how exactly did you attach the fan and filter to the bin like that? cant tell if thats aluminum tape or thin sheet metal?
I find the best way to do an ‘open’ pollination is to control it. Collect the pollen from the males you want to use and try to have even amounts from each plant. you can cut stems from the male plants and keep them in a vase of water if you want (once the flowers have formed) and the flowers will still open and drop pollen.
When the girls are ready to pollinate (i do it at about 4 weeks) i mix together the pollen and then apply it to the buds with my finger. This way you get even pollen from the males and optimum timing… and also you don;t get sh1t loads of pollen everywhere. I can do this with 1 plant in a cabinet with multiple plants and get very few or zero seeds in the other plants.
VG.
P.s. if you want to keep pollen for any amount of time you need to dry it out on a wrap in a container with dried rice or silica gel for a few days before you put it in the fridge or freeze it.
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Y’all are making things WAY too complicated. It doesn’t have to be this complex.
In my room I start by flipping to 12/12 (or doing 12/12 from seed) and sex the plants. When about 3/4 to 7/8 of the plants are sexed, and before any of them are too far down the road of flowering, I flip back to veg mode, then each night manually pull out any plants that haven’t sexed yet into another dark room so they will continue sexing.
Once the males are identified, I transplant them into 3 gallon buckets, as many males per bucket as will fit, and set them over in the corner, away from the fans.
Then I transplant each female into a 3 gallon bucket and set them around the (vertical) bulbs to veg. Generally the males will continue flowering, even while the females are vegging out under 16+ hours light. That’s OK. I make sure they’re well fertilized so they will continue flowering indefinitely. If one happens to finish and die out early before the females are ready for pollination, I don’t care. I don’t need or want such males for breeding.
When the females are sufficiently large and the males have grown and stretched out quite a bit also, then I flower them. Not long after the first pistils appear, I grab hold of the males (all conveniently gathered together in a single container) and give them a good shake. Pollen from all of them flies around the room. The first pistils are now pollinated, and the females will continue to produce more pistils. Every day or two I continue shaking the males and letting the pollen fly, for weeks until there are no more pistils being produced. Then I usually keep the males around for a while, just in case they are needed somewhere else, such as emergency pollination of some other plants that have lost their males. If not needed they can be culled at this point.
The result: hundreds of good, viable seeds on each relatively small indoor female. I can harvest the females as early as 6 weeks and still get a full load of good seeds, even though these are “sativa” genetics that usually go 12+ weeks to a full finish.
One last note concerning seeds sprouting in buds, or the guy who saw the same thing happening in a tomato fruit: if those seeds sprout in such circumstances thereby killing themselves out, that’s exactly what you want to happen. Those are exactly the type of seeds you don’t want to be breeding with. It’s because of poor breeding practice–using such seeds for breeding–that the strain has this undesirable characteristic in the first place. If you have a strain that’s prone to this, you can eradicate it by letting the plant flower extra long and wet the buds down occasionally, in the hopes of getting as many seeds to sprout as possible, which will die, allowing you to collect only the survivors which did not sprout yet. Then when harvested, allow the bud to dry fully and store the seeds for some time before attempting to sprout them. Digging seeds out of wet bud and immediately sprouting them is what you should NOT be doing.
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@lefthandseeds whats the theory behind the early male culling?
I keep seeing mention of this popping up, and even recently read that farmers in Afghanistan will hire people to go through their fields to chop early males.
I’m wondering if some of my homemade strains that declined and were worse than the parents, was because i chose the first, seemingly biggest male that showed sex.
I mean, if afghan farmers are doing it… it is probably a practice i should follow. Because they sure as hell know what they’re doing.
But I’m unsure of the real reasons why.
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I’m also curious…gonna hit some gods space needle and wait for some folks to chime in.
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If there’s two folks on this forum that know the answer to this, @lefthandseeds and @Upstate would be my first guesses 
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Two spaces. One for males one for females. When the males are doing their thing then in with the females.
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Afghan farmers favor the high the later Sativa phenos produce, so they cull the early males.
There is more to the story though as to why breeders do it. I read not to use the earliest or biggest males, but i wouldn’t hesitate myself if my breeding goal was large or small plants. The idea behind eliminating tall males is that they are more hempy. Plants either produce fiber or drugs seems to be the theory. @lefthandseeds knows more than i do tho and i see he is chiming in.
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It’s a speculative argument. I’m not convinced of it, but some people say that natural pressures of cannabis breeding propels it toward hemp. The early males preferentially spread their genetics, and therefore may be a cause of that.
But without any real research behind it, I’d call that more or less just a wild ass guess.
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I think so too. There are tall potent plants.
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Maybe the " kill all tall males" craze is what is responsible for the lack of zip most modern pot has. They’ve bred out the tall Sativa plants.
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How long do cuttings like this last in water like that?Would you put the cut in water then turn to flip?Does the water have to be changed out repeatedly like a regular cutting before it goes in the block?
I currently have two males that are polar opposites of each other , one is short and slow to mature with thick branches the other is tall and lanky and way ahead of the other. I’m going to use both on separate branches and then pop some of both to see what each male may have brought into the next generation.
In general I like to look for the males that smell strong and have good branching.
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But how long do I have to keep the male in to thoroughly pollinate. At week 4, I’m over this pollen…
It’s going to be a lonnnnnnnnnnnng time before I do seeds again 
