A glassblower who outlasted the drug war, a soil detective and a breeder who learned the hard way that free genetics “come with friends.” Here are the first three episodes of Higher Times with Kyle Kushman.
Higher Times with Kyle Kushman is presented by CANNA.
Every episode of Higher Times with Kyle Kushman runs on the same recipe. Kyle cooks something in his kitchen, walks his guest through his grow tent and then sits down to talk shop, usually after a smoke break or two.
The guests are the people who build cannabis culture from the ground up: growers, breeders, glassblowers, soil nerds. The tent has a name, Tentchella, “cuz it’s like big enough for a party,” Kyle explains. Street shoes are not allowed inside.
The new High Times series drops a new episode every week on our YouTube channel. Here’s what you missed in the first three.
Higher Times at a Glance
- Host: Kyle Kushman
- Produced by: Kyle Rosner
- Directed by: JT Barnett
- Format: Kyle’s Kitchen, a tour of Tentchella and a sit-down interview
- Where to watch: High Times on YouTube, new episodes weekly
- Presented by: CANNA
Episode 1: The Ritual Has Changed, With David Goldstein
David Goldstein of Rooster Apparatus has been blowing glass since 1976. He remembers when glass paraphernalia was a big industry, and he remembers when it almost wasn’t one. “The drug war and just say no and all that crowd really took a dreadful toll,” he tells Kyle. By the end of the ’80s and the early ’90s, he says, only a couple of people in the United States were still making glass pipes. “I was one of them.”
The two talk about how a lifestyle got packaged into a product, and Goldstein walks through what a fritted disc and a Dewar seal actually do to your smoke. Before any of that, Kyle opens the series with his house rule: “We wouldn’t want to suffer from an excess of sobriety.” Then he makes tacos from scratch, spice blend and all, with one non-negotiable tip: “Don’t buy shredded cheese.”
Episode 2: The Soil Detective, With Scott Skamnes
Scott Skamnes of Crescive Soil Services drives out to Tentchella and reads it like a chart. He checks stem color, runs a hand squeeze test on the living soil and explains why the purple striping most growers blame on a cal-mag deficiency usually means something else in living soil.
Skamnes says he collects the same data at every farm he visits, soil, water and biology samples, and the numbers often look alike. What separates the gardens that thrive, he tells Kyle, is something no lab report measures: “the vibes at a farm.” By the end, over a homemade New York style pepperoni pizza and “a little bit of cough,” he’s drawing the oxygen scale, with healthy aerobic soil on one side, anoxic soil on the other and a middle zone where he says pests and pathogens thrive.
Episode 3: Bugs Come in the Bag, With Blackleaf
Lance H, better known as Blackleaf and co-host of First Smoke of the Day, joins Kyle for a spatchcocked roast chicken (“two hours in a 350-degree oven, foolproof”) and a look at Tentchella in its eighth week of bloom. This time the soil was amended using the mineral weights Skamnes calculated in the previous episode.
Then Blackleaf gets into what two decades of growing taught him: why breeding needs its own room, why some bagged soil and coco arrive with bugs already in them, and why his fans go off when the lights do. His rule for a sick garden comes from snipers: “aim small, miss small.” Strip it back to a few clean clones and start again. He learned that in Colorado, where everyone was passing around prized cuts. “And then you realize it comes with friends.”
“Growing is fairly easy. It’s battling the bugs and the pathogens.”
Lance H, aka Blackleaf
New episodes of Higher Times with Kyle Kushman drop weekly. Watch the full series on the High Times YouTube channel.
Higher Times with Kyle Kushman is presented by CANNA, which provided financial support for the series. Kyle Kushman is a brand ambassador for Blimburn Seeds. This series is intended for adults 21 and older.
