I’m getting real close on my first Colloidal Silver reversal, and it seems to be going great. Thing is, I thought once the flowers started opening I should start seeing pollen drop… right? It may be that I’m just being impatient, this is the first time I’ve produced a male flower instead of just killing them so I’ve never actually seen mature male flowers in person.
Would love some input, how does this look to everybody here?
It’s probably in there. A reversed female doesn’t dump pollen like a male… at least I haven’t had that happen. You can dry out some pollen sacs and then open them with tweezers and brush them up on the pistils. There will be enough in there to make seeds.
Thank you so much, I’m gonna haul a few off tonight! I’ve got a plant in flower at day 39, gonna run her 9 weeks. I’m really hoping I’m not too late to try a branch.
I’m gonna save my pollen anyhow, so if I am that’s no big deal, I’ll just get her next time around.
I’ve been heavily researching STS. I have been down the CS road before (it worked). I can tell you it has been suggested to crush the pods and dust that way with STS if they refuse to open.
I have a whole thread on auto flower dot net (when I was single and happy) how I reversed and pollinated an auto and made seeds. I can share with you in a PM. Doesn’t matter now. If they refuse to open, crush them in your fingers and go that route.
Believe it or not, I’ve read hippies used to breed this way. They would pick male flowers, dry, and pollinate the next year by crushing the male flowers that had been stored in a camera film capsule. No sterilized flour and pollen mix, no nothing. Just that!
Back then we didn’t know to sterilize the flour or corn starch. None of that. Still pisses me off that the whole time I could have just thrown dried male flowers in a “camera cap” as we called it, and just carry on…
At the end of a peaceful week in the couples box I took the flipped Boaty Mcboatface “male” out and flogged the two females (Boaty and Sebrings Revenge), alternatively wacking and caressing them until the male literally fell apart. There are seeds.
Or at least, I think I did… pulled a bunch off with tweezers over some foil. I could see a bit of pollen collect on the foil as I squished a few with the tweezers.
I rolled a few cotton swabs in the dust, wrapped them up carefully, and funneled the rest of the flowers into a vial to deal with later.
Then I carefully placed a large, new and clean ziploc bag over my seed candidate branches. I misted all surrounding branches, then reached into the bags and rolled the swabs tip against all of the pistils I could.
I left the bag on for about half an hour, then removed it and misted everything. I took the vial full of male flowers and carefully laid them out on a foil tray, tucked away in a corner of a quiet room on a bookcase. I will let them dry for a couple days, then grind them in a fresh clean bud buster with a kif collecting layer with a fine screen. I’m thinking grind flowers, tap grinder on table, pollen falls through just like kif.
Just like this, only its exact opposite. With a new and spotlessly clean one, obviously.
So I’m fairly optimistic that i have had some successful pollination! I checked the buds I hit last night, before the q-tip they were all white pistils, now just a day later they look like this.
Overnight these buds have seen an extensive reddening and shriveling of their pistils. On the rest of the plants everything is still as white as last night, with scarcely a red hair to be seen.
If I’m not mistaken, that’s a solid sign of successful pollination! Now I just hope things will mature in time.
Yeah, flowers from reversed females often grow so thick (densely together) that they sometimes dont open properly…
Sometimes if you just suspend the bud branch over a clean glass horizontally you can lightly tap the flower bud and the pollen will sprinkle out.
A few nights back I pulled off all the remaining Male flowers, opened or not, and laid them out on some aluminum foil on a bookshelf in a still room, far from my garden. I let things dry for a few days and then I took them into the bathroom and loaded them into a grinder. This was a fresh, brand new and cleaned grinder that will only ever be used for this purpose.
I ground the flowers with the grinder upside down so I could achieve a finer grind before the flowers dropped through the holes to the collection layer. Once I was happy with the grind I flipped it and, without opening it, tapped it and banged it for a couple minutes to shake the pollen loose from the ground material and cause it to settle in the kif catcher layer at the bottom. Once I decided it had had enough tapping I set the grinder down for a moment to let things settle before opening.
Once it had settled for a few minutes I carefully removed the bottom layer…
The pollen was then cut with a carrier to dilute it. Remember the picture above contains millions of viable grains of pollen, better to stretch it out for more efficient use and safer handling. I used flour, dried and sterilized in the oven at 180°f for 20 minutes. The flour was cooled and collected in a separate clean vial. When I harvested the pollen I used the flour to “rinse” out the last bits of pollen I couldn’t scrape out of the kif catcher on their own. I also used the same piece of foil to funnel the flour into the vial with the pollen.
The end result is a large quantity of feminized Diamond Kush pollen, capable of producing a ludicrous number of seeds, useable as is and ready to be placed into long term storage.
Very good, I like the grinder idea, it’s seems better at getting the most pollen out of the flowers, instead of waiting for them to open and drop it on paper
If you intend to use that pollen more than once it’s best that you store it in multiple containers…Each time you remove the pollen from the freezer and thaw it out you are compromising its integrity as it will absorb moisture when the cap is removed…
By putting it in multiple centrifuge tubes or gel caps you provide a bit of insurance as to viability of your pollen.
