That 2nd link looks like a great resource. I’ll give it a read over the next couple days.
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After further reading/skimming I’d have to agree. I’ve listed over that book since it first came out and im really pretty disappointed.
I’m not much enjoying the breeders Bible either.
Lesson learned.
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Have a read of the pdf I linked to above. It will have most if not all of the info on breeding most people could ever use. It’s not weed specfic but in general plant breeding is all the same regardless of the type of plant. I have always found those ‘bible’ kind of books to be chocked with ‘stoners lore’ and empty of anything slightly complicated or meaty, like all growers are idiots or something…
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It’s not an academic text. I consider them a good “soft introduction” to some basic ideas. Since you can read it in a weekend, it’s a good starting point to get you warmed up toward some better texts.
IMO these “bible” books provide an important bridge to academic texts that would otherwise be unapproachable for people new to the subject. They’re good for people starting from little up no biology/botany knowledge. But really they shouldn’t be called a bible so much as a “for dummies”.
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I’d say if you have two lines that are true breeding parents, and are distinct from each other there offspring would be a hybrid. Then if you kept a mother and crossed the offspring back to it the resulting seeds would be f1 or bc1f1 then further back crosses to the mother would be bc2f1, bc3f1 etc untill somewhere after the 6-7th generation they become IBL of there own. This normaly requires hundreds if not thousands of plants in the bc3-6f1 generations which is something most people traditionally did not have room to do. I have and use a 11yr inbred line of sfv og that was worked in such a manner.
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Cool info… Care to explain the process you are referring to when you say to backcrossing? It seems to me that there is more than one way to skin this cat, and it’s always enlightening to hear the way people approached it in practice.
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There are diff methods of crop stabilization im referring to the back cross method. Its actualy discussed in the link you posted. If somebody wanted to get into real breeding and not just chucking I’d recommend a person reads that article in its entirety. Once you have done that and understand the advantages and disadvantages to different types of breeding methods you can pick which is most likely to give you the results you are looking for. Once you have developed a breeding goal and plan you can start labeling each generation appropriately.
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that is so true with the breeding of anything 
a great read, thank you all for your input it has helped
me to have a better understanding of this subject
all the best and enjoy the day
Dequilo
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Long story short hybrids are not f1 and most lines are so unstable this type of breeding is hard to accomplish. This is why landrace and IBL varieties are so important. Major crop production requires stability in the varieties grown and one way big agra controls things is by making sure they are the only ones who can supply stabil genetics on a large scale. They do this by eliminating older non patentable varieties and patenting all hybrids of said older genetics. This is why certain people like mr Clark and others love to say the landraces are all gone but they have them to breed with, it’s the start of shifting the controll over.
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its like the guy up in Canada with his canola
they killed him in the end
sadly if they can get there hands on the weed it will be for the money and nothing else
I just chuck pollen at a plant I like from a male I like
and pick thru beans and do it again until I get something I like and just grow that
it takes time to find a plant that gives you that stone time and time again
and that grows the way you like
all the best and thank you
Dequilo
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Hmmm I didn’t make myself very clear there did I lol
Because we are using diecious plants that makes it possible to backcross to either a male recurrent parent or a female recurrent parent, with some breeders seeming to prefer the male as the recurrent parent vs the female… Personally for my own gear I have always used a recurrant female simply because selecting a decent pheno is more straight forward… so for example how do breeders select the males for their traits and combining ability if that’s going to be the recurrent parent?
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Threw growing and observing the offspring and the changes the male causes. If the female is stabile then the changes should predominantly be from the male. When sorting threw a large population sometimes a male stands out from the rest. Males are often kept for a number of reasons, no pure female parent of that variety and a desire to breed towards the males genetics. Also a male with great structure,smell and trichome production is a little harder to find and often favored. I myself prefer to use a female as the recurrent parent but like to hunt threw the 2nd and 3rd backcross for a potentially better female to then use. It depends on if your trying to create a different line with traits from both parents or if your wanting to stabilize the traits of the recurrent parent. If wanting to create a new line with traits from both it’s a little more time consuming. You would need to make the hybrid first and then pick a female that has the desired combination of traits and go from there with either the backcross method or the pedigree method of breeding.
