Interview with Judge - Vince and Weed
AWC:
Hello, I am Gabs Castro and now I am with you at the Autoflower World Cup 2023. And today I am with Vincent. He is very cool! Let’s talk about the Autoflowers. Please, introduce yourself and talk a bit about your relationship with the cannabis community here in the event.
Vince and Weed:
My name is Vincent Weed and I'm a cannabis educator. I educated Germans about cultivation, extraction and also consumption. And today I'm especially interested in this event because in the last couple of years a lot of stuff has changed in the section of automatic genetics. So the best moment to discover what happened in the last couple of years is precisely a cup like this. And I was cultivating cannabis by myself. Five years ago I became a legal cannabis patient in Germany, so I made a trade. I stopped growing but I started educating and giving a face to the legalization movement and by that I'm talking a lot with my community about genetics, the different grow styles. So, regarding autos, a lot of people from my community ask me all the time what I think about automatic genetics, and I have to tell them that in the last five years I couldn't grow. So today we will figure out what's going on with the automatic genetics.
AWC:
You are the judge of the Autoflower World Cup. I would like to know about your first experience. How was it?
Vince and Weed:
The first experience I have about cups is that there are definitely two sections. There are really the top cultivators who are competing for the first and the second and the third places, but a really important part of the cup that nobody knows is the lower sections where the lower competitors are. These are the people who are trying to figure out where they are by competing with the pros. So I would really recommend everybody to enter a cup with their material to see where their skills are. This is motivating.
AWC:
Tell me what you think about the quality of the autoflores.
Vince and Weed:
I can't tell you anything about the quality at the moment because we have to start to judge, and after that I can tell you what's going on.
AWC:
Perfect. Have you smoked autoflowers before you had your own flowers?
Vince and Weed:
Yes, definitely. So the autoflores, the part that makes them independent from the light cycle is the ruderalis gene, I don't know how to say that in English. I would say in the past, when I was still growing, the autoflowers had a certain taste that gave you a clue that maybe it's autoflowering genetics, I think this changed in the last couple of years and this is why I'm fucking curious to figure out what's going on at the moment!
AWC:
Yes, I’ve heard a lot of people say it's more difficult to make clones. Is it possible?
Vince and Weed:
No, this is the thing about autoflowering genetics. You can't hold a mother because the mother would also switch into flowering mode, so there you can only grow from seeds.
AWC:
You are from Germany, right? What is the cannabis industry there like? What can you tell us about the cannabis community, the autoflower community there?
Vince and Weed:
In Germany it is still illegal so we are working on the legalization. Maybe this year, but for sure we have an underground community cultivating cannabis. In Germany we have a problem with the Summer, so some people use autos specifically to have early harvest and not come into the Fall season where the weather gets cold and wet and then the plants catch mold outside. So there is definitely a place for autoflowers. The people are using it, especially on the balcony setups and stuff like that.
AWC:
Are people still buying weed nowadays or do they prefer to grow their own?
Vince and Weed:
It completely depends. I think there are people who go the route of growing their own, others go to the plug. I hope that it will change: that the people will have a legal choice to grow at home or to go to a legal shop or to a club, like where we are today.
AWC:
And the last one: what are your expectations and feelings about this event? What are you looking for in this Autoflower Word Cup 2023?
Vince and Weed:
I'm looking forward to smoking really really good flowers in which I can't see or smell or taste any difference between them and the regular, let's call it regular feminized seeds. And if this will happen today, I can say that all this thing with this type of genetics came really far. So I am really curious to figure it out.
AWC:
Thank you so much. Have a very nice experience!
Vince and Weed:
Thank you.
