VASSAR—One of Christopher Wasko’s earliest memories is pulling carrots out of his grandfather’s backyard in Warren, just north of 8 Mile, and eating them with the dirt still on.
His grandparents moved to Michigan from Kentucky during the 1950s automotive manufacturing boom. They canned, composted, and buried fish scraps in the garden beds. They shucked beans and corn. And they paid the grandkids nickels to collect worms after the rain.
“They were teaching us how to grow food,” Wasko said. “We didn’t even realize it.”
Decades later, Wasko named his cannabis brand after the street where he spent those childhood summers: Hill Street. And the lessons from his grandparents’ garden are still rooted in every jar.
Based in Vassar, Hill Street is one of the newest cannabis brands in Michigan. It was licensed last summer, had its first harvest this spring, and employs just five people. But it’s already attracted plenty of attention, thanks largely to a founder who answers customers’ questions on Reddit himself.
After a tour of the grow and a few weeks smoking his weed, I understand the buzz.
Wasko has spent nearly 20 years breeding and refining these genetics. They grow in a living soil that gets nothing but water. And they deliver the kind of slow, flavorful, nostalgic high that most Michigan stoners haven’t felt since before the plant was legal for recreational use.
Grown on Hill Street
The first cannabis Wasko ever grew was on Hill Street, too.
In 2009, he moved in with his grandmother and started growing as a medical marijuana caregiver—one plant to start. Friends who had been breeding for years gave him more seeds, he started growing more plants, and soon he was developing his own genetics.
Since then, Wasko has bred more than 500 new strains, with about 70 kept alive as mother plants. His mom still waters his breeding projects. His wife, Christine, runs the books.
He never planned to go commercial. The push came from friends who kept telling him the industry needed something different—including a globe-trotting buddy who had sampled weed from top growers from California to Amsterdam and insisted Wasko’s weed was the best.
“I’m an artist before a scientist,” Wasko likes to say.
Spend an hour with him, and you’ll see why.
Just add water
Most commercial weed in Michigan is fed bottled nutrients, Wasko said.
Plenty of “all-organic” grows still lean on compost teas or bottled microbes.
Hill Street skips all of it. Its plants grow in a living soil mix Wasko designed himself and patented, and they get water. That’s it. No feeding schedule. No flush before harvest. Worms crawl through the beds, and mushrooms sometimes pop up around the stems.
Even after all these years, he still marvels at it.
“I literally look at it and go, ‘I cannot believe these grow with just water,’” Wasko said.
He went organic early. Back in his caregiver days, he grew the same strain two ways—one under synthetic nutrients and one in organic soil. The choice was obvious.
“It tasted better. The high was better,” he said. “Same strain.”
The grow rooms at Hill Street are built to feel more like the outdoors. Lights sway and rotate overhead, and fans keep air moving throughout the undercanopy like a breeze in a field. Wasko knows the space so well that he can spot trouble across the room at a glance.
Skipping the flush is on purpose, too. Wasko says the minerals left in the soil are what help his weed burn down to a clean ash. For the customer, the payoff is big flavor and a smooth smoke.
Keeper of the Jamaican
The soil is the secret sauce. The genetics are the soul.
And the backbone of those genetics is Jamaican.
Years ago, Wasko met an older, intensely private man at a hydroponics store who had been discharged from the military after testing positive for weed. One day, he pulled Wasko aside.
The man told him he had a prized, increasingly rare, original landrace Jamaican strain that friends had kept alive since the 1980s by guerrilla-growing it in the Michigan woods every summer.
“Chris, I’m getting older,” the man told him, and asked him to keep it going. And he has: Every few years, Wasko pops the seeds, finds a male plant, and produces a fresh batch of seeds to preserve the line.
Today, he’s the keeper of the keys.
“I honor it,” he said.
The true Jamaican landrace, the strain Rastafarians call Lamb’s Bread, has all but vanished from the island, bred into higher-yielding hybrids. And there’s no simple test to prove Wasko’s mother plant is authentic. But he says Jamaicans who have smoked it told him it’s the real deal.
Wasko met one of them at a meeting with Rohan Marley, son of reggae legend Bob Marley.
