Humboldt Seed Company Perfects Blueberry Pancakes Recipe – The Making of a Novel Strain

Blueberry Pancakes is a sibling of our cult classic Blueberry Muffin, beloved for its uncanny freshly baked blueberry smell. Blueberry Pancakes brings the super sweet syrup and is a fun riff on the popular blueberry theme. Blueberry Muffin is so iconic we wanted to see what other scents we could coax out of it.

We decided to go into our seed vault and go back in time to when the original Blueberry Muffin was created over a decade ago when the helicopters were flying, and it was a different era. In the last few years, we have been pushing the envelope and really looking ahead. It was fun to go back and create a strain based on an old classic. We went back to the Purple Panty Dropper/Razzleberry cross that brought that baked muffin scent and focused on this insanely stable line, realizing there was an opportunity to use these foundational genetics (grandparents of Blueberry Muffin) to create something new and fun. It’s like going into the main lobby of a genetic and just picking a different hallway to go down. We were on the hunt for a new style of blueberry perfume, one that hadn’t been smelled before, and we wanted to create something with that scent that provided a pleasant smoking experience and packed a punch.

We took the Purple Panty Dropper, a three-way cross of Purple Haze, Oregon grape, and Matanuskan Mist, and crossed it with Slurricane, which is known for its super coated trichomes and frosty bag of glitter look. Slurricane has a nice berry nose and added that sugary candy punch we were looking for, yielding the sickeningly sweet syrup terpenes.

When we created the original Blueberry Muffin, we crossed Purple Panty Dropper with Razzleberry, creating an unstable F1 hybrid specifically intended for phenohunting. We then phenohunted that population and found our unicorn, which became the original Blueberry Muffin. We stabilized that genetic, and it’s been a favorite for many years. Back then, we couldn’t look at nearly the number of plants we can look at today. We re-phenohunted that original population, brought in Slurricane, and worked with Wave Rider Nursery in Salinas to look at thousands of plants to come up with Blueberry Pancakes.

Drew Carson, the Owner of Wave Rider Nursery, and I have been longtime friends, and we really connect on having a shared extended family history of breeding and growing cannabis. It was such a pleasure to work with them on this at scale. It’s important to us as a company to be true to our roots, but we also recognize that production at scale is the future for many businesses. They took an existing Orchid growing facility and adapted it to growing cannabis. They kept the same workers from the Orchid business and hired the family that sold them the property to manage it, paying respect to what had come before. They’re using the original greenhouses and minimal environmental controls. During the cannabis boom in the Salinas area, we saw investors buying up old, dilapidated facilities, firing all the workers, and employing unsustainable practices burning through hundreds of gallons of diesel a day.

We have a lot of respect for them, and this is the kind of vibe we want to foster. We’ve got Don Carlos and the Slightly Stoopid varieties growing in the greenhouses there, and the chill, Cali surf vibe can really be felt when you spend time with them. That reverence, respect, and surf culture vibe is special. I like to think the plants feel it too.

We found that perfect pheno at Wave Rider that carried through all the frost, the bright green and the purple confetti flaking. Finding unique terpenes and “special effects” is always our goal, but we are also very conscious of what commercial cultivators need today. We were looking hard for something that catches the eye like this one, adding to the bag appeal, and is a good fit for the modern, ultra-competitive market. I love the idea of going back to an old classic and seeing how it can be relevant today. In this era of dessert strains, it’s nice to put out something that smells like its name, which is not always the case.

We have been working with Wave Rider for years, specifically looking for genetics that perform well in the Salinas Valley area on the California Coast, where humidity and pest pressures are high. You have similar marine layer-related challenges here as in the coastal hills of Humboldt County. Pheno hunting in these coastal environments led to Blueberry Pancakes being mold resistant and easy for both home and commercial growers. It’s an approachable strain for newer home growers just starting, and the high yield and bag appeal will satisfy the commercial operator’s benchmarks for cannabis seeds.

It has a stalky growth habit with large, wide buds and is relatively fast flowering at 60 days and finishes in Norcal in the first couple of weeks of October. It enjoys a good amount of phosphorous feeding leading up to flowering and really sucks it up when flowering begins, so you have to keep a close eye on that.

With THC coming in at upwards of 31%, it gives a super heady, strong high. The Razzleberry roots add a sense of comfort to the smoking experience. I’ve heard it described as a warm hug. The pancake syrup aroma carries through to the smoke. It’s an experience. After you smoke it for a few minutes, you can still smell a strong, pleasant, sweet scent lingering in the air. And, if you nibble on a bud, you’ll quickly discover that even the flower tastes subtly like blueberry syrup.

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