Spanning ten acres of state of the art greenhouses in Leamington, Ontario, master grower Mikey Roots plays joyful Roots and Culture Reggae music to his plants. “Everything here is grown with love and from that, you feel it in our joints,” says Mikey, leading KIND on a tour of his vast, immaculate greenhouses, best in class facilities where premium Smokes Joints are grown and made. Mikey, born in Toronto, has lived and grown in Jamaica during the winter months prior to this project—where he’s smoked with Sir Bunny Wailer in his own home, dabbed out Peter Tosh’s son Stephen Tosh, and shared his personal high grade with Kymani Marley (Shottas) on more than one occasion. He has dedicated his life to his craft with over 25+ years of experience breeding high grade cannabis for the legacy world.
“Every Smokes and FatCat is handcrafted personally by me with organic hemp paper and has to be perfect, because it’s the cannabis I’d smoke with friends in Jamaica,” Mikey told me, as we passed a Cherry Pie OG Kush joint back and forth. “I have to be sure that every joint functions perfectly and is made with the best possible materials. It is my artwork every step of the way from seed to smoke.”
The smoke—white ash, terpene-laden (Mikey told me there’s 177 terpenes in each joint), deliriously pleasant—is Mikey’s passion project. The weed Smokes and Fatcat grown for its prerolls is entirely proprietary to the brands. All the genetics are created in a world class, in-house breeding program from Mikey’s 25+ years of strain hunting and breeding projects. For Mikey, whose cannabis plants can grow ten-feet-high and are fed only natural well water, sunlight and the highest quality nutrients, growing and consuming cannabis is a gift. His plants are hand-trimmed, hang-dried, and cured to perfection; and their strains— Tropical Punch, a 1:1 CBD blend and Cherry Pie OG Kush, a cross between San Fernando Valley OG Kush and Mendocino Cherry Pie—are exclusive to the brand Smokes. “Everything that goes into our plants is clean,” says Mikey. “This is my life right now. Everything I have mastered goes into this weed.”
FatCat is a half gram Fruity Haze single joint, and Smokes are the five 0.6 gram multi-pack joints in Cherry Pie OG Kush and Tropical Punch 1:1, which come in a plastic case that was especially designed for the product. The case, the size of a deck of cards and perfect for transporting, are the kind of disruptive detail Smokes is steadily becoming famous for. Double Jointed, another product launching in April, are two half gram OG Kush joints. Taken together, the tour of the facilities along with the excellent product demo led KIND to conclude this was a brand to watch.
Double Jointed launches in April and Smokes and FatCat brands are available now. For more information, see thesmokes.ca and thefatcat.ca.
