28January 2024
It’s 2012 and I’ve just harvested my first nugs of pure Malawi gold. I had put more time into this plant than any I had grown yet, but she didn’t stink like the others. I patiently watched her pass 100 days of flowering time, steadily growing with a vigor the other plants couldn’t match. The smell became intoxicating as we harvested around 140 days, smelling like a lemon lime popouri or spice road maddness. All kinds of woody flavors came off her, and I wanted to save all the terps, so I tried my hand at an all american cobb. My brother and I wrapped her top cola in corn husks, tied it up tightly, and buried her underground for a long cure. I left a little bit in a jar for a regular cure, waited a couple weeks, and decided to try a small bong rip right before going for a run.
I inhaled deeply, not really sure what to expect. I’d grown some beautiful Kona that had kept me up smiling and talking until my cheeks hurt, and some Zombe Black that had made me feel a racey thing I could only describe as “the dread”. As I exhaled I felt an immediate increase in perceptual acuity, clarity mainlined straight to the soul, and with it my heart started racing. My inner monologue inadvertantly and instictually turned to prayer and petitioning of the most high, as I laced up my shoes and took off for a quick half mile or so up the mountain we lived on.
Mormonism teaches something interesting, about keeping your body in strict accordance with healthiness and life. They call it the “Word of Wisdom” and it reads like entheogenic instructions. There is an oft quoted promise, usually spoken in somber tones by old, fat, sexist men, but which transcends their hypocrisy in its simplicity. The promise reads as the natural blessings that come from living in harmony with the earth. In Doctrine and Covenants 89 it reads:
18 And all saints who remember to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience to the commandments, shall receive health in their navel and marrow to their bones;
19 And shall find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures;
20 And shall run and not be weary, and shall walk and not faint.
21 And I, the Lord, give unto them a promise, that the destroying angel shall pass by them, as the children of Israel, and not slay them. Amen.
As I ran down the same route I had been running for the last couple of weeks, the experience became one of the standouts of all the thousands of hours I have spent running in my life, as well as all the hours spent “high”. There was no pain, no running, just being. The heart racing Malawi gave me a direct experience of oneness I needed, and had been looking for. I first was spiritually connected, then humbled through insight and inspiration, while at the same time physically enlivened. This was in my shamanic infancy, and to my uninitiated self, the Malawi had given me a true ecstatic experience. When I ran after smoking pure Malawi Gold, I felt free, and I remembered the original quote the mormons were working from, Isaiah 40 verse 31:
“But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
Pure Sativa has a reputation for a reason, and over the years science has finally got off its prohibitory high horse, to start experimenting on what it really is that makes all these landraces so legendary. While many in our industry act pridefully confident about exactly whats what, I’m more sure that we are still in the infancy of our scientific exploration of all the mechanisms and effects that come from the eternally complex plant we call cannabis sativa. Still, compared to the technical details we had in 1800, we’ve come a long way. Now, when I read these words from eons ago, and they say things that coorelate with my experience under the influece of certain plant medicines, I can’t help but take notice. Take notice of things like the fact that THC-V is bone regenitive, which lines up with another mormon promise from the herbal medicine chapter, “marrow to their bones”. Hmmmmmm…..
I had another Malawi, the best and longest flowering pheno, that I let go over 150 days. I almost chopped her down but couldn’t bring myself to, founding myself in jail 2 weeks after the dicision to let her ride “2 more weeks”! The only picture I have of her in all her glory is in the news articles about the Provo, Utah bust in 2013, it was prohibition after all and we kept things off the phones and cameras. Thank goodness the cops got a good pic of her.
Not being able to smoke that Malawi Gold hurt me. I can remember smelling her being ravaged by the pigs, as I sat cuffed on my couch, a million thoughts running through my head. Did the cops say a prayer over her like I had planned, the moment they cut her down? Did they care about the life they were destroying? Would I ever be able to find more pure Malawi gold seeds again? Was my obsession with cannabis sativa costing me my freedom worth it?
When I moved to Oregon to grow again, I had one jar of seeds that had slipped through the nets of tryanny. It had a mix of everything we had made up til then, and had been taken to give away, and planted, in Guatemala and NY right before the raid. The Malawi males showed through in the crosses, but we didn’t have a pure line anymore. I went back to the same source, and this time purchased “the sativa of sativas”, Mulanje Gold. I expected the Mulanje to be a special phenotype of Malawi Gold, being that Mt. Mulanje is in Malawi, Africa. My suspiscions were confirmed when I grew out the first 5 plants and put them into an open pollination, finding a clean and pure cedar, incense, sandalwood, leather, and tons of other smells flowing out of her. The three males hit the one female, and one baby seed died right after sprout. I’ll never forget sitting on a milk crate in front of 25 plants flowering under 2 hps thousand watt lights, 4 hours into an entheogenic trip, pondering on the hidden power of the Mulanje as I watched what seemed like light pouring out of her. I knew I had to protect her, like my wife and daughter, and share her with the world like the elixer of life she is. I made a commitment to Jah and her, to spread her seeds far and wide, freely, to heal the nations. I found her to be overlooked for a reason, evil men keeping the ganja that makes a man sleep, or fall into laziness, or goofy distraction, for their own propaganda’s sake. Mulanje, I thought, and the other power sativas, had the chance to right the backsliding of our race from light and knowledge into a dark sleep of an apostate age. If I could just breed her down a little, so the average grower would try her out, the fruits of her highness would wake up the world. I knew she could speak for herself, but to do that, she had to have the same reach as “OG” or “Kush”, whatever those are. So, that day, staring at my plants, I set the course for these next 8 years, breeding her into everything we could, spreading her crosses far and wide. Since she was fully seeded, and my friends broke down the plant when I was out of town, I didn’t even really get to taste that pure Mulanje mother plant, but I’ve been blessed to know her through the fruits of her fertility over all these years, her children waking me up time and time again, to the situation we are in.
