Aloha,
i am trying to breed for pest resistance outdoors. i am kinda lost is the selection techniques… i am wondering would you:
trying to decide who to cull. i am thinking about taking out anything that i see bugs on . Bug= systemic kind bug like aphids or whiteflies not grasshopper or other randos. thanks for any help🤙
Pop a bunch(and I mean a bunch) of seeds and take cuttings from EVERYTHING and then put them outside and let them go. The plants that are chewed to hell and back you can compost and toss the cuttings. The plants that survived well are the plants you will want to breed with. Pull those cuttings out and breed with them. Its actually a lot more simple than it seems.
thanks.
if im going for the creation of a stable strain if there a disadvantage seeding an arm on everything and only keeping the strong? and doing that over and over. i dont mind cloning but would like to keep it fast and simple.
what about the cloning makes it better?
not making any flower just rosin for my head.
thanks for answering what seems so simple. i might be overthinking it.
You wont really know what kind of plant your growing without testing them at the end of a grow. If one of them had a weak or unappealing high, you wont know till you grow out the seeds you made. Breeding takes time, more than most people want to invest. You want to know that the plant is worth your time before breeding with it. And that takes growing it out, smoking it, stress testing it to see if it hermies, THEN breeding with it when you have found one that ticks all the boxes.
Taking cuttings allows you to keep plants while you do all the above that I mentioned. Once you grow it out and smoke it out and you find one you like, you can take the cutting and grow it out as a mother/father plant for cuttings to stress test and then finally breed with.
Im not going to lie to you, selection breeding, what you’re asking about, is a LOOONG process. Sometimes it can take YEARS to get to a final product.
Honestly pests aren’t much of an issue if you spray daily. The biggest issue i will say is finding phenos good for your climate. I’m by the water so everything has to be “og/ocean grown”. Most phenos will die off from the rain/humidity. I have actually found runts to be the best plants.
This is true, i found that it’s best to put them through hell and whatever survives may be a keeper. That’s what i always did and it’s worked well with me.
The last year i did outdoor, i had a crazy pest problems. One thing i noticed, some plants were like pest magnets for everything, some were nibbled on and some were mostly untouched for the most part.
leaf hoppers, caterpillars were the main two pests that season. Didnt use any pesticides. I suggest if you are looking for pest resistant, your best bet is to avoid pesticides so you can get an idea of what plants are the best for that, but also expect to lose some plants to pests.
The two standouts in my garden that year were mind melter from solfire and g13 genius from bros grim. Mind melter only had the occasional leaf hopper, not a single caterpillar/moth touched that plant. G13 genius was very similar that very few pests ate it, but i did find one branch that a caterpillar burrowed into and died. For reference, that year lost 7 other plants to caterpillars and one severely eaten but hanging in there.
I’ve always heard landrace varieties are more hardy and resistant to mold or temp swings and those types of issues perhaps not sure about pests.
Diesels are aswell, my sour diesel thrives outside for me.
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me it seems that pest resistance and general hardiness are linked. I have found that plants that are mould resistant tend to also be more pest resistant/resilient. Plants that I specifically bred for rot tolerance in wet climates were also almost invariably resilient against pest attacks; but they were also more resilient in dry conditions and even in cold conditions even though they had no exposure to cold or drought conditions. The selection process is pretty straightforward, if long winded.
You basically are just selecting every generation for the most resilient, and only keeping seeds from those, but also that have the other traits you want. This is the tricky part, getting all the desirable traits in the one plant and then having them carried down the line. The only approach to this is to have and many plants to select from as possible, simply because it will increase the probability of finding a plants that has all those traits, it doesn’t mean they will be passed down however, so again the numbers you have available to work with will make a difference to your success.
In general, you will do more selection on the females, though for pest resistance, you at least have visible evidence of resilience for selecting males.
Limiting your population and inbreeding more aggressively can speed up the time to takes to fix a trait, but as mentioned previously, it will reduce the chance of finding all the desirable traits in the one plant
One thing that helped me in breeding for resistance was understanding a field of plants as a living organism, with each plant being and organelle.
And with that, the good of the field being more important than the good of an individual plant.
When a plant isn’t compatible with an environment, or it’s own genetic makeup is flawed, it puts out a suicide signal to get itself eaten before maturity so as to not pass on its flaws to the next generations.
This results in jasmonic vs salicylic acid responses. Jasmonic being the one that invites pests in to eat the plant.
Before realizing this, I use to work to try and save every plant and thought every plant might be the magic one to breed with. I’d impose my own expectations on plants, wanting to breed with a plant because of the strain/genetics instead of choosing a plant on how it expresses itself.
So, only healthy plants should be bred with. Runts can be good, but only if healthy and have no bite marks.
If growing for production, I will elicit salicylic acid responses by using things like aloe and coconut water.
But when selecting for breeding, these will mask genetic deficits. Breeding selections should be done with minimal or no spraying nor any coddling of the plants.
Another factor in pest resistance is a plant 's ability to produce secondary metabolites as some of those secondary metabolites are what repel pests.
But, not all great, resistant plants will pass on those traits, or they may not show up in the first generation of progeny but may show up down the line.
So it takes a lot of seeds to start with to find what’s good, clone those so you can test the clones while breeding the parental plants, then pop a shit ton of seeds to test the progeny to see what traits get passed on.
Really, breeding should start with a few thousand seeds to start each season. You don’t need to clone or even flower thousands, but starting with a few thousand is the way to go, with culling rounds being made every couple months.
Godspeed
this is a thing I’ve been working on and I went all out this year by “dry land” farming which to be quite honest I wasn’t really ready for it takes everything to the extreme and I don’t use any pesticide whatsoever so I found out very quickly which plants could and couldn’t make it on there own but I forwarn it is not for the faint of heart! To say the least I have stood by and watched some beautiful plants just slowly disintegrate before my very eyes but I have also seen some that are truly bulletproof and that is very satisfying my friend 
so it is possible but plant in very high numbers expect to lose 80-90% so you are not devastated by losses ps just keeping it real my friend
I did this and it’s good practice but I clone nothing but that’s because I’m working on “seed form” and I bring everything to flower that makes it that far including males and it seems that the ones strong enough always has a corresponding male or 2 for the next generation and I work through the ones left to find the outstanding ones for the outcome I desire luckily I haven’t had to totally start over any breeding projects, “yet” 
ps and to give you an idea out of 1000+ I might have 50 plants left to harvest just saying
Same here.
A few thousand seeds end up being 20-50 final plants that make it all the way through flower.
I personally am against stressing plants that will be bred. I’ll stress test clones, but I believe stressing plants that will be bred give poor results.
Especially when nature will test them to their limits anyways
I always though a weak root system will call bugs to the plant.
It makes sense because so much of the plants overall health depends on its root system another is weak cell walls but it also depends on uptake of nutrients also the symbiosis of micro flora and fauna and silica
Why don’t you try to grow with less bug access-barriers and such.
When I used to grow all my own veggies, other farmers would tell me that many of the vegetables we like bugs like too. Scientists have developed fruits and vegetables with thick skins to combat bugs and still deliver tasty fruit. In cannabis plants this will not work but other strategies may help. Companion plants, which bugs avoid, next to or surrounding plants may help.
I would never breed cannabis for bug resistance, I would, at least in theory, try to find desirable plants for humans and work on pest removal or some sort of barrier.
Insects are drawn to weaker plants. Healthier plants have higher brix levels and the higher the brix level the less insects will feed on it. The hardier plant is healthier and therefore more resistant.
Right and thicker cell walls most bugs can’t penetrate them to feed on think of it as like us trying to eat tree bark, it just doesn’t work out so well