2 IX. I took the ultimate Chem08 to F3.
Buzz Jackson
What made the Ultimate Chem 08 so special?
Thunderfudge
You got a powerhouse gene pool. You have a 30% Sour Diesel population, a 30% Chem population and the rest is those two overlapped with OG in there as well. So you'll get Chem OGs and you'll get sour OGs. I've never been able to bottleneck it down. I'll open pollinate and fire 50 off. And by six weeks in, you can see the Chem phenos, you can separate the diesels and try to figure out what you're going to grow that round, but I've never been able to subtract anything from that gene pool.
Buzz Jackson
Tell me about your general approach to breeding.
Thunderfudge
I use open pollinations and multiple plants in my breeding. I’m more concentrating on gene pools of certain gene frequencies because I believe that if I can find three similar plants and breed them to two more similar plants...three males that all possess that same genetic pattern. If I cross them to two females with that same gene frequency I believe I'm bolstering those genetics in a way you couldn't do with just one plant.
I believe it reinforces those traits better. It eliminates a lot of recessive washout. The first couple of times I did it, I just thought, wow, this is really cool, because here I've got this F1 to F1, and I used eight males to two females. And I mean, in the second filial generation, and these things should be scattered all over the place but they're looking more like F4s. There's a reason for this. I feel like you can achieve that complete dominance like an IBL. People believe once you have 88% complete dominance in a line, that its an in-bred line. 88 out of 100 plants are going to look pretty much identical. That last 12 that is really tough and and who knows if you're ever going to get it? If you're getting eight plants out of 10 that look very similar and they're the same genotype, you've won. You've done something that not a lot of people can do in a lifetime. So I just feel that this is a way to speed that process up. And so far it's worked great.
Buzz Jackson
Doing a selected open pollination is an interesting approach that you hear about mostly in preservation work.
Thunderfudge
I love open pollinations. That's just my thing. I really think sometimes there's things that you might not find in one generation. You want to keep looking, but you also need to refresh that seed stock, so what do you do? Do you just take your chances and possibly bottleneck those unseen traits? Mint Julep would be that perfect example. It was Mike's Thin Mint Cookies to Green Ribbon backcross. So there's a lot of stuff at play there. You’ve got Green Crack, Afghani and Trainwreck. And then the Thin Mint Cookie in there and Starfighter. I mean, who's really going to know what they're looking at unless you've grown all those individually?
I always felt like I could find a Thin Mint leaner in the Mint Julep. I had crossed Mint Chocolate Chip Cookie, the Kosher, to make the original Mint Julep. I though, to have all these strains in there and pull something cookie-esque out…I always felt like someday I'm going to find a Thin Mint in this, a Thin Mint/Kosher...and it's going to be the most amazing plant. I've haven’t found it yet, but I know they're in there somewhere. So I can't just bottleneck that line. It's an amazing line and I'm at F3 now. I've done open pollinations the whole way through. If you look online and Google Mint Julep F2, you see a lot of very similar plants. And to think that I used eight males to two females to make those F2s, most people would say that's absolute bullshit. But I I smuggled 10 plants out of a legal facility to make that happen.That was back in the days growing with Gingergrower, who grows at Lucky Dog now in Montana for Skunk VA. You can verify all that. He's a great dude, one of my best friends. If I ever had a little brother, I wish it was him. He's an amazing guy, great, great grower. He saw the progression of that whole project. It's at F3 now. I haven't I've never released them before. They've been well-grown and well-tested.
Buzz Jackson
Was it around this time you took a little break?
Thunderfudge
I threw in the towel for a little bit when Runtz came around. Zkittlez had a five-year shelf life already at that point, and I thought…how many years could it actually go? Here we're at 10 years on freaking Zkittlez. Everything has got a Z in it still lol.
Buzz Jackson
Every drop seems to have at least one Z in it.
