A journey of a thousand smiles starts with a single... whacking, great BIG spliff
“Though, in the beginning, it was mushrooms that really got my interest piqued…I longed to find the ultimate heightened state of mind, and so I set off. Thus began a 12 year odyssey and romance with many varied mindmelting plants and cacti: San Pedro, Peyote, Datura…all the crazy ones, ha ha! BIG fun, peppered with the craziest characters on the wildest back roads we could lose ourselves down. For me it’s all about people. Their stories, their abilities, their knowledge, just when you think you know everything someone pops up and produces something above and beyond anything you’d ever imagined!
Running along side by side in all the highs and lows, trials and tribulations there was the permanent theme tune of our good friend Marijuana. The irony of all this being, after twice circumnavigating the globe, I found what I was looking for in the pub next door to where I began!”.
Big Head lets out the most raucous laugh and stares into a realm somewhere beyond at this moment.
“It was, without doubt, the greatest dope I’d ever had” he whispers gingerly. “Soft, really dark, Afghan, it was a gift, you couldn’t buy it. It was beyond all expectation of brilliance – somewhat akin to the clarity plateau of LSD accompanied by an orgasmic, ecstatic physical quality. I thought, everyone should have a bit of that in their lives, and so a mental seed was planted…and it grew. It grew so big I had to get it out of my head and into a farm and I just would not stop until I found who I needed to help make this thought a reality.
Burning Man 2002 was really the beginning of Big Head Seeds. A bit of luck will only get you so far and so to make things happen I needed two people to meet… and when it did, it was like the beginning of a bad joke!! There was an Englishman, a Dutchman and an American in the middle of the desert…only it wasn’t a comical moment, it was a glorious epiphany and I swear I heard angels sing…although we were all fairly smashed on some pretty hairy stuff at the time ha ha ha! It was one of those moments in life when all your efforts, hopes and dreams, didn’t turn to ashes but all came together….Boom! It was The BIG HEAD Hadron Collider smashing the three of us into one, resulting in an explosion of a billion seeds!!
After the excitement of the Playa, the hard work began. They had their areas of expertise in horticulture and I had the connections – it was a bit like getting the Blues Brothers back together, you’re not dealing with easy people! We all agreed that together we could deliver superior genetics to the world, after all.…why should anyone have to hand over their hard earned for bollocks weed? And that was the collective thinking.
We found a plot of land, pooled our funds and set up, never looking back and working tirelessly until we had established enough to make a start. We dubbed it Area 420 – yes I know, a little cliché but that’s what it was and I’m very proud to now say that that is what it most certainly is!
Area 420 became our base of operations, our jungle HQ…It was way more work than we expected, blood, sweat and tears…but we laughed a lot too…you had to laugh….it was like herding bees at times!
Things soon got serious. We gathered the best genetics and the breeding really began…clones of this here and cuts of that there…if something didn’t work out we would smoke it and forget it, if strains performed well they would be kept and re-run…again and again…and yes we smoked them too, ha ha ha! Like I say a lot of laughing. We started hiring people to feed them, then we had to hire people to keep things tidy, before you know it the Area 420 compound was a buzzing, commercial farm of epic proportions and that’s when the tears came, tears of joy at the level of professionalism before us, given the wild beginnings which echoed that of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas!
Once we had all the qualities and desirable traits we had to decide which strains we would present….and we thought hang on…. it’s all very well for us to be producing amazing results in these ideal conditions but what about everyone else? That’s why we cut things back to nine strains…nine, super stable, true BIG HEAD strains, all of which have undergone real world testing so we could be sure these girls would not disappoint.
We will never stop!!” Big Head bellows loudly whilst slamming his cup of coffee down so hard it spills all over the table.
“We have more in the pipeline: two feminized photoperiod and another auto and will also be introducing our first regular strain…but, for now, the nine we currently have available to the public are quite a handful as you can see from the photos.”
Coming to the end of our time with Big Head, he abruptly interrupts, “… two pieces of advice….if you can find a place…sun-grown, organically fed, marijuana is, hands down, the best way to grow…and talk to your plants…I’m serious…talk to them, cradle those buds in your arms, cup them in your hands and whisper to them your life story…they will reward you with theirs…great talking with you guys”
BIG HEAD is certainly a larger than life character with a BIG imagination, BIG dreams and is certainly a whole heartedly passionate believer in what he does…he also has some BIG plants by all accounts!!
Originally published in Weed World Magazine issue 116
