Through extraordinary efforts to help seedlings survive we breed plants that cannot. This is symptomatic of our inability or unwillingness to differentiate between what is good for the plant¹ (vigor, seed abundance, adaptability, pest and disease resistance², etc.) and what is good for the grower (sexual stability, yield, growth speed, stone, photogenic bag appeal, high number chemotype, etc. )
I have helped many seeds out of their hulls. As of yesterday, I have set an intention to stop. It is easy to see that breeding-in the necessity for human intervention at that critical moment will lead to lines that cannot survive without it.
One of the drivers behind this trend is the high price and artificial scarcity of seeds. When one has paid the price of a full day’s work for seeds one is compelled to make each one count.
I suspect other things we do as growers (breeders?³) are diminishing the plant’s adaptability and hastening its extinction⁴:
Breeding for generic, artificially designed media and nutrients,
Intermixing lines without testing for outdoor survival,
Maintaining pristine grow environments,
Testing under single lighting scenarios with narrow light spectra,
Culling to avoid natural rodelization (intersex) capability .
This is why the indoor/outdoor differentiation is becoming increasingly necessary. Does the strain retain the ability to grow and thrive in nature? Could this “Landrace” still finish if returned to its home environment?
My recommendation is to note any seedling that required “help” and avoid pairing it with other so-noted cultivars.
I choose to post this in the Breeder Lab category as it is not my intention to question the methods of people who are growing for smoke.
¹ Good for the strain, as opposed to the cultivar.
² This is good for both cannabis and its grower but may go untested in a “clean room” grow.
³ I don’t know what breeders do. I hope they take questions like this under consideration. I’m sure some do and some don’t.
⁴ Feel free to ignore my baseless hyperbole.
I wouldn’t extend this metaphor beyond cannabis. Requiring human women to give birth alone in nature might lead to a more powerful species but the suffering that would ensue would not be desirable for anyone.
I‘m a big proponent of culling the weak, for all of the reasons you said.
Some people used to say the weaker plants produced better weed, but in reality it’s just easier to breed for only yield and potency, and ignore all the other traits.
This specific problem just means bury your seeds a little deeper than usual. The shells should be off before the seedling ever breaks thru the surface.
I suspected that grower error (culture, Cervantes calls it) was to blame for much of my trouble. Yesterday I had to open a dying (dead?) seedling whose helmet was on so tightly that I needed a screwdriver to pry it open. I think your suggestion just pushes the same problem back a few days. Cannabis wants its seeds to fall, ready, from a dead plant, perhaps pass through a bird or bear’s intestine, overwinter and grow again without intervention.
Edit: re pushing the problem back a few days. Grower centric planting culture (deeper, pointed side up?) replaces the equally grower centric, intuitive, removal of the helmet and sack. It is a fine solution for the grower, but the change is in human behavior (culture) rather than seed adaptability. It favors the single cultivar and the informed grower at the expense of the strain’s descendant’s ability to grow in the absence of the largely non-intuitive culture.
Yeah I’ve been thinking this for a while now. Specifically the helping out of the shell stuff. Shouldn’t need to do that. If your seed can’t crack or come up on it’s own, your cultivar isn’t worth breeding with no matter how it is. Just going to perpetuate a line that can’t grow without human intervention.
Thanks for the offered solution @Worcestershire_Farms. If I am planting the seeds I may as well plant them deeper. No problem there.
Your solution may be effective (I will experiment next mass planting) but it comes from the “good for the grower” mindset. Here I am discussing what is good for the plant.
If I were breeding, I would not be looking for an intervention based solution.
I plant my germinated seeds with the heads just under the surface as I am dealing with very valuable seeds often and want to make sure they come up and therefore I have helmet problems sometimes but to use the word extinction is a little extreme don’t you think…
I wet 'em down and carefully pick them off
I don’t see this particular problem as a serious long term genetic problem
just my 2 cents
The genetic bottleneck you describe is mainly due to prohibition. I think as the plant becomes legalized and normalized, we will see a lot more diversity in the breeding.
As it is right now, we have mainly multi-poly-hybrid drug cultivars. There are still some fiber varieties, seed varieties, as well as “hemp” plants with other minor cannabinoids like CBD, CBG, delt8-thc, etc.
