Highly unlikely, certainly genetic studies don’t bare that out. Cannabis is one of the most heterozygous plants on the planet, genetic studies show that even so called IBL’s show a large amount of genetic variability.
For more than 8 thousand years we have selectively bred fibre and drug varieties, and in different locations, we had already domesticated it in the Neolithic period and consequently there is no real ‘wild’ cannabis, only escaped domesticated plants.
Landrace don’t ‘breed true’ and it’s the very fact that they are so heterozygous that enables environmental adaptation.
True breeding as you are using it is a misnomer anyway, plants hardly never breed true for everything, it’s normally only specific traits that are said to ‘breed true’.
I have tried just selecting for the fastest finishers without adding anything broad leaf and it’s a long slog with little gain, maybe if I had a few hundred years it might make a difference.
The only Mexican I ever saw and tried was Acapulco Gold and that was real nice came in what they called Lids (an oz in a tin) 80/81, but it looked nothinglike Haze.
We used to literally get tons of the stuff. From orange to gold to purple. It was so abundant that I never thought about saving seeds because it seemed like it would always be there. But unfortunately nothing is forever
How old are you Slain were you growing in the 70s ?
I started growing in the spring of 79, and I can tell you with absolute fact that the lines pre-dating the Dutch seed companies, seed we collected from imports or from travelling different countries breed true.
The only old line imported in 82/83 I remember that didn’t was the old Maui sativa, and that was a hybrid.
Take Nevils Haze by F2 I had isolated two types HzA and HzC by F3 locked now how would that happen if the original lines were not true breeding ?
The thing is that there was so much Mexican coming in that it would get called all kinds of names to keep people interested. Colombian and Panama and even Thai were the main exotic names people would use. So there could be a lot of confusion going on with the name game. I would say 90% of all the US imports was actually Mexican. I know because I saw it happen.
The Colombian red were very different to the Panama Red you could grow say a Colombian Red next to a Panama red and know what was what just by the look of the plants even in veg they were that different in both plant frames and the colour of the leaf even but both had red flowers.
This Haze plant growing in Sam’s greenhouse in Holland looks like a classic old school Colombian, and yet the first female Haze Nevil grew looked like grew like a Thai.
There was so much variety in the Mexican batches back then. It was almost never the same. That was before the mafia took over and it was a collection of many different areas that got all packed together. It’s something that I think should be mentioned. Usually when people grew the seeds from Mexican weed they would call it Colombian. I grew up on the border states and have seen some things people would not believe
I’m not trying trying to argue with some stoner geezers decades old recollection suffice to say that anything ‘true breeding’ doesn’t happen by accident There was neither the skill, nor knowledge to achieving homozygous lines and to do so would require a serious investment of time.
Segregation is random, so the chance of getting a perfect phenotype sort of Thai or Colombian from a couple of plants in a cupboard is unrealistic and would require hundreds of plants. It’s a numbers game.
Those two pics are both old time heirlooms that have been around for many decades, no seed banks were involved.
I have never ever seen two seeds that were exactly the same. There is no such thing as perfect true breeding cannabis. Unless you are growing cuttings you will never find such a thing
Years many years generational growers/farmers selecting inbreeding creates true breeding does it not ?
Crop breeding programmes are frequently based on pure lines. These require 5–6 generations of inbreeding and selection after crossing to generate inbred homozygous lines suitable for extensive evaluation.
Maybe with tomatoes but definitely not with cannabis.
Let’s use Skunk#1 as an example. It’s supposed to be one of the most inbred and true breeding varieties around. I’m here to tell you that it’s not and none of the plants look or smell the same. I would love to be proven wrong here
100% correct ,
this is why we grow it from cuttings ,
no 2 plants are the exactly the same , like strawberries , and other fruits we tend to use cuttings to have a more uniform and constant result ,
and thats from cannabis hybrids ,
landraces , as already mentioned are very diverse ,
that is the value they have ,
and they can adapt , as well as resist diseases etc etc ,
they definitely do not breed true …
may[be there is an issue with the definition of breeding true here ,
even inbred lines of cannabis will only breed true for some specific traits …
landraces are another story all together to the standard ibl …
Only when done with a specific goal in mind, you have to actively select for the traits you are trying to fix or you are likely to just end up with feral plants that show a high degree of variability. This is normally done by trait, not by the entire plant, else there are just too many variables
Open pollination, no matter how many times won’t get you homozygous offspring, else landrace varieties would all be uniform. It’s normally about 12 generations of careful selection before you get reliable consistency, something that hardly ever happens.
True breeding means parents are homozygous for every trait. In the pure breeding that occurred in the plants having either recessive or dominant alleles of a gene. Due to the presence of both types of same allele pure breeding produce the progeny of their own kind in the plant.
I am not talking about hybrids Slain, the old varieties of set genetics were grown and selected by many generations of growers/farmers before we got a hold of the seed even back in the 60s.
If what you are saying is true then why is it that say TH haze is so varied that you need 100 plants to get a few good ones? It makes little sense that uneducated and largely ignorant farmers with landrace strains were producing more consistent plants than current farmers with all the information available, especially considering that farmers mostly didn’t even produce seedless until reasonably recently. I’m not buying the whole idea of a mythical golden past where everything was better and more consistent, to me it just sounds like rose colored glasses.
