Monocropping, Green Rushed Out! Hello to the Renaissance Age of Cannabis with Bigger Menus!

What’s up, everyone? My name is Joey Cannoli. I started Holy Grail Chemistry with the intention of making the best and most consistent blends of Feminized Seed Sprays on the market. My trademarked product, POLLENETIX®, is a silver thiosulfate solution that induces the formation of pollen sacks on female cannabis plants for the purpose of breeding. It is my goal to have HGC serve as a rich hub of information for aspiring cannabis breeders and veteran breeders alike. I also want to maintain having some of the best guidelines on the market for the new breeder. My well-established sequenced timeline of events helps minimize errors and maximize creation when making your own feminized seeds!

POLLENETIX® is a feminized seed spray that is meant to block the hormone ethylene in the female cannabis plant. This allows the plant to produce pollen sacks and feminized pollen. The feminized pollen is collected in a variety of ways, all effective and unique to one’s own craft and how they go about this process. Imagination is certainly key when doing this, and making sure we enjoy the journey is the other half. The first time reversing the sex of a clone can be nerve-wracking—my first attempt ever with sex reversals. I produced zero pollen. I used a random spray found on the internet that came with zero guidelines. That inspired me to create my own and give out my guidelines to assist others in their efforts! I tested different ratios of STS (silver thiosulfate spray) for years. Looking for the best blend that had the most effectiveness while staying balanced perfectly in between cycles. POLLENETIX® is just that. I developed the spray while growing and running 14 lights in North Lake Tahoe! What a fun place to live and grow! A vibrant underground grow culture tucked away deep in the Sierra Mountains between Sacramento and Reno. The people I was selling clones to at the time were watching what I was doing with my genetic lines and wanted in. They knew they wanted to create their own and learn more about this craft.

It’s 2025, and it’s time to send it. POLLENTIX® is a great solution for the grower who is looking to expand their menu. To get away from working with over-used, popular, hyped-up strains. Genetics are the crucial building blocks of any solid grow that is going to produce consistent yields and quality. This spray is the answer to the grower looking to keep that one strain around in seed form in case the cut gets infected with HpLVd. Feminized seed breeding narrows the genetic spread of what you are going to get when crossing two strains.

For years Monocropping in the cannabis industry and the traditional market has been a benchmark standard for dialing in rooms, patches, and greenhouses. It still is, and there is nothing wrong with that because it still works and is considered running the same one and only strain in the same room for an extended period of time. The good old days of Monocropping an entire room of OG or Sour just had a different vibe. Today’s market standards are based on variety, lineage, and heritage. People have adopted a connoisseur mindset and are exploring every terpene they can find! They have favorite terp profiles for hash and flower. Sometimes they align. Sometimes they differ. People have a better understanding of how terpenes and cannabis affect their bodies, mindset, and overall health. We have a much more intricate relationship with cannabis today, where the individual enthusiast is much better educated in the craft than even ten years ago.

In the past five years, we have seen the desire to connect your own brand’s name to your newly created strain! It is a rapidly expanding niche in cannabis that is largely untapped. The room for growth is sustainably greater when you are running “your own gear” than someone else’s. Yes, while running the tried-and-true strains, they are useful for breeding and as platforms upon which to build. They’re useful for knowing what yield you are getting and bag appeal based on what others have done. The problem today is everyone is running the same shit! It’s obnoxious. People like to piggyback off other people’s strains and brand names because they are too scared to put themselves out there.

I love the old veteran and new hype strains, just like everyone else. But what I like more is smoking a breeder’s own creation—farm to lungs. I enjoy speaking with the breeder, exploring what makes them tick and why they created this. I like understanding what they were after. And I enjoy seeing and smoking the finished product! Smoking a different rendition of sour over and over and over and over again gets old.

Diversifying your menu isn’t as easy as it sounds. First, we all need to make sure we are dialed in! This comes from running the same strains numerous times to create a consistent variable in your room. If you are constantly changing strains, are you ever dialed in? Strains feed differently. That’s just a fact we all have to deal with. No one fits all recipes; this is where the advantage of monocropping comes about. You build a room. You run the same strain three times, and boom, you are dialed in by cycle #2. Then, once you are flipping cycle #3 in that room, you know exactly what’s going to happen and when and you’re absolutely sending it! Still, today, this is the most efficient way to turn over rooms in a consistent manner with consistent results pull after pull. It’s advantageous to find a handful of strains that run, stretch, and finish the same way to avoid having pounds of the same strain that people are sick of.

Variety is key in life! We growers provide the ultimate medicine for our people! Monocropping isn’t going out of style because it doesn’t work. It’s because it’s a prehistoric technique in the modern world. The new-aged grower needs to be well-adapted to today’s ever-changing market conditions and needs the genetic library to achieve that. The ability to create new strains and meet new customer demands doesn’t exclude re-creating versions of veteran strains that we lost over time. Recreating older strains has been a true asset to the grower’s skill set. What’s easy is making the cross happen. Then comes the hard work. Years of testing through beans, looking for that one keeper! That’s why we do what we do. We are all questing after that holy grail strain that checks off all the boxes, that one strain that makes all your hard effort and dedication worth it.

Follow online: @holygrail.chemistry

Photo credit: Joey Cannoli