Breeders Secrets and Tips!

I just want a spicey skunk, a sour skunk, a dead skunk, and a sweet skunk.

Links please.

Yeah… I’m going to have to breed. Grow out all the mango scented seedlings you want. I’m not wasting my time.

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Good luck. Skunk is elusive.

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This is what is see. I see little small male plants with little nuts. Do I want them or do I want fking grapes. I’ll take the grapes. You want the male in its full potential. Not a wet dream. People smoke leafs and male plants. People here do it. I’m very sure if it. I did 30 or 40 years ago. Was it trash . Yes. Nasty. With the big N

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This has been bugging me, and yea you definitely are being that guy. No one NEEDS to breed, but everyone does it for their own reasons. Some for experimentation, some out of curiosity, some chasing that nostalgic strain from the past some breed just to share the wealth of the ability to grow a plant with others. So for all those out there, regardless of your motives, don’t let something like this discourage you, it’s fun and educational, breed away my friends, breed away.

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I think possibly that’s not what was meant, ‘breeding’ is a very specific term and there is a monumental difference between crossing things we like and breeding with a plan and purpose for a reason.
I don’t read it as discouraging anyone from making as many beans of as many crosses as they want, on the contrary the idea of using fems with strains we like imho is a sound one for a number of reasons, but I agree that unless you are growing big numbers in plots and methodically selecting for pre determined traits then going this route simplifies things and gives a good chance of getting a good expression of the two parents. It’s not really ‘breeding’ per se.
Selecting for traits is a long grind involving many plants and is often full of dead ends and disappointment with thankfully some wins along the way to keep you going lol. Not saying that to discourage in the least, just that’s my personal experience of it, I suspect that’s why the rhetorical question of asking yourself if you ‘need’ to breed . It’s a bit the old “buy it or build it” question in engineering

Making f1’s from ibl’s is fun and so long as they are stable is reasonable easy to get a satisfying result.

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For the auto breeders out there. Best bit of advice I’ve heard is to pollinate EVERYTHING. Don’t try to pick winner females before pollination, do it after. It’s too hard to tell, most times, if a female auto is gonna display whatever traits you’re hoping to pass on before the optimal pollination window is gone. Color is a great example. Some autos don’t go dark til the last few weeks of life. Way too late for making selections based on color alone.

So, pollinate everything, pay attention after pollination, keep seeds from winner females, give the others away as freebies :slightly_smiling_face:

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What I was wondering in another thread is what should the selection be based on if you can’t first grow them out and smoke the seedless end product like you would do with photoperiods? Cause we all agree on the fact that the smoke decides doesn’t it?

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Take some clones, flower out the plants, sample the smoke, if you find one you really like breed the clone you took of that plant

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Yes, of course! But this doesn’t apply to autoflowering plants because you can’t take clones of those…

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Maybe just pollenate one branch on each plant? Or if you really really want the whole plant seedless, you can take clones and seed those, they’ll just be smaller plants. So you’d have to take clones of everybody, then pollenate them all, and keep them numbered so you know what seedless moms they came from.

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I’m actually waiting on a call from Cornell about their cannabis and hemp breeding program. Gotta find something to do with this gi bill :sweat_smile:

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Yes, that would be a good approach! But we have to make sure that they grow vigorously so we can take a (few) clones before flowering sets in and the mother isn’t set back too much from topping.

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I’m always in favor of people doing their own experiments and making whatever seeds they want. I make tons of seeds, I think everybody should. Most of the time, I’m not really breeding them. I’m not focused on stabilizing a trait into a line, so much as crossing two plants that I think will complement each other. But sometimes, on a rare occasion, I want to build a very specific trait into something and then I do breed for it.

My point is that advice should be very different for each scenario. Usually if you want to fix a new trait into a strain, your process will look very different than if you are trying to just make some good seeds. The most helpful tip you can have for breeding is a list of traits and whether they are dominant or recessive. This is critical information for someone looking to breed a photoperiod plant into an auto. The most helpful tips for making good seeds are usually more observational or qualitative.

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I’ve tried to keep a clone of a male plant before. Took the cutting before the plant was flipped into bloom. Well for one reason or another, under 24hr lighting, he started to bloom. Likely from being root bound, but I couldn’t keep him around

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Very good point. I think I was lost on the terminology differences. I call that pheno hunting or selective breeding. Any time male and females of anything are combined for offspring, i call that breeding, lol. I agree that very different advice is needed for each and I may have mistaken the point of the thread. I mistook what you were saying as most people shouldn’t cross plants. All good growski!

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A couple of ‘hopefully’ useful tips:

  1. Try as much as possible to get a photographic memory for leaf shape, texture, colour, growth habit etc, likewise for the plants overall structure, or if you are more organised than me document these things, you can tell a lot about the contribution of both parents to a cross and the relative usefulness of a parent plant in donating its traits to the mix; not all plants with great characteristics will be good at passing on or receiving those traits (for various long winded reasons), and a cross will often give a gradient of characteristics between both parents; leaf form and plant structure are complex traits and are a useful way to get an early indication of how dominant one or other parent is in the mix. Especially if you have lots of them and are looking to minimise variation. Some variation will turn up later in the flower cycle but at least you can narrow it down faster, and this means can put in a lot of plants and thin out the outliers earlier.

