Just a couple questions in the process I’d like to undertake creating my own cross.
After the initial cross of 2 plants and creation of seeds, I then do a pheno grow, where I grow out say a dozen females and choose the strongest pheno. Or the most desirable one. Once that has been established, I am curious about the back-crossing process.
Once I have the dominate plant I want, what is the best process to F1 and or S1 it? Should I first clone that plant and then reverse the clone? Or simply reverse the dominant plant I’ve chosen from the pheno grow?
I realize I’m new to this, I think I’m kind of on the right track, I realize the commitment and time this is going to take. As I’m doing this all outdoors, not indoors, it may be a three year commitment.
I would be grateful for any and all advice and guidance.
Blessings
Great question… I will be curious to hear people’s methods in here and how certain people would approach this as I intend to take on a CBD project here shortly in the near future.
At the current moment I have not gone in depth enough to call anything I have made anything other than a pollen chuck. 
Looking forward to seeing your results and others input for sure on this one…
I’d take clones and then reverse the dominant plant.
You can hold viable pollen for years. That would give you some flexibility.
Cheers
G
Backcrossing is taking an f2 and breeding it with the f1 parents. So you would need to keep the parents/pollen around of the f1 generation to be able to bx. Making an s1 I would definitely take clones of all the females you will use to make feminized pollen. Then take that pollen to the clones you took and you have your s1 generation.
And that, my brother, is precisely the answer I was looking for. I wanted to ask about keeping the original P pollen as that must be important. Next question, and here’s where it can get complicated for me, in the pheno grow, you wouldn’t want to collect any male pollen, only the say top 3-5 females that may exhibit different and desirable characteristics.
You, @Cyr_grow have put the easy in this with a simple paragraph.
Very grateful to you.
And I’m off.
Good luck on your adventure, take good notes and enjoy the process!! Peace
That depends; if you want to use a favorite lady from the F1 Gen to back cross to, then you’d be looking for good males from the F2 Gen to combine w the F1 female. (Alternatively w a favorite F1 girl, you could do a S1 reversal which is not the same as a bx)
Or vice versa; if you have saved pollen (or kept a male alive) from the F1 Gen, then you will be hunting for F2 girls that catch your eye to take the F1 pollen. In this second scenario you don’t need F2 males or pollen for your project.
What about the parents of the initial cross? Were they good? Or will you just be sifting through the offspring of a random cross. I think here lies the main question. If the parents were good, I would just keep them for later breeding. No brainer. If the parents weren’t that good for keeping them around, why then breed with them? If the parents were good but got lost accidentally then you still can’t backcross to them. So let’s assume you have made some seeds by accident and want to sift through them.So then keep clones of every plant until you know which female is best. You can now cross this female with its sibling males. You should use the best male too. It should also have some traits of the female so the chance that their genes line up nicely is greater than average. Now you’ve did your f2 generation. With the offspring you can now do a back cross or further line breeding where some breeders say backcrossing won’t get you very far in fixing traits and line breeding is the thing to do (breeding siblings of the same following generations with each other and applying selectional pressure).
Which way you go really depend on your goals. Do you want to fix some traits into seed lines, or combine traits of unrelated lines or just find new unexpected combinations? The last one is best done with making f2 crosses because they show greater variation than f1 crosses (which should look more uniform). The variation of the f2 crosses will be the greatest when the f1 parents were as unrelated as possible.
That depends, if the male offspring in the f2 has better traits show up than the male parent you used for the f1 then you cross it back to the mom and vice versa. In reality, when bx, you want to save everything you can cus the offspring could have desirable traits you want to pass on through the bx process. You don’t have to keep males around as long as you collect the pollen or you find a more desirable male to use in crossing. Same goes with the females. Usually breeders will go to bx2/bx3 before they release the line and find all the traits to make the perfect offspring that represent the parents and make them better.
It sounds like this can be as easy or as complex as you’d prefer to design the paradigm.
I am thinking if I’m going to commit, especially to such a lengthy process, than I might as well do it right.
males around as long as you collect the pollen or you find a more desirable male
This would be males from the pheno grow, I’d be looking for a strong male(s) to collect their pollen and so I would have to have several clones from the different females in the pheno grow.
My heads loopy, but I am writing it all down in my book and bookmarking all of this. I have found an addictive project.
Since we are talking about crosses, I have 2 doubts;
- who passes more genetic trait, the male or the female?
- what should I look for in a male for crossbreeding?
These are questions I’ve always had, maybe because I don’t understand very well how the hereditary part works.
It all depends of what you want to achieve. People have told you a lot of info here but I still doesn’t understand what your goal are and why you want to backcross the plant? Before you evolve your goal and share it with us, we can’t give you an direction of what is the best options for you.
Pz 
The female usually does ,look for vigor,ease of growth,stability(if you can keep a strong male in veg that doesn’t flower without light drop that would be a desirable trait), potency, and shared characteristics that you like to obtain your goal and breed to that for generations to get reliable ,uniform seeds.Smoke the male.It’s time consuming.Well bred crosses use 2 ibl’s to limit diversity
Hey @PioneerValleyOG . Do you have a vision/idea of what you want the finished work to be like. I assume your trying to make a plant that checks all the boxes when grown outdoors, in your area? A happy medium between yield, effect , taste vs disease and pest resistance, structure, finishing times? Or do you prioritize one trait in particular?
You are right on the money sir @Budderton !
Precisely my friend
Always establish a game plan or what you are shooting to achieve Then assess the situation and it’s much easier to lay out a precise plan to achieve optimum results
I guess it depends on your goal, are you trying to recreate one of the parents? Combine two or more of their traits like height, scent, disease resistance yield? To create something entirely new?
but to speak generally that initial cross will be an F1, meaning there will be little variation among the progeny as the dominant alleles shine through while most of the variation stays hidden in recessive alleles waiting to recombine in future generations. Personally I’d take the first cross to F2 or F3 before I did any serious selection
All of these steps perhaps easily done indoors in a controlled environment, however, growing outside the time factor is done in years. By the time I’m only selecting my F3s, I’m now looking at a half a decade. So it’s not that I don’t have a vision yet, it’s that I’d like to be fully educated on the process before I even begin to choose the parents, which is an extremely important choice that I would have to make. Just selecting two parents without a full understanding of the process would be both irresponsible and perhaps foolish of me. I’m sure certain Plants can pass on different traits and that would be another area of study. I whole heartedly confess I am a student of the art, not a professor. However, there are many here that have the knowledge to help guide me, and that is where I am at on my path at this time.
Not that I want to back cross as much as I want to understand the process and why it is used. I’m assuming bx has a.purpose, perhaps not in the creative process I have in mind. I’m learning here! And I am humbly grateful for all that I’ve learned in this thread.