“This is what my granddad had,” the man told him. “I smoked this when I was 12. This is it.”
Wasko compares the effect of his Jamaican to Maui Wowie: awake and up, but without the anxiety. Its DNA runs through many of the strains carrying the Hill Street label today.
Now, his Reddit followers are helping convince him to bring the pure stuff back. When Wasko posted about the Jamaican this fall, the thread drew nearly 200 comments. He spent more than four hours replying, and the response encouraged him to sprout a fresh round of about two dozen seeds.
He’s now hunting for a plant with a little more bag appeal than the one he has now.
If all goes to plan, a small, limited batch could hit shelves next spring or summer.
Where to start
Before you pick a strain from Hill Street, check the label. Michigan requires every cannabis product to list an “activation time.” Most jars say “immediate.” A lot of Hill Street’s weed says “progressive.”
Wasko started labeling his so-called “creeper” strains that way after a weed-snob friend rated a batch of his new strains. One jar got three stars, then had them crossed out and bumped up to five stars once the high had a chance to sneak up on him about 30 minutes later.
“That’s that old school creeper high,” he told Wasko.
It’s an effect Wasko chases on purpose. A lot of weed these days “smacks you,” he said. A creeper builds slowly and fades the same way—without the nasty crash.
“You’re gradually getting higher, but you’re also gradually getting not high,” he said.
I asked Wasko which three strains a newcomer should try first—then smoked them exclusively for a week straight. All three were smooth, properly cured, and loaded with flavor.
His first pick was Berry Wreck Pi, a descendant of the first cross he ever made. Its ancestry includes Blueberry, Strawberry Cough, Purple Urkle, and Trainwreck—plus a squat, gassy line he calls “Pi,” after the endless number, because “there’s a lot going on there and it’s a mystery.” It tastes like a reunion of old school favorites: strawberry, blueberry, and earthy grape, with a big gas note, a sharp herbal bite from the Trainwreck, and a little incense. It’s a creeper that melts stress and builds into a full-on brain blaster. Heavy eyelids. Save it for the end of the day.
Jamaican Blue Z starts with his Jamaican crossed with Blueberry. It opens with a candy nose, then turns wonderfully old school on the palate: earthy wood, incense, and familiar kush, with a soft floral sweetness underneath. The high is jazzy, buoyant, and curious. It’s weed for browsing a record store or cracking open a book. It keeps me awake enough to keep turning pages and settled enough to follow the plot. A fun high doesn’t need a racing mind.
Cherry Soda Pop is one of Wasko’s two favorite daytime strains, and my favorite of the three. The cherry is unmistakable, wrapped in bright, floral sweetness. Effervescent is the closest word I’ve found: almost fizzy. The high is electric, with a pronounced buzz that gets my mind humming. It’s my favorite way to start a leisurely day. A little goes a long way.
Your own personal grower
Hill Street almost didn’t survive its first few months.
Buyers kept asking for trendy, candy-focused strains like Runtz and rock-bottom prices to go along with them. Wasko was days from going under altogether when the team at Information Entropy in Ann Arbor sat down with him for hours and agreed to take everything he had.
“You’re the type of people we wanna work with,” Wasko recalled them telling him.
Today, Hill Street jars—including the half-ounce size Information Entropy specifically requested—are on shelves at its Ann Arbor and New Buffalo stores, as well as at Eleven Cannabis in Berkley. Supply is limited, but new drops are hitting shelves this fall.
Wasko wants to grow, but slowly, and only with people who care about the plants as much as he does. “If they’re not proud of it and it’s just a job, you’re probably not gonna fit here,” he said.
Getting bigger isn’t really the point, though. What he wants is to bring back something the legal market lost: the buddy who grew something special and shared it with an inner circle.
So, he keeps the door open. Wasko hosts occasional “canna tastings,” where a dozen or so fans get to sample new strains and help decide what gets grown next. He also rolls joints for customers at in-store meet-and-greets. And he still answers Reddit comments himself.
Five years from now, he says he wants to be known as “the people’s grower.”
Most of us never had a personal grower. Most of us never pulled carrots from a backyard on Hill Street, either. But crack open one of these jars, and it feels a little like coming home.
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