Hey everyone, let’s talk feminized seeds making, I’m especially interested in the ratio’s of success and failure, I’d really love to hear everyone’s thoughts about the various methods &the pros/cons. If. Cost/availability & ease of use and the success or failure rates from application of Cs, sts and elite x elite.
I’m going to attempt to reverse one of the girls for future seed stock.
So please share your thoughts/experiences
Oh I’m definitely taking a seat with ya here.
Pull up a seat brother be great to hear everyone’s perspective and experiences!
Also hoping to learn from this thread…don’t know anything to share yet.
Curious about the best reversal spray as well.
Hi, lovely to see that some folks are interested in fem seeds… Ask me anything you want to know about the procedure.
Plants are individual so the success rates are dependent on the cultivar. Some are notoriously hard to reverse while other’s are really easy. But I would say that 90% are reversable… The rest is abit of a gamble, sometimes they’ll reserved.
PZ
This is a timely subject @Cranio, thanks for starting the conversation.
I am new to this game but I hope my recent experience can shed some light on using reversals to create Feminized Seed. My grow log for a reversal & feminized S1 seeds can be found here:
The primary lesson I have learned is that reversing your favorite plant to make pollen and then pollinating your female plant will very likely NOT produce a seed version replica of that strain.
The reason is that your outcome depends entirely on the stabilization of the genetics in your mother plant. In our world of polyhybrids everything has increasingly been blended with everything else at an rapid pace and little effort is put into stabilizing the genetic line. The result is that the plant you are reversing is likely very heterozygous and loaded with unexpressed phenotypes that will likely emerge in your S1 seeds.
Your seeds may produce something wonderful, or at least some version justifying the effort, but unless you start with a highly homozygous inbred parent plant your S1 seeds are likely to be all over the map rather than an accurate reflection of “Mom.”
My conclusion is that if you want to grow your favorite plant over and over again, your best bet by far is to cut a few clones and plan on hosting mother plants forever.
I hope this doesn’t sound too opinionated, I’ve been wrong before, plenty of times. This is just my experience and I hope some of our serious breeders (@LonelyOC?) will chime in here to fill in the details.
Respectfully,
-Grouchy
PS, If you plan on using reversal to create feminized seeds, at least save some of your reversed pollen to use later in back crossing your S1 phenos to head back towards the original mom.
I’ve reversed a couple females at his point and my biggest advice would be to have a plan to collect the pollen. Timing can be tricky and you really need to start flowering and reversing the selected female a good 2 weeks before the plants that are going to be pollinated. Sometimes the timing is just off and collecting the pollen and hand pollinating is much easier. One of the females I reversed made male sacs with pollen, but they wouldn’t drop the pollen without me squeezing the sac. Very frustrating.
Good timing… just ordered my sts ingredients and bottles last night.
@GrouchyOldMan - So would it make any difference in terms of stabilization if you were starting with an IBL that was further along? Like F9? Or would that stability make her harder to reverse?
Second question:
What’s the advantage/disadvantages to starting a second seed to dust with pollen, rather than a clone of the mother plant?
Hi @blowdout2269,
If you start with a highly stabilized inbred line your results should be much more predictable. I’m only talking about heterozygous polyhybrids above.
I haven’t seen anything suggesting that the inbreeding process itself affects the difficulty of chemical reversals.
It’s above my pay grade, but I would expect that dusting a second seedling with reversal pollen would only increase the potential for phenotypic variations since you have another gamete in the mix. At least with two clones the parental genomes will be nearly identical.
Making S1 is the first step to making something stable. You can use all sort of method, but with experience and being strict with the selection of the females. It’s the fastest method to inbreed a cultivar. You have to select for homozygous which you can see in the offspring. But at the same time select for the traits you like. Which require abit of a plant count. This is why I personally prefer to use the sea of green method when selfing. This way you can self multiple females and have a good chance to hit jackpot.
Inbreeding does not build a resistance against STS.
Dusting another female is like using a male, but you only get females. It’s not selfing, it’s feminizing. Which is also a great tool in the breeders toolbox.
Pz
@LonelyOC - I do not quite understand that last paragraph. It you dust the female, plant A, of the same type(not the mother, plant B) with pollen of the reversed female(same breed, different seed), wouldn’t the seeds produced still be considered S1?
No, S1 stands for Selfed generation 1. So it’s not considered a S1 since selfing is only when you cross it to itself.
Pz
Ok, call me naive, but…
You’re saying if I take two F9 feminized seeds and grow one to reverse, and the other to be pollinated…the pollinated seeds produced are still considered F9?
No, it would be considered F10 Fem seeds
Pz
Hopefully this is not considered offensive.
But I gotta hear this from several other experienced breeders or pollin chuckers before I believe it.
It can’t be that “easy” lol.
Haha, couldnt stop laughing. Sry, sure I understand. Simplicity is overwhelming sometimes
Pz
It is that easy. At the very base level. It’s having a plan, identifying the individuals that fit that plan, testing the offspring to see if you have made progress…that is the not easy part.
Yes exactly. Breeding as all about selection or de selection!
Pz
And having the mindset that it’s going to take a long time to get to the end goal …