Joe Jacovini has been cultivating in southern Humboldt County for nearly three decades.
The Philly native’s experiences along the way have pushed his farm, Vesuvio Gardens, into becoming a mainstay on shelves across Northern California.
Before making it to Humboldt, Jacovini was running a 30-lighter in Philadelphia. Like many, that original big effort out East came after his time following the Grateful Dead on tour after graduating high school in 1989.
“I just kind of dropped ninja bombs and bolted out of Philly; showed up here in ’99,” Jacovini told Leaf.
Jacovini didn’t arrive empty-handed. At the 1995 Cannabis Cup, he’d spent a month building a genetics collection that included Barney’s Farm and the entire Sensi Seed catalog for that year. He did so well that the move west wasn’t just about starting his own grow, but also assisting someone in the hills with their genetics.
“I cut 100 clones in Philly,” Jacovini explained. “This was right before 9/11, so you could kind of get through security a little easier. I cut the clones really long, vacuum sealed them and stuffed them down my pants. We cut them in the airport in San Francisco and plugged them.”
Jacovini was unfamiliar with the stout indicas commonly cultivated during that era.
Nevertheless, he understood they were effective in the county’s indoor scene, which was under intense law enforcement scrutiny. He felt he relied much more heavily on sativa-leaning genetics than many of his peers at the time. The move west came with a $2,400 drop in what he was getting per pound, but he hit the ground running with a new grow house and was off to the races.
The light-deprivation scene started a few years later. Jacovini built out his first hoops in a greenhouse. He dated the time frame to around the birth of his daughter in 2004. He kept the plant count at around 20 to stay out of trouble.
“If everybody’s getting $2,200 pounds for deps, I’m in,” Jacovini said of the plan.
After starting with OGs, he ran 10,000 square feet of Sour Diesel deps until 2016. That was also around the time he saw the writing on the wall for where the market was heading. He jumped into the permitting process at the last minute after spending some time traveling between growing seasons.
“I literally didn’t get my first license until the last minute. I was in Italy, and the phone call was on the 28th. Everything had to be done by December 31, and I think it all cleared on December 30, type thing,” Jacovini said.
Eventually, Jacovini completed full vertical integration through his farm, Vesuvio Gardens, a distribution license and Joe’s Pot Shop, a dispensary in Whitethorn.
The way Jacovini makes his selections for what he’ll be growing in any given season is a combination of what moved the previous year and what he isn’t seeing on Instagram. Two of the mainstays in his greenhouse rotation over the years have been Dirty Taxi and Garlic Cocktail. Dirty Taxi is a pairing of GMO and Chem I95, while Garlic Cocktail brings together GMO and Mimosa. Garlic Cocktail has proven itself to be award-winning hash material. It offers heavy GMO notes with the Mimosa slightly less present but still definable in the flavor.
In addition to the sales data, Jacovini is always searching for an impact level that reminds him of strains from the 1990s.
“Most of your customers are 40 and up, and most of them don’t even have an Instagram account, so I just, you know, proof’s in the pudding,” Jacovini said.
