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The original White Widow is to Amsterdam what the cheesesteak is to Philly or the bacon-topped maple doughnut is to Portland.
Not in dispensaries well-stocked with oil rigs, maybe. But look up a seed bank and you'll still find "the backbone of the Dutch coffee-shop industry" is widely sought-after. It's crossed with AK-47 to make the legendarily potent White Russian and with three other strains to make the WW house-favorite, Omega. And it's where Agrijuana's Mike McElveny started his efforts to re-create a long-lost B.C.-bred strain that he'd grown for a few years in the early '80s.
The result is McWidow, a sativa-dominant phenotype currently on sale in Washington at North Bonneville's Cannabis Corner and finding its way to Battle Ground's Cannabis Country Store and Vancouver's dispensaries.
All White Widow seeds are the same genotype, meaning they have the genetic material. But every regular seed will express those traits differently after it spends a month in the ground. McWidow began as one of 10 White Widow seeds sent from Amsterdam. Unlike its cousins, it leaned heavily on its sativa heritage, growing slowly to produce tall and winnowy stalks with long, feathery flowers. Those flowers have a light and piney scent, smoking easily and producing a quick-hitting, mildly euphoric and creative high with very light body effects.
"It's not a
super-high potency, and it takes a while," McElveny says. "But it's a
great plant. Not hard to grow and it has that smell—that floral, piney
scent I was looking for, that I remembered from all those years back."
WWeek 2015