I have heard, “the biggest” “the prettiest” “rub the stem” “the one that produces pollen first” “the last one to show male flowers”…
What qualitative or quantitative methods do you use?
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If the females of the line are all great…use that male.
You can shortcut it too by picking a strong vigorous male from an inbred line.
Pretty and smelly can help you pick between males if you’re having trouble deciding.
Other than that, it’s kind of a crapshoot. Only true way is to see the females it produces, but that is a long process. I’m just now flowering females from last year’s pollination.
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If you have a line multiple phenos, pick the one that looks like the pheno you like best.
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The dirty secret of the seed industry, most of the high dollar pack breeders are just as clueless as we are. They pick a male, pollinate as many clones as possible, and profit. There isn’t a ton of thought to it.
Sometimes you get lucky and the results are amazing, sometimes they’re pretty good, most of the time they’re just average. You can usually still find good plants either way.
Guys have ascended to fame off males that aren’t even THAT special.
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To pick a male… I have gone by STEM rub smell only for years, and its kept my heirloom potent for many many generations . Obviously you want to pick something with good structure, and symmetry is very important if you can find it. I’ve read that you should not pick the most vigorous male, because the fastest growing male is often not the most potent. You want to pick something middle of the road. A recent tip I got reading a book by the Rev call true living Organics, is to use hollow stalk plants for your males. I did this for the first time 2 years ago I think it was, and I had a much higher percentage of potent plants the following year. All of them really. Plants are either grown for recreation, or Fiber. The idea being that plants with a solid stalk have more relation to fiber plants, according to what I read.( Upon further reading, I’ve come to the conclusion that hemp is a hollow stalk variety, though…???)This goes against what you would think regarding potency, but none the less, the proof is in the pudding as they say. I had always found at least two or three keeper plants out of every 10 growing my own variety, but the One season using hollow stalk males got the % of keepers up above 50% easily, probably almost all. But I wouldn’t take this tidbit of information as gospel yet, though it certainly bears looking into further. A good Hollow stalk is easy to find by squeezing the stalk. Really hollow males can break ( fold over) from a squeeze that’s too hard. So nice and easy.
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I wish I knew, I remember always hearing you didn’t want to use the male that grew and threw pollen the fastest.
But there have been a couple grows where the “earliest” male was the one that ended up being the best looking, most productive one.
Unfortunately I’ve got a small setup so I don’t have room to grow out tons of plants nor do I have time to grow out the offspring of a bunch of different males to test them.
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I suppose it depends what you are looking for in a male. If you were trying to get your variety to flower quicker, I don’t know that there would be anything wrong with picking the earliest flowering male. And there are many variables that would exclude size from being an eliminating Factor. For example, if you were growing a hybrid of a potent sativa, and an indica, a fast-growing male may be exactly what you’re looking for, so there are exceptions to every rule. I’ve never had the luxury of a high plant count either. It will be so nice someday to be able to use males to pollinate and then keep these males alive as clones and grow those seeds out find out which male was the best. I should have added earlier, that looking at the male pollen sacs when they open with a Jeweler’s loupe, you may be able to see some visible resin. Although resin doesn’t equal potency, it’s still one of the best indicators that we have.
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People put way too much stock in stem rubs, in my opinion. Get it, stalk?! Haha, but in all seriousness…I don’t think it necessarily translates into smell of the flowers.
What’s your favorite “elite” clone? Do a stem rub…usually not that much going on.
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Yea I tend to agree. I think stem rubs tend to be very subjective and misleading even. Sometimes you’ll do a stem rub on one part of the plant, and then later on another part of the plant and it smells way stronger or different. Sometimes you’ll stem rub at different points in the lifecycle and it smells different. And then there’s the leap of faith that the smell of a male stem has anything to do with female flowers…
I try to focus more on concrete things first. Like what is the branching structure. How does the male distribute its flowers. How many flowers and how much pollen does it produce. What is the height of the plant. How much does it stretch. What leaf shape do I prefer. What coloration does it have. These are all things that are easy to observe.
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That being said… I also advocate for not doing male selection at all, and using several males in inbreeding programs. Only throw away the ones that you really don’t like, until you’ve selected enough females to know which males are giving you certain traits. There’s no reason you have to do 1:1 breeding… hell, do 10:1 breeding and let generations of females solidify the traits you want.
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for female selection, i believe you won’t get the true results you’re looking for until you’ve got the finished product. i smoke my bud while it’s curing but i’d say after a month or two you should know how that female performs in terms of sinsemilla. so i’d take clones of everything i suspect is good and try the bud then those are my keepers. like lefthand said for males that’s how i would approach my male studs.
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I popped a seed that I had to perform surgery on to get it to survive, it was teeny tiny like a few mm across.
That seedling became the strongest and best of the 4 plants I grew.
Just throwing that out there, sometimes you can’t tell by pretty/smelly/big either, you might be killing something great by throwing the runts away.
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I disagree. Plants that produce great bud, but have problems with low yield, weak frame, low vigor are a dime a dozen. I’m not saying it’s not worth keeping as a cut to mother, but that for breeding purposes, only the strongest and most vigorous of a line should even be looked at twice. I have plenty of seeds, no time or space to waste on something slow, mutant, or otherwise “weird”.
I usually kill 1/2 of everything before they even make it to sexing.
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makes sense when it becomes a time and space thing,
if you’re after high volume , don’t bother with weird or slower plants.
if you’re after unique flavors/colors/cannabinoid content keeping those weird or slow ones might be worthwhile
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Yea same. Investment is pretty low before you even start flowering, so why not? They don’t take up much space or many resources until you have to move them to bigger pots anyway. But I also only do it with seeds I’ve produced… because I’m not made of money.
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It feels great throwing down two 11 packs at once and only keeping the 8 most vigorous plants to sex. I bet your collection of other breeder’s seeds, even packs you paid for, is more than you’re going to be able to grow in 10 years. It’s nice to feel like you’re getting to run more seeds than you actually have time/space for. I feel like the majority of us are sitting on more seeds than we can grow.
You may not find what you’re looking for every time, but when you do it’s always something strong and vigorous that you can feel good about breeding.
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This is from the Mr. Nice Forums, it’s a pretty good read. Mr Nice - How to Select a Good Male
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It won’t pull up for me buddy.
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thanks @Guitarzan that was a good read but the link didnt work here is the new one for the same page
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Vigor, trichrome production, pollen sack structure, stem rub smell. Not really different than picking a female really?
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