Thunderfudge
That's at 10 years now. It's been 10 years since those guys started out. They were always vending the cups with the Kush-Cake pops people. And yeah, 10 long years later, everyone is still on that Zkittlez wagon. To this day I think the Zkittlez to Sour Larry backcross was one of the strongest Z crosses I've ever seen. It retained the Z terp. I even hit it to Chemmy F’n Sours to make Chemmy Zours. It had just an amazing moonshine jet fuel finish to it with the Z terps.
Buzz Jackson
THCfarmer seemed like it allowed people to gravitate towards your work organically. People come across your threads and see that people love your work. Then they get for seeds and have a great experience. Now you have a group of growers who are willing to be testers or supporters. This is a cool, organic way to build a following. You have some epically long threads going there.
Thunderfudge
Twelve years. I just wish more people were still into the forums. They want to stay on Instagram. Everybody has been so programmed that its the only outlet. I have a dozen years of success and fails documented there…integrated pest management, tips, bro science…some good, some bad.
The Sour Larry Resurrection was over there where I documented the BX1 and the BX2. I started with 14 males and took pictures and explained why I was weeding out certain plants. It's all documented there.
Buzz Jackson
At what point did you decide it was time to release your work to the public, beyond the forums?
Thunderfudge
I originally made seeds just for myself. Mike and I would talk back in the day and it was like, look, I want my sons to have the most amazing seed collection because this is all going to go Big AG. I want my kids to have the edge if this is what they want to do. It took people beating me up because I didn't want to sell. I had a confidence problem because I’ve had whole gardens hermie on me from other breeders gear and when that happens, you have to live pretty frugal for the next 10 weeks, 12 weeks because seeded flower wasn't going to sell. Extracts weren't really a thing so the last thing I wanted to do is mess somebody's garden up and put somebody's livelihood in jeopardy. It wasn't until I realized that I was testing these males so freaking much, and I was seeing so little return as far as herms went that I figured I could take the risk.
Buzz Jackson
There was a post on there that you walked through your entire process regarding males and I thought it was pretty fascinating to read. It’s super rigorous.
Thunderfudge
It's all about the 4 S's. Structure, Smell, Stress, and Stability. Stability for me is the ability to adapt and overcome certain inadequate scenarios by expressing itself differently, The genotype of that male becoming a phenotype. Its drifting and changing and adapting to it's environment to live its life. I think a lot of people miss that step. Hermaphrodism is controllable if your selection is on point. If you beat males up to the point they're within an inch of dying and resurrect them…If you can put them through every scenario that a grower is going to come into contact with, drought, light stress, nute burn, everything. If you can run the gauntlet on a group of males and find one that shines in that scenario, you're way ahead of the curve.
Buzz Jackson
Truly survival of the fittest.
Thunderfudge
I think it translates into a lower percentage of plants that buckle under pressure. I love to put a male in flower for two weeks, get him clustering up and then pull him out back into veg under 24 hour light and see what he does…see if he continues to make flowers, if he shuts down, if he goes back to the point of revedge and spitting the one bladed leaves out. I'll start putting him in different rooms of the house or outside during different seasons and making him react. You know what to expect and breeding is the ability to predict an outcome of a situation. What you're going to get, what you should expect. Some of it is mathematics. Some is luck. But the more and more males you go through, the easier it is for you to see.
For instance, I noticed Sour Larry doesn't like to be around fans. She doesn't like low humidity. You throw her near a fan, the leaves will canoe and they'll try to capture any moisture they can to control that vapor pressure deficit. They will try to adapt the best they can. Moving it into a moist, more humid section of the room and it goes away.
I've looked at Sour Larry for so long, and it's coming back. I've been on this Lemon Larry venture, which is Sour Larry...which is Larry the Sour D crossed back to Larry. It was his Larry BX, and that's where Skunkmaster flex’s work started with all his Larry lines.
