Laughing Buddha

Sativa-dominant, Laughing Buddha can get you out of the darkest moods and feeling good about life again.  It can take a bit of effort to grow, but the payoff is a bumper yield of tasty, potent weed.  Created by Barney’s Farm, Laughing Buddha is a 2003 Cannabis Cup winner.

Laughing Buddha is a cross between a land-race Thai and Barney’s own Jamaican hybrid.  The landrace genetics make for a robust plant and Laughing Buddha is known for growing tall, strong and quickly.

This is a strain to set your mouth watering.  If you enjoy exotic fruit salads, then you’re going to love Laughing Buddha.  It has the classic, Asian, sweet and sour approach with citrus lemon counterbalanced by pineapple sweetness and, of course, a dash of herbs and spices to make the taste more interesting.  The aroma is mainly sweet and fruity, with a hint of complexity.  It should be noted that both during growth and during use, Laughing Buddha has a powerful scent.  You may therefore wish to look at odour control while you are smoking or vaping it.

At 18% THC, Laughing Buddha may seem on the mild side by modern standards, but any strain which has been popular for over a decade, clearly can deliver results.  Laughing Buddha is more than strong enough to show pain the door and blast the blues away to get users, quite literally, laughing again.  Since this is very much a head strain, it leaves users feeling refreshed and ready to go, which makes it great for daytime use, particularly as a “wake and bake” strain.  One of the great advantages of this strain is that it allows users to keep their focus, which means that it’s feasible to use this strain when you need to get on with some work, although obviously activities such as driving need to be avoided.  Because of this, Laughing Buddha is very popular as a treatment for headaches and migraines.

Even though Laughing Buddha acts pretty much like a pure Sativa, the small dose of Indica genetics does help to keep the height down, so indoors, it will generally top out at under 1.5 metres.  The Indica content may also be the reason why Laughing Buddha does like to grow outwards as well as upwards, which is one of the reasons we said it takes a bit of effort to grow.  The long branches carry super-size colas and hence are pretty much guaranteed to need some degree of support during the flowering period.  The other key reason we said this strain takes effort is because it has a long flowering period of 10-11 weeks, which means that realistically most growers will need to keep it indoors as the outdoor harvest is in mid- late-October, where frost is going to be a risk even in southern countries.  This long flowering period means that growers will need commitment and a plentiful supply of food.  If you’re up to the challenge, however, you could harvest up to 600 gm/m2 of delicious and effective weed.

Strain Characteristics:
Indoor/Outdoors: Indoors (preferably, outdoors possible in some climates)	Height: Medium/Tall
THC Level: Medium/High	Flowering Time: Ten to eleven weeks
Plant Type: Sativa dominant	Harvest: Mid/End October
Genetics: Land-race Thai and Barney's Seeds’ own Jamaican hybrid	Yield: High
Grow Difficulty: Medium/Hard