Highs you can ride to the end of the year’s longest day
The Summer Solstice observes the longest day of the year for every place north of the Tropic of Cancer. It’s when the sun takes high noon to its highest heights, as far above the Equator as it will go, and bathes us with the most light of our annual trip around it.
The word solstice, however, roughly translates from Latin as “standing sun.” The longest day of the year is mere seconds longer than the day before it and shorter than the day ahead of it. Because of this, for a week around the Solstice, the sun appears to keep its place in the sky.
When we think of the best summertime cannabis strains, energizing sativas like Durban Poison and Blue Dream immediately come to mind. And if they sound like the perfect vibe, we hyperlinked them for your convenience. But if reflecting on the cycles of our planetary existence stirs your soul in ways typically kept between you and Mother Nature, read on for complex cultivar recommendations that pay proper homage to this yearly sunlight summit.
Cannabis connections to Summer Solstice
The Summer Solstice coincides with two significant Northern Hemisphere cannabis cultivation practices. One is the first of two harvests for greenhouse growers, and the other, for outdoor growers, is when the sensitive plants make their shift from veg and stretch to flower and grow as they detect the days getting shorter.
Weed growers, especially of the outdoor variety, must have rebellious spirits, green thumbs, and the knack of laughing in the face of risk if they want to grow great plants and make a good living. Those traits often accompany extra layers of open-mindedness and curiosity that allow them to question not just authority but the reality that breeds it. So if you give them a chance to howl at the sun while they smoke their choicest buds, they’ll likely take it. Perhaps they’ll even embrace the more mystical ideas behind it. Such as that magic is most potent when the sun stands still and Earth hangs from her feet.
Strains to accent summer’s celestial flex
An appropriate way to honor all the sun’s hard work is to unlearn the idea that “energizing” and “sativa” belong in the same sentence. They can share a sentence, but one descriptor needn’t inspire the other. Cannabis sativa and indica designations are about the regional genetic origins and corresponding growth traits of different plants.
The strains that create typically uplifting reactions in us come from all over the world, from plants with all sorts of shapes and growth patterns, and with more terpene variations than we could ever name. But that doesn’t mean that some aren’t better than others for celebrating the Summer Solstice.
Bananas, berries, and citrus fruits mingle with funk, gas, and pine needles in the following gorgeous strains that could make celebrating Summer Solstice your favorite hoorah of the year.
Pick a flower for the day you want to have
Beach day: Tally Mon
Nothing screams summer like releasing an open-throated, “Day-O” to the morning light. Pairing this rousing call with the equally stimulating Tally Mon strain is an ideal opening to the day’s extra sip of sunlight. It’s a banana-forward delight bred by Oni Seed Co. in California.
Though reportedly tough to obtain beyond the West Coast markets, if you can find it, Tally Mon is the perfect thing for seeking that spot where the sand isn’t hot and shifty but also isn’t in a wave-maybe zone. Unfurl your towel, pin it down with buds and yummy foods, and enjoy the deep dawn stretch feeling of Tally Mon’s balanced, body-soothing high.
Hiking: Super Lemon Haze
A longtime fan favorite and award-hogging strain, Super Lemon Haze is an energetic combination of bright, sunny lemons and the soft earth that nurtures their trees. It has unmistakable citrus, pine, and forest floor aroma and exhale notes, but the first draw you take is all lemon—no sour, no sweet, just the bright yellow sensation of the vibrant fruit’s soul.
Take a deep inhale of Super Lemon Haze during any kind of daytime hike, and you release as much gratitude as anything else with the exhale. Super Lemon Haze is a jazzy, old-school strain with a unique beauty to its sativa-dominant traits. It’s also bound to keep you going while you make your way to whatever peak you’re after with its quick, proactivity-boosting burst.
Festival: Super Boof
Colorful and crystally, Super Boof is a summer festival deity. Its buds are dressed in royal purple and are laced with velvety greens that are trimmed with spindling bright orange hairs that pop and shout when you bust open its buds, but shyly hide behind a thick crystal coating while waiting patiently in their jars.
Super Boof brings the funk to the festival, whether it’s for music, weed, aerospace engineering, or purely spiritual purposes, its gassy fumes hover underneath Luxardo cherry and tart lemonade notes. It’s a strain that will smudge out any off-feeling vibes and clear space in your mind to take in the Solstice-inspired celebration that drew you into its doors.