The first equivalent that popped into my mind is dog breeding. The American Kennel Club establishes breed standards for an animals structure and appearance. They have dropped the ball in the past, making decisions that were not good for the animal, but good for the breeder.
Today’s bulldog’s can’t be delivered naturally via vaginal birth. They require human interference (C-section) because of human interference (breeding for larger size).
For a long time the AKC dictated that German Shepherd Dogs should have a slope to their back. This led to a HUGE number of problems with hip and elbow dysplasia. I believe 1 in 5 GSDs suffer from dysplasia today. To get a Shepherd who could be a solid working dog, people turned to breeders in Europe who weren’t conforming to the same standard.
I think we would be better off if plants that can’t survive on their own in nature are excluded from breeding projects. There’s something to be said for hunting unique traits, but great care should be exercised. I’m not sure helmet head is an deal breaker though.
Depends what your objectives are. If you really want to preserve a landrace, then move to where the landrace is from / adapted to, and grow outdoors. Otherwise, it will always be adapting to whatever environment you are growing it in. And despite your best efforts, you will be selecting the plant toward how it thrives in your environment, which will fundamentally change the morphology of the cultivar.
If your hulls are thick and difficult to open, perhaps it is to survive a harsh climate or to not germinate prematurely, which may cause a false start during a time when it could not grow. If you select away from this trait, you have not preserved a plant for the reason that it adapted that trait. I don’t believe that we can fully appreciate all of the reasons why plants are the way they have been adapted and selected to become what they are. I also don’t believe that many of the things we select for are beneficial toward outdoor survival. That is a grower’s goal, not the plant’s goal.
Big buds - good for the strain?
High potency - good for the strain?
Short plants, water consumption and tolerance, nutrient tolerance - good for the strain?
It all depends on your environment. But we’re not here growing wild cultivars either, and if you want a plant that survives well outdoors, don’t do anything at all. Just let it do whatever it wants to do season after season. Once you have vigorous, gangly, low potency, low yield cannabis, you will have a successful cultivar ready for long term survival.
If the seed is sprouted (above the soil) but the helmet won’t come off, nothing (short of human intention) in nature is going to help it. Perhaps overwintering to soften up is an “expectation” for some strains. I wouldn’t suggest breeding for soft hulls, just breeding strains that don’t require surgery to get sun on their leaves.
I think the problem is that seeds are mostly designed for indoors-outdoors use, while conditions in both media differ and one requires more human intervention than the other.
Softness of the hull would be great for indoors but not so for outdoors as it’s been said, mould resisrance, high or low temperatures tolerance, bugs resistance …
There are many factors and breeders should decide what line to follow depending in that “inside or outside” criteria, no use to look for strains suitable for both as they will not be optimal for any of them …
i suspect that it would not usually achieve optimum depth before sprouting in the wild. What I have done …and I noticed this same issue was commit to only dripping water on the seedlings. If it needs more than that it doesn’t usually get any help.
I just recently had some renegade seeds fall out of a bag and into my clone tray. With the humidity being high and then laying in tiny puddles I didn’t notice them until they had sprouted completely out of their shells.
So to me the whole, just plant them deeper, may not be that strong of an argument. If seeds can sprout and shed their shell while laying in a tray with nothing to assist them then they shouldn’t have a problem doing it while pushing through a tiny amount of soil.
As for the argument that old seeds were better. Well it’s really hard to say. When you throw hundreds of seeds out a window and 2/3rds sprout that’s still a lot of seeds. But when you spend $100+ on 10 seeds and only 6 sprout of course you’re gonna notice those that don’t a lot more. Then when you factor in that roughly half those will be male and yeah people are gonna really notice that they only got 3 females to choose from for their $100+ 10pack.
Effectively, we are talking about the same type of thing as dogs who can no longer conceive by natural coitus, but require artificial inseminstion. That type of organism, be it plant, or animal, is so destroyed by poor breeder selection, and is so unnatural, that it has lost it’s ability to survive without human intervention. Wipe the slate clean, start over, let’s get it right this time.
it is. Just going to perpetuate a line that can’t grow without human intervention.