Exactly , not all hay is created equal, sounds like me lecturing my fellow workers about what not to bring to the garden lol , send them for straw bails and they come back with horse food smh
Some of that stuff is bad for the garden
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Phenotype is mostly, if not fully, nutrient uptake. Therefore you can’t be a real breeder if you aren’t solid in nutrition.
Grow 1 clone in 100 different soils, then sell me the clone, and put me on the correct soil. That’d be too normal of a relationship for the cannabis scene. Breeders can’t answer questions without making stuff up or quoting someone’s unrelated work. Why? I don’t care about what scientist you can quote. I don’t care about how well you document Icmag posts from 10 years ago. I want to know whether your seeds actually suck or if I’m in the wrong soil mix. I’ve not seen a single $200 ten pack with a 8 cents worth of instruction manual. The price tag on those seeds doesn’t say “I’m just following the casual gardening model”.
If you grow 1 clone in one soil, and it’s floppy, it’s a phenotype that utilized copper too efficiently. Try a soil with less copper. The less copper pheno will be less floppy. Use that soil. Don’t bury some half sincere 2nd hand disclaimer in some obscure web forum. Tell your customers too much copper with create a viney plant. Simple as that. I see breeders talk about prone to this, prone to the that, tons of problems easily addressed with nutrition changes. That’s the entire reason cannabis sucks today: growing 100 different unproven clones in 1 “proven” soil, when it should be the other way around.
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I suspect I have been selecting based on which plants do best in my specific lazy style.
Sunshine mix4 and jacks pro so if that’s not suited to a particular type then it gets culled.
Do that for a couple decades and its a thing I suspect.
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Huh? I’ve never sold any clones and it’s not my job to turn ignorant customers into master growers either. If you feel that is an avenue worth pursuing then by all means, pursue it. Efficiency of nutrient uptake and all other environmental factors comes back to how an individual genotype responds to them and no two are the same - so these directions you feel entitled to, regarding cannabis seed, would be purt near useless anyhow.
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Tom,
I threw this question at Tony G, since I live at 33-34 n latitude I have a ton of trouble using all my growing season for the genetics I have ie Deep Chunk and such. I am running into the problem with my clones going straight into flowering since nights are too long.
I want to breed a crap ton of chunk and pick the ones that will grow this far south from clones eventually. Does this make sense? I don’t want to introduce new genetics which I know can be done, just want to keep the amount of alleles more homozygous. Preserve this line so it stays an IBL even though that is not true since every time you breed seeds things segregate/consolidate.
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Search civil twilight hours at your location, there is not a great deal of difference between 33-34n and 39n. I consider it safe to bring clones of most any variety out when civil twilight reaches about 15 hours. For me at 39n this means right around June 1. I saw the post in Tony’s thread, I do not think there is enough variation in DC to bother trying to stretch the season out by way of selective breeding. Returns/progress would be very minimal if measurable at all, and you will have added a selection criteria - that always costs something somewhere else.
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Tom,
THANKS you saved me a lot of time and disappointment! June 1 throws me in at 14 hrs 20’ . 420 That’s a sign😄. Then indoors it is!
My longest day is June 20 = 14 hrs 29’
San Francisco is 14 hrs 47’
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I veg them at 15 hours too under lower light levels. Seems counter intuitive at first but it actually builds a bigger plant faster. Coax it into a more stretched out growth pattern. At 4 weeks, you can have a 10 inch plant, with 7 nodes and a pinky sized stalk, or a 24 inch plant with 7 nodes and a thumb sized stalk.
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Tom,
Thank you! This is why we need you guys here!
Looks like you reading sunrise to sunset. It’s safe to use civil twilight hours. On June 20 San Francisco was up to 15 hrs 50 minutes or something.
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Yes!
I was watching a video with Dr. Bugbee in it and he was talking about light intensity and light leaks causing hermaphrodite plants. He said that the if the light intensity is not bright enough to read a book the light levels are low enough not to be an issue.
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Sounds about right. So if light intensity is bright enough to read by then light levels are bright enough, as they are about a half hour before and after sunrise to sunset. Use civil twilight hours.
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Yes that is right and would need to be adjusted like you pointed out to take advantage of the extra hr I was shorting myself. Great observation Tom!
With all else being equal I was using the light levels for each location using the same source for all the daylight lengths. I deduced that the growing conditions would be dictated by their latitude and respective daylight lengths. Thus when the flowering was first observed outside I would back calculate 14 days on average for chunk to transition into it primordial phase of flowering. Once the date was found I used 56/2 to get on both sides of summer equinox to see what the critical time was that activated the flowering phase. When the nights were long enough which is anti intuitive but that is what I was angling at growing weed based on your location 
I realized that 70 days of growing from 56 days would require you to tack on a week on each end of the critical period. Need seven more days each side. I found on average that the days increase by about 2 minutes and vice versa on the other side of equinox. 15 minutes more of daylight was what I was needing theoretically. But the flowering time is based on some latitude and it’s respective day length. I could come close to the actual flowering time if I slowly decreased the timer till it started flowering or grow a bunch out and set it to the day lengths that I needed to get it to grow properly at my location.
