Preferred Gardens took the long way to success, and it shows in the flower. Torches NYC carries this notorious brand because customers on 42nd Street kept asking for cannabis that photographs like a magazine spread and smokes like something a grower actually cared about. Both things happen to be true here. And that’s just scratching the surface of the empire that Dave Polley, his wife, and their team have built.
If you have shopped our flower wall lately, chances are you have spotted the red-and-white “P” logo. This guide breaks down where Preferred Gardens came from, who runs it, and why it earned a permanent spot at Torches NYC.
Who Is Preferred Gardens?
Preferred Gardens started in 2015 as a small California cultivation project and grew into a genuinely respected name in premium flower, first on the West Coast, then further east. The brand’s calling card is flower that looks as sharp as it smokes: dense structure, heavy trichome coverage, and terpene profiles that hold up from harvest to jar.
That reputation is earned. The Preferred Gardens team evaluates roughly 200 new seeds every month, hunting for the phenotypes worth keeping. Over the years that process built a genetics library topping 260 strains, a serious catalog by any Sacramento cultivator’s standard. It also means the brand rarely runs out of new drops to send east once a phenotype proves itself.
The Mixed-Light Legacy That Built the Brand
Mixed-light cultivation blends natural sunlight with supplemental lighting inside a greenhouse. It sounds like a technical footnote until you taste the difference. Preferred Gardens leaned into this method early, well before “mixed-light” turned into a buzzword other brands started borrowing.
The approach pairs sun with structure to produce dense, flavorful flower with vibrant color and a lighter environmental footprint than a fully indoor grow. Plants get the natural spectrum sunlight provides plus the consistency artificial lighting adds on cloudy days. Growers who work the method say it tends to bring out more aromatic complexity and a cleaner burn.
Founder Dave built the brand’s identity around this hybrid system, running indoor and mixed-light lines side by side so the team could compare notes and keep refining both. It reads less like a trend chase and more like a decade of trial, error, and patient pheno-hunting. That patience is the actual legacy here: a decade-plus of the same grower learning the same greenhouses, season after season, instead of chasing whatever cultivation trend gets buzz that year.
Meet Dave and the Team Behind It
Preferred Gardens is still a family operation. Dave founded the company, and his wife runs the business side, everything outside the greenhouse. Together they lead a tight-knit crew Dave has described as a team of friends who happen to also be smokers and family.
No outside investors sit on the cap table. Dave has reportedly turned down funding offers worth tens of millions of dollars, choosing to keep the company independent rather than hand decisions to people who have never touched a plant. That choice shapes everything from how strains get selected to how the brand talks to customers. Small team. Direct accountability. Nobody hiding behind a corporate layer.
The crew stays small on purpose: a handful of people covering cultivation, retail relationships, marketing, and content, plus a longtime friend of Dave’s who has worked alongside him since long before Preferred Gardens existed. Everyone wears more than one hat. That is part of what keeps quality control tight even as the brand’s footprint grows.
It shows up in the daily details, too. Dave trains staff at each cultivation site himself, and he tends to favor simple, reliable systems over flashy tech that adds more ways for a grow to fail. Fewer automated shortcuts, more hands actually on the plants.
From California to New York
What started as a Sacramento operation now reaches growers and customers across California, New York, Arizona, Illinois, Florida, and Pennsylvania. That is a real multistate footprint for a brand that never took outside money to fund the expansion.
New York is one of the newer markets, and Torches NYC is proud to carry Preferred Gardens flower on 42nd Street. Cannabis retail here runs through a licensed, regulated system overseen by the New York Office of Cannabis Management, and every Preferred Gardens product on our shelf passes through that same testing and compliance chain before it reaches you.
Hear It From the Team
Want the story straight from the source? The Preferred Gardens team sat down for an episode of the First Smoke of the Day podcast, talking through the brand’s origins, the mixed-light approach, and what keeps a small operation like this competitive against companies with far more funding behind them.
It’s worth the watch, especially if you want to hear directly how a family-run brand thinks about growing without losing quality control.
What’s on the Shelf at Torches NYC
Our flower selection from Preferred Gardens rotates with the season, but a few strains have become regulars:
- Gelato 41, a cross of Sunset Sherbet and Thin Mint Cookies with a sweet, creamy, dessert-like flavor.
- Permanent Marker, a heavy-hitting hybrid known for its loud, gassy aroma.
- Sidebanger, a dense, gas-forward hybrid built for people who want a heavier hitter.
- Marksalot, a loud, pungent hybrid in the same family as Permanent Marker.
- Znacks, an indica built for a potentially slower evening.
We also carry Preferred Gardens pre-rolls, including a Gelato 41 pre-roll for anyone who wants that sweet, dessert-forward flavor without breaking out a grinder. Looking for something with more punch? Preferred Gardens makes a lineup of 1g cured resin disposables too, including Lemon Head, Chanel, and Dezigner. As always, inventory changes, so be sure to check our menu first. Ask a budtender which batch just landed. New drops move fast.
Preferred Gardens Cured Resin Disposables at Torches NYC
Preferred Gardens does not stop at flower and pre-rolls. The brand also makes a lineup of 1g cured resin disposable vapes, and Torches NYC currently stocks a rotating selection of strains that includes Lemon Head, Chanel, Dezigner, and more.
Preferred’s cured resin starts from premium cured whole flower rather than trim or biomass. So, the finished oil tends to hold onto more of the plant’s original terpene profile than distillate-based vapes do.
Each disposable is an all-in-one pen, so there is no separate battery or cartridge to manage. Charge it, hit it, done. No fuss, no leaks, no extra parts to lose on the subway.
Why Preferred Gardens Stands Out
Plenty of brands claim small-batch quality. Fewer can back it up with a decade plus of pheno-hunting, a founder who still trains staff himself, and no outside investors pulling strings. Preferred Gardens built its name the slow way, one greenhouse and one strain at a time, and that patience shows up in flower that keeps earning repeat customers at Torches NYC.
Buy Preferred Gardens in NYC
Preferred Gardens flower and pre-rolls are in stock now at Torches NYC, 12 E 42nd Street, steps from Bryant Park and Grand Central. Stop in for pickup, browse the full Preferred Gardens brand page, or order Manhattan delivery if you would rather stay put. Join our rewards program while you are at it and start earning points on every Preferred Gardens pickup.