It started with Elites Lemon Larry, and then he got the Larry Cut from Bodhi and backcrossed it and took that to F8 or F9 or whatever. That's where all his Larry work comes from. A lot of the youngsters don't understand it. They don't know its true lineage or the heritage or the history behind it. It's been a major player in a lot of people's gardens and a lot of breeders' portfolios. I've been hunting it down for 15 years. I ran into Inkognito Genetics, who's a really cool dude. He's done a ton of Bubba work and Chem work and West Coast dog, bubba OGs, a lot of really old stuff. He doesn't share cuts. He doesn't take in new cuts. Everything is disease and pathogen, viroid-free. It's just really super vigorous stuff.
Buzz Jackson
So you and Inkognito hooked up for a new project?
Thunderfudge
Yes, as of February, it’ll be two years into the Lemon Larry project. That’s seven months of hunting, and then a solid year of testing males. I ended up sending him a pair of F2s, male and female, and he sent me a pair of F2 male and female. I've made some crosses with my keepers, the cultivars that feed my family. These are all proven, chosen keepers. That's my rule. I need to know intimately what that plant can do and can't do before I use it. So I can tell the customer what to expect out of seeds. If someone hit me up and said, "I ran your gear and I was horrified at the low quality crap I found in there"…man, that would have me moping for months. It might even just take me out of the game completely. There are some guys out there that still breed with heart and they're doing it for the right reasons. It's not financially motivated.
Buzz Jackson
In your breeding work, what would you say you are breeding for? Potency? Yield? All of the above?
Thunderfudge
I would have to say optimal yields, potency, ease of trim. Color is far down the list for me. I mean, green weed is still alive. I don't know what it is about the anthrocian. It turns purple. Most of those plants, though, you're not going to get two ounces per gallon of medium. You're not going to get those half pound plants where if you grow 30, you're taken care of. There's exceptions to every rule…Ice Cream Cake....you could feed it battery acid every day and it'll still come out purple. They'll still be hashy, and you'll still get a decent yield out of it. It's just a drama-free plant.
Buzz Jackson
The yield aspect really comes into play when you have plant limits. When you can only have so many plants, finding a plant that's going to yield enough to get you through to the next harvest is important.
Thunderfudge
Very important. That's what I want to put in people's garden. Vigorous, high yielding plants with awesome potency. I don't breed so much for hash…the dumpers, because that's going to work itself out. For me, it's about maximum output, ease of trim. The sooner you can get trimmed up, the sooner you can reload and get your next run going.
Buzz Jackson
Who are some of the breeders that your watching these days?
Thunderfudge
I love Inkognito's work. He makes it a point to not make anything redundant and not make anything anyone else is even coming close to. I haven't bought seeds in a long time but those are the guys' feeds that I watch. Lemon Hoko is really just an awesome human being. His Blueberry work, his Chem D work. The fact that he puts so many young breeders ahead of himself and is on his Discord 8 to 10 hours a day helping guys, He has a lot of good guys over there. Groundbreaking Seeds is one. Really nice. Twisted Trichomes, a guy named Scruggs. They're primarily working with TGA gear. They've become the gatekeepers to Vortex and Space Queen. A lot of these strains that in five years would have been gone forever. There's other guys, Cascadian Grown. He's a local out here. Same thing, he doesn't sell seeds. He just breeds for the love of plants.
People Under the Stairs. I've been watching him since 2010. You look at what he's done and just what he's accomplished as a breeder, what he does as a person. I mean, he's always doing giveaways. Go clean up some trash in a park and he'll send you seeds. That's breeding out of love. He is not just financially motivated. I totally dig his freaking style…and he does incredible work.
Buzz Jackson
Like yourself, there are threads upon threads on various forums of people praising his work. So many happy people and everybody's satisfied. Growers loves it. That's what you‘re looking for in a breeder.
Thunderfudge
Yeah and he's never out there blowing his horn, banging his drum. He’s really just an old school really cool dude. I've got a lot of respect for him. He never buckled in this market of purple hype stuff. He just keeps doing what he's doing. I mean, the Sour Saunders and all the S1s and stuff, that's work. Just pure breeding.