I wasn’t referring to phenotype but “pheno”. Lol, a phenotype is something like blond hair, blue eyes or purple buds; observable traits. It’s my understanding that the term “pheno” may be cannabis growers slang, but it refers to plants withing a given populace that are physically distinct from others within the same population.
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Pheno is Greek for shine or shows. The second term added to pheno differentiates it to a more specific type of meaning. That is why the Greek terms are used; form of language that everyone can use in common when describing old and new observations and work being done. The standard like the metric system or American standard for weight distance and etc.
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It’s been explained to me that environment+genetics=phenotype.
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Pheno is short for phenotype
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Is Pheno really a useful tool for consumers?
TBH, I’m climbing the steep ramp up the learning curve regarding modern cannabis breeding and this thread is a gem of cogent discussion. Thx to all involved, I’m taking notes. 
I gladly acknowledge my insufficient knowledge on the subject ta hand, but I reckon I’m talking to folks who “Really know this shite!”
So, @Soiltech permitting, let me raise my hand in class and make an observation/argument based on what I think I understand from some recent comments above on our working definition of Genotype & Phenotype.
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The distinction between phenotype and genotype is simple.
A phenotype is an observed characteristic, something that is easily observable, like blonde hair.
A genotype on the other hand is something that is not easily observable like if someone is big boned The characteristics are in the genes just not necessarily expressed in an observable way. @Kabuddha -
We do not have homozygous, heterozygous, male, or female in regards to a population. What we have is strongly homozygous, heterozygous, male, and female. These things are not now nor have they ever been absolute. They are to be measured on a scale, always. @TomHill
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It is again simple to explain why breeders use the term pheno instead of geno as the “phenotypic traits” are what one typically observes growing cannabis (purple buds for instance). @Kabuddha
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Any plant you have ever seen is a phenotype, it is a product of genetics and environment. @TomHill
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It doesn’t necessarily make it '‘wrong’ ’ to use those terms if they are predominantly correct, and if majority of a group then adopts it as part of that particular sub-cultures jargon.[/quote]@Lady.Zandra63
Given those premises:
The term “Genotype” has no specific meaning because every observable characteristic defines a different genotype and the “unobservable” traits useful in defining a “Genotype” are, almost by definition, subjective and non-quantifiable.
OR, is Genotype the individual specific DNA map of an individual plant?
the genotype is the changes in the DNA and you can only see that if you sequence its DNA chain. > and you work seeing the variations in graphs. @Murciano207.
Phenotype also, being a reflection of both genetics and environment, seems incomplete as a useful terminology. For buyers, growers and breeders alike.
Since environment plays an important role in phenotype displays, seeds claiming a (any) specific “Phenotype,” i.e. observable characteristic, would necessarily depend to greater or lesser extent on how the plant was grown. Down to an arbitrary level of detail.
My point being that without specific environmental conditions the advertised “Pheno” may not manifest itself at all. If that is the case the phenotype is inherently dependent on unknown environmental factors, hence kinda meaningless in practical terms.
As an example I have S1 seeds from a White Widow female that reliably produces lovely purple buds when placed in a cold & dry environment during flowering. “Pheno” descriptions of that WW in full purple bloom without the key environmental factor mentioned or perhaps not even known, would be incomplete at best.
Consider a less “observable” characteristic like size? What complex set of grow conditions result in that “phenotypical size?” Yield? Nute prefs?
Or even SEX! “Strongly homozygous, heterozygous, male, and female @TomHill” There are certainly many “Feminized” seeds surfacing these days that prove to be more trending, rather than reliably, female. ** Is sex just a pheno? Gadzooks!
Not to belabor the point, but “Phenotype” alone seems to be failing us as a particularly useful tool.
Please don’t think I’m being contentious here, this thread is a gradschool course in genetics and I have a hungry mind! Enlighten me brothers.
Respectfully,
-Grouchy
“Popsicle Toes” my purple widow “Phenotype” 
PS:
Thx @TomHill, a reading list would be a great asset here… but a little more accessible than "Diploid Chromosome Behaviour and Panmixis… LoL
We are all just searching for that ideotype. (the ideal plant). @Soiltech Well said.
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Recently Sam did an interview. Talked about how in the old days a common thought was that environment played a bigger role than it does. Upon returning from his travels he realized it was genetics that really matter most. Most heritable traits express across a broad range of environments. Genetics>environment, nature>nurture.
We do not require a lab for genotyping plants. Example: take 4 elite phenotypes a,b,c and d. Self them all, grow out 30 progeny of each in 4 plots a,b,c,d. During observation we note that plots a,b, and d are highly variable therefore phenotypes a,b, and d are strongly heterozygous genotypes. Plot c produced a highly homogeneous plot most resembling phenotype c and therefore phenotype c is a strongly homozygous genotype. Selfs well, and we can expect it to cross out well too.
Another excellent book is R.W Allard’s Principles of Plant Breeding. More easily digestible, but I can’t find an online copy.
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