What a great discussion going on here, thanks for everyone who is participating. For those that have volunteered your time and your space I am extremly thankful and I have taken note. I am sorry if I haven’t reached out directly yet but be sure I will be doing so shortly.
I am still trying to mentally get some details worked out about how this will work in the grand scheme of things so thats where my energy has been focused. I didn’t want to reach out to potential growers without having a pretty well fleshed out idea of what will be asked of them. But for those who have volunteered be sure that we are close to things being set in motion.
Here are my thoughts about how to go about certain parts of this project:
Growing the F1’s to make F2’s:
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The Goji plants should be grown in a separate space then your other plants just to try an eliminate any potential accidental cross contamination with other strains pollen. Its OK to have other plants going in your place just have some form of isolation in place and practice some good protocols of not going directly from one space to the other.
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Clones of all males and females should be kept for a short time past the initial pollination. Here is my reasoning. The females will obviously want to be ran again by their growers in hopes of finding a keeper female. The males seem to be a desirable commodity for potential backcrosses and future breeding projects by the community. Males should be kept in clone form until the growers have a chance to see what they look at after they have been flowered out for initial F2 pollination. Once the males have been flowered out for the F2 making an evaluation can be done by each grower and the community at large to see if there are any special males worth keeping. If something is found then we can arrange for that clone to be sent to its “forever home” of whoever can hold that male and spread it out to the community.
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Pollen collection and sharing. I think it should be up to each grower to use a pollen collection method that the have available and feel comfortable with. If the grower is not experienced with pollen collection methods then please ask advice in this thread. The expectation is that the grower will only be responsible for collecting pollen and pollinating their own batch of plants. However each grower also has the option to collect enough pollen and share it with other F2 growers to add to those pollen store to increase genetic diversity of each batch. This is a completely optional step but for those grizzled vet growers that don’t mind a challenge then share pollen as much as possible.
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Once each individual growers batch of F2’s is complete those seeds will be sent back to me to be combined with all the other growers seeds to create one gigantic F2 seeds stock.
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Those seeds will then be distributed through the spring co-op box using the normal channels.
Schedule for being able to run these seeds.
After looking around at the seed co-op thread I found this quote.
If this information is still accurate then the final combined seeds stock has to be packaged up and sent to the seed distributers by end of March so they can be sent out in April. So lets work backwards from that date.
March 31st 2022: Seeds are mailed to seed run co-op distributors
March 15th 2022: Separate F2 batches are in Lazy Hippie’s hands for him to combine and package. (This gives me a few weeks to get this done because you know Im lazy lol)
March 1st-15th 2022: Each individual F2 grower has to package up their batch and get it in the mail.
Feb 14th-28th 2022: 2 weeks for the seeds to dry out.
Dec 20th - Feb 14th: 10 weeks of flowering for those long flowering ladies.
Nov 8th - Dec 20th: 6 weeks veg
Nov 1st - 8th: seeds are popped and transplanted into their first containers.
EDIT: This is just a a VERY rough outline to look at to generally see when things would need to happen. If your grow style doesn’t align with how long each phase is no worries, the important dates are mid-end of March to get the finalized seeds out. If your style can get that done then its all good!
I padded several timelines here but it certainly would seems that we are under a tight time line. Seeds will need to get out to the f2 growers in the next couple of weeks and those growers need to be able to pop their seeds by the first week of Nov.
Beyond the F2 making
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First things first I want this project to be fun for everyone involved. Life is stressful enough without adding to it, especially adding stress to a hobby that is suppose to be something we do out of love for the plant. So that should be the number one consideration. I appreciate all the volunteers but no one should feel any additional stress over this.
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Now the second point of the project is to make available a line a genetics that the community desires. The F2 seed stock gets the basics covered to keep this line going. I would also like to see sharing of any keeper cuts found with the community.
Female keepers: I would like to see each volunteer grower willing to share their keeper cut that they find in their Goji run.
Male keeper(s): I would like to see the volunteer growers coordinate on selecting a keeper (or multiple keepers) male plants that can then be held by a willing individual and shared with the community. If there are going to be many dozen seeds popped this seems to be a good opportunity to find a special male to keep around. I know most folks struggle with space so we can work on making sure this election process happens quickly after the initial pollination run so folks wont have to hold on to the male clones very long. Just long enough to see the original males flowered out and then a decision made of whose male to keep and then the rest of the males can be culled.
I will update the OP to include these key points in the notes. I feel comfortable that these details have been worked out enough to proceed if everyone is in agreement.
The biggest caveat is if you have volunteered, can you pop the seeds quick enough to have your F2’s mailed back to me by the middle of March?
you are totally right with the end of the year festivities things get crazy at the post office, most things sent in late november always arrive late and even if all breeders started now the pollen exchange would be done at the turn of the year which makes it difficult a lot of pollen exchange.
Hopefully someone who does this run is generous with clones! I’d love to be able to give the real Goji OG a try, it’s already become a bit of a legendary strain - would be interesting to see if it lives up to the hype.
The F2s and beyond will surely be nice, and eventually will be stabilized into something similar to F1, but this part of the plan will be awesome for those who can have clones sent to them. Not me yet unfortunately, but maybe eventually, and either way this’ll do wonders for getting the genetics out there. Seems like a fitting treatment for a legendary strain!