Karma has been a good mentor to me. Anytime I needed a shoulder to cry on and ask him, Why aren't I selling all these seeds and this and that? He's always there in that damn Dutch accent telling me, “Oh, it's okay. You be okay.” He's always represented me and been really cool. I got to refresh some seed stock for him on a few occasions. He had gotten burned by Reeferman, years ago and had gotten bags and bags of just straight white pale seed. At a some point, Reeferman's ex-partner had contacted him and gave him an album of all these seeds. And he put them right up on the Seed Depot and said, “look, I just got a big load of reefer man gear and all I ask…I’ll give all this stuff…all I'm asking is you guys just refresh the seeds and send some back to me.”
I couldn't imagine how many days in a row his DMs were full. Probably blew him up for two, three months and he sent them all out to the US, which isn't cheap, all on his own dollar. He told me I was the only one to actually send him seeds back. Out of 50 people he sent those beans to, and it was Reeferman’s man's WHOLE catalog. They are all there..RM 23, RM 25, right on down the list.
He sent me the Twisted Purps and the Ultimate SFV Chem. That's where I found that male. So I owe Karma a a lot…he’s been real cool to me. I know he did a drop over at a European bank, and he just wanted to be paid in my beans. That's how he cashed out. I had just dropped there as well, and he was like “hey, just pay me in Thunderfudge beans, and we're cool” That was a huge freaking honor. He's world renowned and a multiple award winner. That's one of the crowning fucking moments of my whole career.
Buzz Jackson
Let's talk a little bit about what you pulled out for the drop. What are we looking at?
Thunderfudge
I've got some newer stuff and I've got some older stuff…it’s so tough to choose. I put a lot of thought into it and tried to walk down memory lane and go through what I've really enjoyed. It wasn't about color or flavor. It was all about memories and fondness of these cultivars.
I asked in my IG story, What do you want to see me put back out there? The Snake and Mongoose kept coming up. It was GMO to what I call my 81808. That was relentless's 818 SFV cut. This plant smells just like gasoline. For an OG, it wasn't It wasn't lanky…It didn't stretch. It didn't have your standard OG features. It was a slow grower. But this smell, this gasoline smell was just...It took me back to being at a gas pump when every one of them had a 96 or a 98 label on them, when they were still octane gas. It was amazing. I hit that to my Ultimate Chem 08 back in 2013. I pulled cinnamon pheno’s out of there. I guess cinnamon travels with root beer from what I've heard.
I pulled a hot tamale pheno out of those. Most of it was just solid gasoline though. It was a great yielder because that ultimate Chem 08...that Sour D IBL that Elite used, they used to call it the baseball bat pheno. There was many bats in those '08s. Just huge, huge flowers. So everybody that's run that Snake and Mongoose is just like, WOW. Many of them bought another pack or two. It's one that people get to know and they really love it they really talk about it. I really wanted to get some of those out there.
I was never really a huge fan of Ice Cream Cake but for ease of grow, potency and color its amazing. So I hit that Sour Larry bx2 male to it, it just made everything better. I mean, it was 36%... This is by Washington testing standards. It was a 36% THC pheno of iIce Cream Cake.
All this Sour Larry stuff is super special and super intimate to me. It also has a high resistance for PM and bugs. Its one that checks all the boxes.
It's important to bring back the real medicine and give folks a chance to walk that same path I walked. The Golden Lemon Larry's coming back out. Everyone wanted more ChemmyFnSours. You get some of that. You're getting my last packs of the Ice Cream Cake x Sour Larry, the Slice Cream Cake.
