Mother: I had wanted Spirit in the Sky from the moment I first saw the spectacular photos that Exotic Genetix posted. I hadn’t quite seen a cannabis plant like her before with trichomes on top of trichomes smothering dark purple, almost black buds and leaves that had what looked like a chromatically hued metallic-sheen to them. After a while, we landed the girl…
Now that we’ve had her and worked with her for a few years she is without a doubt one of our favorite plants of all time! Today, she still remains as one of the top 3 most resinous plants we’ve ever grown, which is quite the accolade. Considering the crazy amount of trichomes, one might assume that Spirit in the Sky will come with a smaller yield, but no, the yield is actually quite substantial. The buds are dense, heavy and colorful, and the leaves turn dark purple, nearly black with cold temps. As if all that wasn’t special enough about her, our favorite trait, and one that we’ve found only one time before, is that she’s completely resistant to powdery mildew! She will not contract it even if every plant in the room is highly infected and with the oscillating fans are blowing on high, etc– she is still 100% resistant! It’s a rare trait to find in such a special plant. Sometimes we feel that Spirit in the Sky never got the recognition she deserves, so we never miss an opportunity to add her chromosomes to others, like we have here.
‘Father’: Purple Pineapple Express #4 is one of our favorite plants, and she just so happens to be one of the first crosses we ever made! Nearly 10 years ago, we used a beautiful Pineapple Express female and crossed her to a special non-serrate leaf Huckleberry Hound male. Each of the Purple Pineapple Express phenotypes were extremely nice in appearance, all expressing purple flowers with huge, fat buds and exceptional yields, but we decided to keep the #4 phenotype because of her sturdy stature, fantastic bud production, her insanely resinous pewter-purple flowers. We grew PPE #4 for many years until we accidentally lost her for a while, only to receive her back from a HUGE clone facility in California that we had gifted her to previously. And she came back with good news– Customers absolutely loved growing her indoors and out in California and those same happy customers found her to be 100% resistant to powdery mildew! To us, this is one of the most special and important traits a cannabis plant can have, and is one more reason why we love PPE4 so much! This resistance to mildew was our primary motivation in using her as the pollen donor in this new fem line. She is so intolerant to powdery mildew that every plant in the garden can be completely covered in it and this plant, sitting right next to them and touching them, will NOT get it, and will stay 100% unaffected. While we imagine many of the plants in this line will show great resistance to powdery mildew, we did not purposely expose our plants to it during our trials, so we can’t speak to exact percentages or ratios of resistance, but we can say that we had zero instances of powdery mildew in our flower garden during the most critical, wet months of the cold-weather season.
Generally speaking, plants from our Purple Pineapple Express line have tons of resin and color– most of the progeny produce dark buds ranging from light pink to deep, dark purple, with a couple standard green plants here and there. The fan leaves themselves are highly colorful, turning various shades of purple towards the middle to end of flower. Plants can also showcase a unique trait where the leaves are green on top and purple on the undersides. This certainly makes for a colorful garden! We also found that plants produce exceptionally nice flower structures that are large, fat, and rounded on top, just like we want them.
If one searches ‘Purple Pineapple Express’ on Google the first 3 pages of results show grow reports, smoke reports, PPE buds, concentrates, and clones for sale, which just goes to show how popular this plant has become over the years!
The Halo cross is one of the main reasons we decided to make this fem line in the first place. We wanted to cross two powdery mildew resistant strains together. We hadn’t seen that it had been done before, or at least not recently, so we decided to be the ones to do it! Its worth noting the other similarities that both of Halos parents share- they are insanely resinous, they both have rich, deep colored buds, both have deep, dark purple leaves. And how did these Halo seed plants turn out during our trials? Phenomenal! All plants we grew were surprisingly uniform, resembling Spirit in the Sky in growth structure, with traits of both parents seen in other ways. The plants are extremely easy to trim come harvest time which is always a bonus. How many of these seed plants are resistant to powdery mildew though? We would imagine, statistically speaking, around 50% or more of them would show extreme resistance, with others showing partial resistance. We will say that although we had no instance of PM during our trials, we are not sure what the actual ratios reflect because we couldn’t bring ourselves to intentionally introduce fungus into the garden. One thing we can be certain of though is that both parents are absolutely 100% resistant to powdery mildew, so there will be some here to find yourself!
