Strains
High Times Top 10 Strains of the Year: The Retrospective
The High Times Top 10 Strains of the Year revisited by the editor who chose them: how the lists were judged, how the winners changed, what growers can learn.
This is the Danny Danko strains section: the profiles, judging notes and yearly lists I wrote over eighteen years at High Times, brought together in one place. It is the Field Guide online. It is not a ranking of every strain on the market, and it is not a dispensary menu.
In 2011 I wrote The Official High Times Field Guide to Marijuana Strains, 180 pages of profiles built from what I had grown, judged and smoked, not from breeder catalog copy. The method behind it has not dated, and this section continues it.
The Field Guide to marijuana strains, continued
Every profile here comes from direct experience: a strain I grew, judged at a Cannabis Cup or examined closely enough to describe. Each entry gives lineage where it is known, type, flowering time, aroma, and the note I would have written on a judging sheet. Where I do not know a strain's lineage, the entry says so rather than repeating a breeder's claim as fact.
The lists in this section are built the same way. The strongest strains, the purple strains and the best strains are drawn from my own judging and grow notes, ranked by what held up in the jar and in the garden, not by search volume. If you want to know why a strain is labelled indica or sativa and what that label actually predicts, read indica vs sativa first.
High Times Top 10 Strains of the Year
From 2005 to 2018 I personally selected the High Times Top 10 Strains of the Year. Each year's picks were mine, made from what I had judged and grown that year. The Top 10 Strains of the Year page here is the retrospective: what made each list, who bred it, and what I think of the pick now. While reproduction rights for the original lists are confirmed, the page runs as an analysis with excerpts rather than a full reprint.
How to use the Danny Danko strains section
Start with the Top 10 retrospective if you want the history. Start with the lists if you are choosing what to grow next. Each strain profile links to the chapters in the grow guide that matter for it, flowering time and stretch in particular. For the full profiles and the original photography, the Field Guide itself is on the books page.