Making feminized seed

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:

Frankie’s Daughters: Unpacking a Frozen Genome

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 :v: :green_heart:
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.

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