ReikoX's Workshop

[ReikoX]

The microbes told me not to wash them off. They said to cut everything up small enough to fit in the growler, add some molasses and LAB, put on the air lock, and call it a day.

Breeders Retail has some Ancestral Skunk#1 seeds available right now. These seeds were produced in an open pollination in the early 90s. Germination tests were around 10% so they are selling packs of 100 for $60. I couldn’t help but get a few packs to hunt through. As you can see these seeds are quite dirty. I grabbed about 50 seeds to work with.

Chimera was kind enough to post his protocol for popping old seeds on ICMag:

@Chimera

The protocol I use is pretty simple.

5% bleach in autoclaved, distilled water with a couple of drops of Tween-20 per liter of solution. I sterilize the water in Duran jars (loose lids) in a pressure cooker @ 20 PSI for 20 minutes, and then allow the jars to cool under my flow hood and tighten the lids when the water has cooled. This is probably overkill for most purposes, but it’s a variation of the protocol I use for sterilizing explants for tissue culture, and it seems to work with minimal contamination. You can get away with a drop of dish detergent instead of the Tween, I just have the tween-20 in the lab so I use it. If you are going to be doing a lot, you can order a few ml of Tween-20 on Amazon if you like.

First I rinse the seeds in a tight mesh strainer to remove any leaf debris that might be harboring bacteria or spores. These seeds were a little dirtier than most having been field grown, so you definitely want to wash away any superfluous materials. This can be up to a 5 minute rinse in lukewarm water. Cannabis achenes have a lot of little crevices where spores and bacteria can hide, so a thorough rinse is a wise step.

Then I take the seeds and drop them in maybe 100-200 mls of the bleach/Tween-20 solution in an Erlenmeyer flask, but any clean glass vessel will do -the seeds should be fully immersed, maybe 2x the volume of water as seed. You want to keep stirring and swishing the seeds around gently to ensure the current is washing away any contaminants. After a minute of swishing I remove the bleach and strain the seeds from the liquid and start again. No more than 3 minutes total, and if I see bleaching on the small test batch (always do a test batch to seed how the seeds react), sometimes I’ll only do 2 minutes.

The next part is key. Immediately rinse 3-5 times (for 5 minutes per rinse) in the same sterilized distilled water (baby water / distilled water from Walmart or the local pharmacy is fine), again using a tight mesh strainer, or simply rinse the seeds in a different vessel with the same volume of water, at least 3 times to ensure the bleach is removed. I use a labratory orbita shaker, but you can do it by hand it’s just a little tedious. Once the rinses are completed, soak the seeds in the distilled water as before, for 2-24 hours depending on the age of the seed and the medium you will be growing in. Sometimes I’ll use agar plates, but most often I’ll just sprout them in paper towels and transfer to a light dirt (like Light Warrior for you Americans) or surface sow on a .peat based planting substrate. You can use whatever medium you prefer, it’s not that big of a deal as long as the seeds remain moist.

First I needed some sterile water, so I put a few cups of RO water in the bottom of the pressure cooker along with a glass jar and lid. This was cooked @15 psi for 20 minutes. I let this cool and then poured the water into the sterilized jar for later.

Next I made a 5% bleach solution with a drop of detergent. This was also sterilized in the pressure cooker @15 psi for 20 minutes.

The two jars were allowed to cool. Then, I gave them a five minute wash in luke warm tap water through a mesh strainer.

After the rinse, they were put in a glass container and washed with the bleach solution for one minute. The seeds was strained through the strainer and washed two more times. Then, the seeds were put back in the container and rinsed with the sterile water for five minutes. Again, they were strained and rinsed two more times.

Finally they were covered with sterile water and allowed to soak in the cupboard for the next 24 hours.