While California Cannabis cultivators have faced difficulties following legalization, one that has certainly stood the test of time is Oakland’s Fig Farms. This year, they added another hitter to the list with Strawberry Guava.
Fig Farms founder Keith Healy originally purchased the pack of seeds containing Strawberry Guava at the Chalice Festival back in 2015. They would sit in his seed vault for a decade before finally making it into Fig Farms’ propagation program last year.
We talked with Chief Operations Officer Mike Doten about the process to find their newest hitter. One of the best things about this Strawberry Guava is that the seeds popped.
Each Fig Farms pheno hunt includes a spread of classics from Healy’s collection and the work the team has created in-house. In the past, the farm has had trouble getting some of the more legacy packs to germinate. There have been vault picks that just didn’t work out when it came time to pop the seeds.
“In the old days, when we first started buying seeds 16 years ago or more, we weren’t storing them the way we are now,” Doten told the Leaf. “It’s not surprising if 60% of the old packs have maybe one or two seeds germinate.” Thankfully, this was not one of those occasions.
The flavor profile of Strawberry Guava lives up to its parents’ legacy. While it leans heavily on the Strawberry Banana terpene profile, the Papaya notes definitely come through. The result is an amazing daytime smoke. It has a strong cerebral edge but is relaxing instead of racy.
This pairing of Papaya and Strawberry Banana was made well before either strain became a major player in the global rosin market. “It immediately became one of our favorites in the garden just because it smells so good,” Doten said.
Strawberry Guava competed against 700 other phenotypes from Fig Farms’ breeding program and other old-school packs the team decided to hunt. Many are thinned from the herd early, with only about 200 being fully flowered out.
“We scale things up slowly,” Doten said. “We find a lot of things that we like, so we take our time with all of them. We don’t just end up flooding the market with a bunch of things that we haven’t spent time with.”
Strawberry Guava has a beautiful, bright green complexion in a world of quasi-purple dessert and candy strains. While it doesn’t have those purple notes in the actual bud, one genetic trait the Papaya passed on, along with vigor, was a slightly pink hue in its trichomes.
The testing numbers were basically off the charts for a legacy strain. Fig Farms’ Strawberry Guava comes in at a whopping 33% total THC; a fantastic result given the era these seeds came from — a time that leaned a lot more on perfection than how much room is left in 100%.
“The Strawberry Guava is one of the higher-testing things in the lineup right now,” Doten remarked. “And it’s absolutely beautiful.”
Originally bred over a decade ago, Strawberry Guava holds up after all these years with some of the best-smoking flower on the market.
This article was originally published in the June 2026 issue of California Leaf.
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