Many people just love fruit-flavoured strains and if you’re one of them then Mandarin Haze may be the perfect strain for you.
Strength
With 23%, THC Mandarin Haze is strong enough to deal with severe physical pain and more challenging emotional conditions. In fact if you’re new to marijuana, you may want to start with a lower THC strain just so you get a realistic idea of what THC levels mean in practice (taking into account the fact that everybody’s different). Alternatively, if you’ve set your heart on the delicious taste and happy, energetic high of Mandarin Haze, go very gently with the dose until you’re clear about how you, personally, respond to it.
If you’ve already tried Sativas then you might find it useful to know that Mandarin Haze is about 15% Indica and while that might not sound like much, it’s enough to give a stable anchor to the high and ensure that you come back to earth in a gentle glide rather than with a harsh bump.
Yield
Looked at in terms of headline figures, Mandarin Haze offers good yields with indoor growers looking at 550-600 gr/m2 and outdoor growers looking at 750gr/plant. In the real world, however, you need to remember that Mandarin Haze is a Haze, meaning it is a Sativa dominant, meaning it likes to stretch.
In other words, there are plenty of compact Indicas available, which will yield almost as much bud in much less space, hence, frankly, the harvest is far less impressive than it initially sounds. On the other hand, while there are plenty of gorgeously fruity Indicas out there (Tangerine Dream springs to mind), even these days, you’d be hard pressed to find any Indica with this kind of THC level.
Speed
Taking 10 weeks to flower, Mandarin Haze is never going to win any awards for speed, although the touch of Indica genetics does help to bring the flowering time down a fraction.
Outdoors, you can expect to harvest around end-September to mid-October, which means that really it’s only suitable for true outdoor growing in the very sunniest parts of Europe. Depending on where you live, you may be able to work around this, at least to some extent, by growing under glass so you can take advantage of natural light and heat as much as possible, but back it up with electric lights as days get shorter.
If you do want to go down this route, then you’ll have to think about managing light cycles the way indoor growers do.
Taste
The clue is in the name. Mandarin Haze is fruity sweet, citrus fresh and clearly a Haze.
Bag Appeal
To be perfectly honest, Mandarin Haze doesn’t look like much in the bag. For a strain with Mandarin in the name and a pretty high level of THC, there’s isn’t much to see in the way of orange pistils or frosty trichomes. On the other hand, there is a simply mouth-watering tangy/sweet odour of mandarins, which wafts out clearly even before you’ve started breaking up the chunky nugs.
The Haze family have always divided opinion. Some people absolutely love them, others think they’re just more hassle than they’re worth. If you’re one of the former than Mandarin Haze should definitely be high on your list of strains to try. If you’re still making up your mind, then we won’t pretend that Mandarin Haze is the easiest strain in the world to grow and frankly beginners should probably give it a miss and wait until they’ve confident growing photoperiod Indicas, but if you’re up for a challenge, then Mandarin Haze could be a very rewarding strain to try.
