Not going to spill the beans (hahaha) until it gets into my hands, but I’m very excited about what will probably be my last trade of 2022, and it’s a doozy. With my Vortex co-op grow coming up and learning more about pollination and seed making, I realized that what my genetic stash was lacking, along with the experience of using it, was pollen. Looking at my seed glut and continued acquisition of them, clearly the only thing to do was diversify my holdings, so I found a member on here with a freezer full of kickass pollen from AKBB and Bob Hemphill plants who wanted to trade for some outdoor heirlooms and landraces for next summer’s grow. We’re at the same latitude North, so the outdoor varieties I have are perfect, gathered in anticipation of finding someone around here with a yard who wants to grow and I could hold their hand/use their plant count for selection and my own edification.
I have to sit down with a calendar and sketch out the rest of my grow year through the spring, but I think I’ll have a window to try branch pollination of the plants currently in veg while the Vortex seedlings are all still too small to be pollinated, in accordance with the Co-op Run rules on no other pollination activities in the same area. I run two tents, and the ventilation could easily be split and filtered, but I’d prefer to not goof around with the rules or my setup that works well right now.
It’s a split of old school NL and Hashplant and modern Chem pollens so I think I’m going to stay in the family roughly and hit the Blue Tara and Icy Grape with the old dank, while the LDSC and Sowah Grapefruit are gonna get some the Chems. If it works well, I’ll definitely be giving some of those seeds away here in the spring when they’re ready, first dibs for my homies here in the thread and other places on OG I interact with a bunch. I’ll also see what’s up with how much pollen I get, it’s from big outdoor plants so it could be a lot, if it is, I will share with y’all. Joining OG has been great for me, not just to learn and get support on growing my own, but to interact with other folks about genetics and to see them spread around freely or bartered fairly.
I truly think we’re going to make sure that no matter how fucked the legalization of weed continues to be, with bottlenecking genetics and big corporate MSOs doing cutthroat things towards smaller cultivators and breeders (see @Tracker 's thread for some real fucked up shit from the Midwest recently, a straight hit job on the little guys at a public competition by the organizers), we are going to make sure that there’s fridges and freezers and buried Mason jars full of preserved seedlines everywhere. People have a lot of justified fears about the future of cannabis, but the way I see it is that Pandora’s Box is open, we’ve had the chance to interact in the open like this and spread the seed, at a scale beyond anything in the underground years, and that can’t be undone. There’s still so much still hidden or missing and maybe lost, and lots of work to do reproducing and sharing rare stuff, but it’s happening and I don’t think it’ll stop.