We got raided at that house too, when our son was 2 months old, but the cops left with nothing but 4 plants. The Mulanje seeds were safe for the day, I put them in our storage shed on our land and got out of town, CPS on our ass trying to get my sons blood, looking for THC so they could try and take him from us. 3 years later, right after I had landed the job as head cultivator on the operation in Oklahoma named Owasso Organics, I went to Oregon to get whatever seeds were still there. When I got to my property the locks had been cut and theives had ransaked our little sheds, throwing hundreds of books that were boxed up into the winter snow, as well as everything else in the sheds. As I walked around, crying and broken in spirit, I stepped on something. Upon further inspection I found an orange jar under 4 inches of fresh snow, the same jar of seeds from the pure mulanje mother I tripped with years before. I found a few other jars, becoming ecstatic, manically looking through the rest of the rubbage to find any others that the idiotic fools had thrown into the elements. Funny, the theives had looked for valuables and thrown all the gold away over their shoulders.
I drove home angry and violated that my property had been ransaked, but excited and emboldened by the seeds that had once again survived. We took them to Oklahoma and bred them in huge numbers, with all the exotics and hype and rare landrace crosses we could find, eager to give Mulanje her chance to show us what true power exists in cannabis sativa. Every cross we made of her became requested by the management to go into clone production, with them changing her name to stupid shit like “Oklahoma Mulberry Pie” when I crossed the pure mulanje with purple mountain majesty. Despite my frustrations with naming, it was wonderful to watch the pure sativa genetics and their crosses bless the lives of so many people, from Utah to Oregon to Oklahoma, and now to Virginia. In all environments she thrives, her hybrids are the biggest plants I’ve ever seen. In Oklahoma summer 2019, the seeds from Oregon were barely able to finish by the time the season ended their lives in late November, but each outdoor breeding season they got a little quicker. The males from that mother Mulanje from Oregon were put out to breed with everything the commerical market had to offer. I knew everything had been focused on fast finishing for years, so I was pleasantly unsurprised when the Mulanje males crossed with Golden Ticket or Papaya Sorbet, came out finishing in 70 days indoors or by November outdoors. Despite this lowered flowering time, many of the hybrids maintained the spiritual, uplifing, revelatory high I have come to associate with Mulanje and Kona.
What we did in Oklahoma in 2019 was a big risk, we ran seed in a fresh legal market, to make unknown polyhybrids in the hopes they were unique and valuable, saying goodbye to the easy money of sensimilla for the genetic heritage we deemed more valuable to our childrens children than pure gold. Now, we’ve ran through those seeds by the tens of thousands, and found them to be worth our sacrifices. We have a problem though…
I only have 20 pure Malawi Gold seeds left, 10 Mozambique Poison, and maybe 50 pure Mulanje. It’s time to re-up on the power, to preserve them in the purity as well as cross them back again, to create new F1’s, destined for some blessed human’s specific endocannabinoid system, the resin patiently waiting in potential energy to change a life. We have a new facility, and are committed to not only the preservation of these varieties from Africa, but to making all american consecrated medicine, in honor of the shamans who bred these lines on the slopes of the misty mountain, Mulanje.
We put a lot of Mulanje hybrids from over the years, like we always do, into the field for our open pollination in 2023. We then selectecd out the cream of the crop to offer our customers. If you decided to buy some of these, only offered through our exclusive cooperative member email, I hope you can breed them and spread their power far and wide. We have brought the flowering time down enough that everything in the field had finished flower by December 1st, something that took 8 years of breeding to accomplish. I have many other lines to dedicate time to, like the Brazilian and the Central American landraces, but I can’t do that until I can pass the torch and complete the commitment I made to Mulanje way back when. Look for us to release pure Mulanje, Mozambique, and Malawi, in late 2024. Be patient because even if we flip at day 21 of flower, we are looking at a 6 month cycle on these! Once I’ve done that, we’ll move on to other love affairs we have had the stirrings to focus on, and of course, we’ll bring you along for the ride. Thanks for reading, and may the Mulanje be forever with you;)
Jordan
I got a pack of African widow (Mulanje gold x white widow) and it was a Mulanje leaning pheno. I had never seen cannabis like this girl. Fast growing and long flowering. Fast forward to smoking and it is magical. I relate with what Jordan felt when he smoked Mulanje. She is my favorite strain in the garden. Thriving in northern. Illinois. She is a beauty and after Reading this. I am beyond honored to grow these out and share. I had my most abundant yield with Mulanje and I gave away so much medicine. Everyone loves her as I do too. She is a special strain. Thank you for the hard work you did for people like me to carry the torch. ONE LOVE