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Some breeders like to keep both the same female and male plant as breeding stock. Two stabile but different varieties should produce rather phenotypicaly stable offspring and if you make seeds with the same parents each time the results are more dependable for the ones popping the beans. Example if I cross a afghan and a Brazilian strain and the results are good I can expect those results again using the same parents. If I use different afghan and brazilian parents the results would be slightly differnet. Also which variety is the male or female can make a differance , say Afghan fem to Brazilian male or afghan male to brazil female. Two highly stabil and inbred lines should create rather dependable hybrids however stabile inbred lines are rarer in the cannabis world now then ever. We are getting buried in a sea of hybrid x hybrid over and over to where the genetic make up is so random it would take years to re stabilize into a dependable breeding plant. This is why I encourage people to keep what they have as pure as possible. We need to work on stability rather then having the two most popular strains crossed together or using one male to 50 different clones to have a large strain catalog. Some breeders are working there lines but most just release hybrid after hybrid based on what’s popular atm.
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Ok so let me see then if I can get this straight… bare with me here lol. so lets say you have a generally unstable f2 population . normally in this situation I would grow out three or four generations and let them inbreed without a whole lot of regard for the males really only select for the traits I am after from the female side… progressively then you should start to a greater number of phenos with the characteristics you are after… then at about f4 I select a female that is closest to the characteristics I am looking for and then keep that as the recurrent female to back-cross over the males that seem the strongest, however I have learned the hard way that visual characteristics don’t necessarily tell you combining ability of the male, so now I am thinking I might be better off instead picking out the males… test crossing them over a stable ibl to check both the traits they pass on as well as their combing ability… selecting the best of those and then using that as the recurrent parent?
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If looking to get the best traits out of both lines in a stabile form thats a good route to take. Realy it’s just about having the patients to test the offspring and keep working towards what you want to see. Sometimes we get lucky and the combination seems to be stabile early on , sometimes it takes several generations. It realy depends on what Gene’s are present and which arent. I think it was tou that posted a genome sequence kit for $1000 if somebody realy wanted to be sure of what they were doing and save some time and guess work that tool could prove very usefull
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Yes marker assisted breeding most defiantly looks like it will the way of the future, especially now that big pharma is getting involved and for medical purposes strains are increasingly selected based around their chemotypes. I can see for the purposes of integrating recessive genes into a line for instance where the trait doesn’t express itself to the breeder, being able to genotype each of the progeny at the outset will be a massive benefit. The issue with the genome molecular map that has been defined for cannabis is that ‘the map is not the territory’, so the quantitative trait analysis is still required to be done so that linkage can be done against the markers… i.e what marker or combination of markers are responsible for the expression of any specific traits. Unfortunately this is no triival task.
Thanks for your input!
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So at the end of all this if i cross a hybrid male with a feminized hybrid female other than a roll of the dice what is that seed considered?
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A poly hybrid… basically the same as MOST of the ‘elite’ cuts that have become popular… You have a jumble of genes that with large amounts of segregation down the line will express a large variation in phenotypes… so many of these elite cuts are the result of someone getting lucky and fluking a good phenotype… Well MOST people here can do that right?
What you could do in this situation is to self the fem while keeping a cut so as it can be a recurrent parent, then take the seed from the fem, grow them out, reverse the fem again while keeping a cut and cross it over the progeny that are most similar to the mother… do this as many times as you need to so as to get what you want… and then you could introduce a male as an outcross… and then fold that into the line by repeatedly back-crossing the males from this over the recurrent female… I practice you would probably do this by developing separate lines once you have a semi stable female and then combining the two lines once you have the traits from the male you want… which if you are looking to reproduce the original would be not many so you can basically breed out the male lines traits except now you have regular seeds to work with… Time consuming and probably why most commercial seed breeders don’t seem to do it an instead just self so called ‘elite cuts’.
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Thank you. So f1 is not the first seed of a random cross.
Im creating a polyhybrid then . Now selecting through and breeding that “brother n sister” as they say would make it ? I know im a pita thats more than i need to know right now. Again thanks.
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Ok so if the chart is right the second cross would make h2 hybrid and so on.
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