When Brothers Grimm shut down in 2002, the original Cinderella 99 seed stock was quickly depleted and unavailable until their resurrection in 2016. During the dozen or so years that passed between, C99 became more than just popular, it reached cult status as the “Holy Grail.”
The resulting plants have been extensively grown and tested in 2016 and found to satisfy the pickiest grower’s expectations of stable, reliable phenotype. The seedlings have very little variation, having been bred for uniformity – they grow with similar scents, flowering time, potency, yield, and growth structure. And the finished buds will impress any weed connoisseur’s demands for bag appeal, flavor and quality of high.
The dried, cured flowers are rich in terpenes ranging from sweet tropical fruit, to stinky rotten cheese… sometimes all in the same bud – the flavors and aromas are sublime. And of course, there’s the famous C99 high – devastatingly potent, yet clear – you’ll feel like getting creative, playing music, or making art.
Cinderella 99 likes 56-65 days of 12/12. Pistils should all be withered and the resin heads have all gone cloudy/milky at harvest time.
Flowered at 12-18 inches tall, the finished plant will be approximately 36-48 inches tall. Expect frosty tight buds with tropical fruity terpenes.
The properly cured bud feels sticky and pliable between your fingers. On the nose, you get a kind of Hawaiian Punch scent but with a funky body odor undertone. When you light it up, that fruity flavor hits your taste buds first, then the funky aftertaste.
C99 is a fast flowering plant needing plenty of light and nutrients, she also likes extra calcium. We grow C99 as multi-headed bushes with tomato cages or stakes for support. They also work well in a SOG or SCROG arrangement.
We harvest 4-5 ounces of primo buds from a 48-inch-tall plant. Above average yield.
12 Regular (non-feminized) seeds per pack!
THE CINDERELLA STORY – AS TOLD BY MRSOUL:
In 1996, I discovered a few seeds in a bud of Jack Herer I bought @ “Sensi Smile” coffee shop in Amsterdam while there to buy seeds. I didn’t expect much when I grew them, but one of those seeds from the Jack Herer bud produced a very special female that I call “Princess”. She had devastatingly potent resin and stayed short, compact and had a heavenly aroma of tropical fruit and rotten meat.
The scent given off by Princess, was unusual in the late 90’s – not at all skunky – she’s sweet and fruity. Someone passing by the flowering room MIGHT not recognize the scent as pot and mistake it for tropical flowers. When you rub the resin you can definitely smell it. The high of Princess is also more “psychedelic” or “trippy” compared to the strains like Skunk #1 that were popular. I always advised friends to smoke a LITTLE, wait 10 minutes, then think about whether or not you need any more…it’s easy to over-indulge and become paranoid.
We can assume Princess’ mother was a Jack Herer not only because Sensi Smile printed it on the package, but also because I’ve smoked verified Jack Herer since then. So Princess’ father is a totally unidentified mystery plant – his pollen somehow got in Sensi’s growroom. Princess had two sisters join her from that same bud. I called them Genius & Café Girl. There were also 3 males from those seeds which regrettably, I didn’t preserve. Genius became the mother of the Brothers Grimm Apollo lines, while Café Girl gave us Rosetta Stone, and Princess of course, created Cinderella 99.
I wanted to create a strain that would allow me to share Princess with others, but I wanted this incredible “Holy Grail” of indoor clones available to the world in SEED form. I decided to use a technique called “cubing” to create the seeds. Here’s how cubing works:
Pollinate a flowering clone of the chosen female with the pollen of a related male, preferably her father or a brother – to preserve any female traits that are linked to the male side of the family. An unrelated male won’t have the Y-chromosome of the chosen female’s family & therefore any Y-linked traits of the family will always be missing in the seed line. The resulting seeds contain 1/2 the original female’s genes and 1/2 those of the male.
Grow the above seeds & flower them.
Pollinate a flowering clone of the chosen female with pollen from a male selected from the above group. These seeds contain 1/2 the chosen female’s genes plus 1/4 more from the male being 1/2 her genetics too. I call this first back-cross generation .75 to capture the idea that it’s 3/4 of the original female’s genetics.
Grow the above seeds & flower them.
Pollinate a flowering clone of the chosen female, using a selected male from the above generation. These seeds contain 7/8 the original genes (1/2+3/8), so this second back-cross is the .88 generation.
Grow the above seeds & flower them.
Pollinate a flowering clone of the original female with pollen from a selected male off the above generation. These seeds contain 15/16 the original genes (1/2+7/16), in other words, so we’ll call this third back-cross the “.94” generation.
Theoretically, this will be a stable, true-breeding seed line from which all females are replicas of the original. Cinderella 99 seeds are created from a male P94 crossed to Princess, which is technically P97.
In the process of “cubing” Princess I wanted to add a little strength to her branches because the buds were always so heavy at harvest that the branches flopped over. To do that, I crossed a male from a heavy-yielding, dense, resinous strain, Sensi’s Shiva Skunk. Crossing that male to Princess created the “P.50” generation (using the shorthand notation I developed to indicate the fraction of Princess genes in the cross).
Each generation is the result of crossing a male from the previous generation to Princess herself.
Here’s a blow-by-blow description of the generations as they tested in my garden:
P.50 = Heavy, single-cola type plants with mellow high (too much influence from the Shiva Skunk) Sweet fruity scent/flavor. Unstable in most traits – for example, 10 days’ difference in fastest/slowest maturation period in a group of 20 seedlings.
P.75 = Princess floral cluster and bud structure, scent/flavor turned more “tropical” like pineapple. The stability was becoming better – two major phenotypes; short & dense (potent too) or tall/HUGE (less potent).
P.88 = Renamed Cinderella 88 when first released on the market. It grows fast and produces excellent yields of FROSTY buds in 7 weeks! Generally uniform seedlings with minor differences in floral formation and some height variance, but the smoke is quite consistent from all plants – Dense, heavy nuggets of fruity scented & flavored (like wild berries) and covered in resin glands, the dried buds have distinctly ORANGE pistils.
And finally, the male P.94 cross to the Princess clone creates Cinderella 99. The name “Cinderella” was chosen because of the parallels between this story and the well-known fairy tale in which Cinderella becomes a Princess despite her humble beginning.
Each generation exhibited a MAJOR jump in potency: P.50 was rather mellow, P.75 has a well-balanced body/mind high with a citrus flavor, Cinderella 88 is cerebral and paralyzing with a tropical fruit flavor, and Cinderella 99 is of course renowned for the fruity flavor and speedy, scary high inherited from Princess.
This project clearly became a huge success. The strain has been embraced by the community. The smokers gave rave reviews & the breeders elevated Cinderella 99 to cult status. It’s extremely gratifying to me, MrSoul that so many hybrids were created by breeders who recognized C99 as a stable parental stock from which to build or tweak another variety. It’s a big compliment to me as the breeder, and a huge testament to the enduring quality of Cinderella 99.
12 Regular Seeds per pack!
Andrew (verified owner) –
Better than I remembered getting back in the day! Great yields and love the flavor
If you’ve never had cindy 99 you’re missing out. If you have had it … grab a pack stat!