  2. Vigour to a large extent is linked to a genotypes heterozygosity, meaning that when you put in a bunch of beans and naturally as we all do select the most vigorous seedlings to plant out, you are also likely inadvertently selecting plants that will express greater range of variation later on in their growth cycle. wait a while before thinning them out ( a couple of weeks) and initially select using structure and form as mentioned above.

  3. In my experience, and I’ve no idea why so it could just be me, it’s easier to start with a good structure and root system and select and breed or add for potency/aroma later, rather than start out with a spindly weak plant that has insane potency/aroma/taste and try and beef it’s structure up.

  4. Speaking of spindly, imho and it is only my opinion, thin stems are a bad idea that only leads to pain for growers so don’t do it! Sure there might be less stick and stem in the end product but it’s much harder to even get an end product if the buds hang on the ground and need constant propping up. All thin stemmed pheno’s must die imho lol.

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When a male is stubbornly flowering even under 24hrs of light - trim him back and pluck his balls, this should calm his hormones a bit :wink:

Reasoning: Flowering hormones accumulate in the shoots first.

There was a gentleman who did an experiment years ago where he boxed a female and fed branches through holes on each side of the box. He then left a light on 24/7 inside the box and flipped the outside to 12/12.

Well only the bits exposed to 12/12 flowered

What does did have to do with males inadvertently flowering? Hormones baby lol

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Please excuse the quotes, I’m lazy tonight :slightly_smiling_face:

to expand further, let’s give a couple of examples.

Example 1)

We self Burmaberry, grow out 100 seeds and self the single most outstanding example of it’s progeny again. This gives rise to another 100 and we repeat. By about the S3, although the line is beginning to firm up and express our desired phenotype in a larger percentage of the population, vigor and fitness are clearly on the wane, inbreeding depression is setting in. This will often happen, and is an example of how the technique may be misused, as we left ourselves no proper countering of negative effects.

Example 2)

We self Burmaberry, grow out 100 seeds and self the 5 most outstanding individuals. Grow their progeny in 5 separate plots and label them families 1-5. From within those families, we again look for the top 5% without regard to which family they come from. You might get two outstanding individuals from family 1 but zero from family 2, etc, so family 2 is over, culled from the program. As we continue, by about the S3 generation we might decide that family 1 and family 3 are performing the best of all. They are both producing a high percentage of our ideotype, except now they are doing so in a homozygous (true breeding) condition unlike our original clone.

The other thing to note, is while the original clone might have been Aa/Bb/etc at some loci, family 1 might be aa/BB at the same, yet family 3 might be AA/bb/etc, all at the same locus/loci, yet all giving rise to the same ideal phenotype. At the end (and sometimes during) of these cycles, you can now bring several outstanding individuals from family 1 and family 3 and mate or bulk them together, restoring fitness/vigor to the line, and countering the deficit of heterozygous individuals within the population. This would be an example of how these techniques may be used more properly to counter some concerns one may have regarding inbreeding depression and etc.
-tom hill

if an acceptable percentage of the progeny from the original parent upon selfing show the trait/s, then the original parent is worth trying in the outcross, no need to look at reversing S1’s. Otherwise, yes, test S1’s via reversal and observe those progeny etc etc. And therein lies one of the main values of breeding utilizing selfing via reversal btw… If it proves out that the parent we’d like to use, is terribly heterozygous, the progenies as we continue on with selfing, become homozygous 3 times more efficiently than under any male/female breeding scheme.
-Tom Hill

From “principles of plant breeding”:

Self-fertilization (one individual in each generation in each family) leads to very rapid increases in homozygosity. Starting with a heterozygote (F=0.50), F takes the values 0.75, 0.875, 0.9375, 0.9688, 0.9844, 0.9922, … in successive generations of selfing, thus exceeding 0.90 in the third generation. Under continued mating of 2 individuals per family (full sibs) each generation, F is not expected to exceed 0.90 until the eighth generation. […]
. It is therefore not at all surprising that breeders of plant species nearly always choose schemes featuring very close inbreeding. Selfing schemes (one parent/generation) are by far the most common in breeding outcrossing plants, and the usual goal is to develop numerous highly homozygous lines that are first evaluated by top crossing to identify lines with good general combining ability, followed by testing specific combinations of pairs of lines to identify the very few pairs that have the potential to produce truly excellent single-cross hybrids

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Greeting
I apologize for the possibly stupid question.
Let’s say we cross two stable varieties. Pure and stable sativa and indica.
In the f1 generation there will be more or less uniform plants, with hybrid efect
If we want to stabilize and make a new variety we have to pair the same characteristics on the alleles.
But is that possible with effect? Can a hybrid high be a stable feature?
The reason I ask is that a friend bought a seed and did grow. He got uniform plants with indica characteristics in appearance (I believe they are stable in that respect), but with a quality hybrid effect.
I wonder what would happen if I took pollen and pollinated pure sativa?
In my inexperienced view, in the next generation sativa could be tamed in terms of structure, and effect could be roughly divided into two groups. Sativa and hybrid high.
Is there any logic in all this or am I too intoxicated and talking nonsense

I have alao had a really hard time keeping males in veg. They just start growing out there sacs after they have become mature for some reason. Lile they dont stop at preflower. I dont understand, so Ive just had to toss them to prevent pollen from getting everywhere.