People were so psyched about the Cheetah Piss x Tahoe Alien. It has a very unique terpene profile. It's super lemon grass. I mean, there's no way to mistake the smell of lemon grass. It’s just super medicinal. You still get a lot of phenos with the ammonia from the Cheetapiss in there. Fucking stretches like the dickens. Yields, I would say mid 20s on the potency, but there is something special in there. I think out of all the Alien gear I grew, man. I mean...I went through Alien grenade and afterburner and all the Starfighter crosses and Fruity Pebbles and Purple Tahoe Alien. I bought 10 grand of Alien packs back in 2012. I ran the Lemon Alien Dog. I ran all of them.
Out of all those crosses, this is the one Tahoe dominant plant that I ever found was that male. I mean, he was just rancid. He looked like Tahoe OG. I wish I could have knocked him up and got the Tahoe cut…But the alien piss, everyone that grew it said the same thing. Like, wow, dude. that was so well worth the grow. I've had a couple of people hit me back and grab more It's just like, let me get a more packs. Can I get a 50 pack? I need to have a lot of those around and just slowly go through them as I can.
That's the ultimate compliment when somebody tells you something like that. I want to bring those out. I want to bring as much of the Lemon Larry stuff or the Sour Larry stuff I have left. And there's not a ton but I just I think it's real important because that's what I made my bones on. It's what I cut my teeth on in the whole business and pretty much what I'm known for.
Buzz Jackson
Thats so killer…we’re honored your letting us release such special packs. Tell me about the new project with ink?
Thunderfudge
This Lemon Larry is just the next chapter in the saga. I mean, we've got Hell's Angels knocked up. We've got Tahoe, Banana, SFV, Louis de Pestilence…We’ve got Outkast, Blueberry to Lemon We've got Raskals Fire Cut to the SFV Chem. That's my ultimate Raskal, which it's got to be well over 30 %.
Chem 91, GSC S1. That's called Tommy's Cookies. It's something that he went through and found in some forum cut S1s. It's supposed to be amazing. He's bringing his Mamba into the picture, which is Chem D x Bubba. There's some Albert Walker work in there, Chem 3. I did throw a little stuff in there for the new generation. I've got Lemon Tree in there just because it's a Lemon Tree. It's super Lemon, and it just would do well with Lemon Larry.
Giesel is in there. Topanga Canyon, Triangle, Platinum Lemon Cherry Gelato.
There will be three different versions of the F3s. There will be my male, my F2 male, to my F2 female. There will be Ink's F2 male to Ink's F2 female, and there will be, Ink's F2 male to my F2 female. So, yeah, we're trying to bring the whole pallet right to your table and let you paint your own picture.
There'll be F3s. I just think it's just the right thing to do. Throw as many variations in a controlled environment and give someone options. I think Ink's female is a little more of a broadleaf kush, and my f2 female looks more like an OG. It's lankier, the leaves are thinner. It'll throw trees. It variegates a little bit, but it's amazing. I mean, I'm smoking on the same batch from two runs ago, and I've been smoking this and the Raskal solid for a year and a half. There's no threshold. I never say…I can't smoke this anymore. That Lemon Larry is potent as all get out. It's still super lemony and depending on what nutes I'm using it either reminds me of Sour D or it reminds me of a Sour OG. The lemon is always there.
Buzz Jackson
We’re super excited to have you on board and this drop is very exciting. It gives newer growers a chance to get some of your older work or people who missed out the first time. We’re also really looking forward to the new gear your working, thats super exciting as well. Any final thoughts?
Thunderfudge
At this point in time, man…I’ve already climbed part of the mountain and I didn't like the way I was climbing. I didn't like the mountain, so I walked back down. I needed to find myself and figure it out if I could make it back up again. Now I just want to put that best foot forward every step. Honestly, I put this on my kids. I just want them to be proud of their old man someday and say he did things. That’s all I could ever ask for. Honestly, if I died tomorrow, I would be happy knowing that my kids love me and they know their dad was out there hustling the best he could. Working hard and doing it right. This is like a life's work…It's like an autobiography in seed form. That's what it is right there.
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