Creek wade: Tropicanna Cookies
With an alias like MTN Trop, the Tropicanna Cookies strain by Oni Seed Co. makes sense for wading ankle deep through the cold, clear rushes of your nearest creek. But we can’t go by curious coincidences alone, even if one of Tropicanna Cookies’ parent cultivars also happens to be Girl Scout Cookies.
Tropicanna Cookies weed tastes like fizzy orange sweet-tart candies, but with a little extra sugar and notes of thick forest brush. Its high is just right for feeling the water pass over, beside, and underneath your feet, creek pebbles, fallen branches, and silt. Close your eyes and inhale the woods around you slowly as you let yourself feel that everything is always new, always renewed, and, like us and everything else, the sun plays an integral part that started at the start of it all.
City park: Blumosa
The Blumosa strain is a newer, indica-leaning hybrid strain that’s become beloved, fast. It has the sweet, citrus flavor of an afternoon mocktail that feels at home, knees splayed with a side smile and relaxed slouch on a bench in the heart of a metropolis park, post-workout and pre-sunset.
The Blueberry Girl Scout Cookies and Mimosa cross from SOG ARMY is a fantastic anytime-of-day strain that shines a light on the wisdom of your intuition and easily gives way to letting go. Like the cannabis plants peppering the hills, you’ll sense an inner shift to switch your growth to something that bears potent fruit. It’s perfect, breezy yet deeply gratifying material before joining your buds for the final frays of the day.
Desert fade: Yellow Zushi
The Yellow Zushi strain is another one gaining recent industry traction. It’s a cross of Zkittlez and Kush Mints that makes for a pine and menthol flavor and aroma experience with citrus and funk highlights. It has painted desert vibes all over it, and it’s just the thing for setting up camp and enjoying the fading rays.
The Yellow Zushi plant is meaty and mostly indica. It sports purples and greens dotted with peach-toned hairs and giant, sparkling trichomes. If you can find show buds, their beauty is hypnotic, and the high is euphoric. This is mind-melt grade cannabis, perfect for appreciating the harmonious relationships we enjoy within our solar system and beyond.
Weaving midsummer crowns and setting up sundials: Zkittlez
Zkittlez is the pairing of cult classic strains Grape Ape and Grapefruit. Though it doesn’t typically clock in as high-THC, Zkittlez is the perfect example of the beauty and complexity of the cannabis plant as a whole. Much like the extended length of the longest summer day, this strain uses its space to conjure a deep connection to our emotions and a resounding sense that we are where we should be.
As you weave flower, vine, and plant stems into a midsummer crown or DIY a Summer Solstice sundial with the family, the light yet profound effect of the Zkittlez flowers will add a glittery essence to your playfulness and glee.
Dancing through twilight’s final sunrays: Strawberry Banana
The hashy, mouth-watering big bud energy of the Strawberry Banana strain is the sweetest sendoff to the last of the sun’s showy display. As fire pit ash and smoke rings fade up into the deepening dark, Strawberry Banana, Strawnana to some, puts the berry on top of a day we can only praise one axis spin per year.
Strawberry Banana loves to be alive. It pops itself proudly from seed to weed and enters the world dripping in diamonds and jonesing to mingle. It begs to butt into the philosophical musings of strangers and sink softly and deeply into the mossy cushion of a swirling Solstice dance. As you swing from the arms of a friend or bough, let the belly laughs flow, and let go of what didn’t get ready for new growth this year.
Weed enhances solstice celebrations
If you want to make it to sunset on summer’s longest stretch, weed is a better bet than alcohol. Though if you chain smoke your blunts, reach for another weed drink, or give in to the munchies from your munchies and eat more edibles, you might welcome it with a true midsummer’s dream.
Don’t sweat it, whatever you do. A lovely element of celebrating Summer Solstice with a truly great strain is taking in the miracles that sustain life’s cycles. That calls for an open mellowness that borders on meditation, which is what sets the best nugs from the rest.
No matter the thrill, rush, couchlock, or contemplativeness of a strain of this caliber, it will take you places you didn’t know you needed to go.
What better way to kick off the next stage of your year?
