Sources

Sources we cross-check

Lockbox draws strain data from a small, deliberately narrow set of primary sources. We do not scrape aggregator sites and we do not repeat numbers we cannot trace back to either the breeder, an independent registry, a documented grow, or a lab report. The point of keeping the source list short is so that we can triangulate — read the same strain across three or four independent angles, see where the figures agree, and flag the gaps where they do not. This page lays out the source categories we lean on, in roughly the order of weight we give them when the numbers disagree.

Breeder catalogues

The breeder catalogue is the primary source for every strain entry in the library. When we read a breeder page we are looking for four specific things: a clear statement of lineage with both parents named, a flowering window in weeks, a yield range in grams per square meter indoors or grams per plant outdoors, and any awards or cup placements that anchor the release in time. We are also reading for ambiguity flags. A breeder page that lists only one parent, or that hides behind generic copy like “a heavy indica-leaning hybrid bred from elite cuts” without naming the cuts, is a flag. A page that publishes a single point estimate for yield with no range is a flag. A page that does not name the breeder behind the catalogue at all is a hard fail, and the strain stays out of the library until that information surfaces.

Independent strain registries

Two registries sit at the center of our cross-check process. The first is seedfinder.eu, a community-curated database that maintains lineage trees with citations back to the breeders that contributed each entry. We use seedfinder to verify that the parent strains the breeder claims are the parent strains the broader community has documented, and to catch the cases where two breeders have released distinct strains under the same name. The second is strain-database.com, which we lean on for older lineage work and for strains whose parentage is contested in the consumer literature. Neither registry is treated as authoritative on its own — they are useful precisely because they were built independently of the breeders, which makes a registry-versus-catalogue disagreement an interesting signal rather than a problem.

Forum grow reports

Grow reports are how we sanity-check the breeder’s yield and flowering claims. We read four forum communities regularly: the r/microgrowery subreddit on Reddit, the Grasscity grow journal section, the ILGM Growers Forum, and Breedbay. None of those communities are perfect, and we are not naïve about the photo manipulation and tall-tale culture that surrounds harvest weights on the internet. The reports we weight heaviest are the ones that timestamp every flowering week, include trichome close-ups taken with a phone microscope, and place harvested buds against a kitchen scale or a clearly sized container in the final photo. We discount reports that show only flowering canopy shots, reports without feed schedule notes, and any post where the harvest claim is wildly out of band with everything else on the strain.

Published lab reports

For potency figures we cross-check publicly available results from licensed testing labs, primarily California license-required lab data and Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission test results. Two things to be honest about here. First, licensed lab potency disagrees by a wide margin even on identical genetics — interlab variance on total THC of the same flower can easily run a relative ten to twenty percent. Second, what gets tested commercially is rarely the same phenotype most home growers will pull from a seed pack. We therefore publish potency as a range, lean toward the lower end of that range when reporting expected outcomes, and never present a single lab’s headline number as the strain’s “true” THC content.

Breeder interviews

Breeder interviews give us the historical context that the catalogue pages strip out. The High Times archive remains the deepest single repository of long-form breeder profiles going back to the original Dutch programs, and a handful of contemporary podcasts have picked up where that magazine left off with newer US craft breeders. Interviews are where we get the founding date of a seed bank, the story behind a flagship cross, and the breeder’s own description of how a strain was selected. They are useful for breeder history, attribution, and the editorial voice on a profile page. They are less useful for live data — interview claims about yield and flowering tend to track the catalogue copy, so we do not treat them as an independent source for those figures.

Reviewed 2026-05-23