Open Pollination only lets me NOT know who the father is.
That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You don’t NEED to know who the father is. Who cares? Forget about the males. Select the females in each generation that most closely approach the ideal, and reject the rest. Let the males open pollinate the females, sprout the seeds from the best females, and begin again.
So I have no way of knowing how to reproduce anything that may come from that.
The “reproduction” you’re looking for, i.e. uniformity and locking in positive traits, comes from line breeding over multiple generations. If you select the best and reject the rest, then over time your line will resemble the best, and not the rejects.
Preserving != breeding
Anytime you sprout a seed, you are breeding. Natural selection is always occurring at all times. The very soil mixture you use could allow some plants to grow and thrive and others to fail, for no other reason than the conditions are better for one or the other.
Breeding should have a purpose, a goal. If you just wanna preserve a line than sure, OP everything and call it a day.
Open pollination does NOT mean “no selection.” It just means quit trying to cherry pick individual plants to use, because you can’t do so effectively in the vast majority of cases, without causing problems in your line over time.
You’re not improving the line by open pollinating,
Say what? If you select the females that most closely approach the ideal and reject the rest, you most assuredly are breeding, and you are indeed improving the line over generations. And you are doing so without all of the waste of time and futility of trying to cherry pick males.
Even the ugliest male may have postive traits you NEED, but can’t easily test for. It might be ten generations down the road before that trait is truly needed (such as resistance to a certain pest or pathogen), and if you were happily doing heavy plant culling early on, or cherry picking males to breed with cherry picked females, now that trait is totally bred out and gone. If you had instead kept more plants, and just worked the line over more generations, you might find that later down the road when a disease strikes, only half the plants die instead of all of them, for example.
Every time you sprout a new generation, it’s like shuffling a deck of cards. The various traits (positive or negative) which the lines carries are shuffled around from place to place. The smart breeder does gentle selection over time to gradually lock in the positive traits, while gradually eliminating the negative ones he is able to test for. He damn sure doesn’t try to cherry pick individual plants and imagine he can guess, or figure out through testing, all of the traits that it carries.
If there’s a male causing deleterious issues in your OP line, now you have no idea which one caused it
You don’t need to know any such thing. You subject the population as a whole to various stresses, as does Mother Nature, and watch how they respond. The superior females are kept and the inferior ones are culled. If there is a trait that is clearly expressed in the male that is definitely undesirable (like weak stems for example), THEN you can cull that male. But don’t cull too many of them at one time, in a single generation. Don’t be rubbing the stems and all of this voodoo people do thinking they can use that to judge the male. That’s a fallacy for numerous reasons. Furthermore there are traits in both the males and females which you simply cannot judge just by looking at the plant, and would have to create elaborate tests in order to even perceive. You can’t just go culling plants based on the illusions in your mind about what is good or not, as every plant that is culled removes genetic diversity from the overall population.
Heavy selection does very much have the possibility to ruin the line completely from choosing that wrong male from the start
Even LIGHT selection is potentially harmful; see above.
the more plants you can look at, then the better chance you have of finding what you want sooner rather than later.
It’s about a lot more than “what you are looking for.” It’s also about what you NEED: like horizontal and vertical resistance to various pathogens for instance, which in some cases may be controlled by dozens or hundreds of genes. You simply CANNOT conduct enough tests to account for such things. Even if you could, it’d be a waste of time. You’re much better off in every possible way just by open pollinating and doing a gradual selection over time, than trying to cherry pick individual plants, especially male plants.
More plants are indeed better, which is why you shouldn’t be in such a hurry to cull plants, especially males, unless it truly has negative traits you can clearly observe, and only as long as you don’t cull too many in one generation.
All I can find and have ever read has said that Cannabis, like most flowers, are obligate outcrossers. They need to be outcrossed in order to improve the line.
Corn is an obligate outcrosser. Try growing only 40-50 corn plants per generation, and you will find your variety is quickly bottlenecked. The same does not hold for cannabis. You can start a new cannabis line with only one unrelated male and female. In the first few generations, maybe only 10-20 plants in the generation is enough to preserve enough genetic diversity for most purposes. 40-50 cannabis plants per generation is enough to maintain the population for quite a long time.
All those guys talk about heavy selection to pull out those original top shelf lines.
Of course. And they usually end up with a strain that has serious faults, like how Sweet Tooth #3 is extremely vulnerable to spider mites. That’s the price you pay for following the “conventional wisdom” of cannabis breeding.
Open Pollination only lets me NOT know who the father is.
That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You don’t NEED to know who the father is. Who cares? Forget about the males. Select the females in each generation that most closely approach the ideal, and reject the rest. Let the males open pollinate the females, sprout the seeds, and begin again.
So I have no way of knowing how to reproduce anything that may come from that.
The “reproduction” you’re looking from comes from line breeding over multiple generations. If you select the best and reject the rest, then over time your line will resemble the best, and not the rejects.
Preserving != breeding
Anytime you sprout a seed, you are breeding. Natural selection is always occurring at all times. The very soil mixture you use could allow some plants to grow and thrive and others to fail, for no other reason than the conditions are better for one or the other.
Breeding should have a purpose, a goal. If you just wanna preserve a line than sure, OP everything and call it a day.
Open pollination does NOT mean “no selection.” It just means quit trying to cherry pick individual males to use, because you can’t do so effectively in the vast majority of cases, without causing problems in your line over time.
You’re not improving the line by open pollinating,
Say what? If you select the females that most closely approach the ideal and reject the rest, you most assuredly are breeding, and you are indeed improving the line over generations. And you are doing so without all of the waste and time and futility of trying to cherry pick males.
If there’s a male causing deleterious issues in your OP line, now you have no idea which one caused it
You don’t need to know any such thing. You subject the population as a whole to various stresses, as does Mother Nature, and watch how they respond. The superior females are kept and the inferior ones are culled. If there is a trait that is actually expressed in the male that is undesirable (like weak stems for example), THEN you can cull that male. Don’t be rubbing the stems and all of this voodoo people do thinking they can use that to judge the male. That’s a fallacy for numerous reasons. Furthermore there are traits in both the males and females which you simply cannot judge just by looking at the plant, and would have to create elaborate tests in order to even perceive. You can’t just go culling plants based on the illusions in your mind about what is good or not, as every plant that is culled removes genetic diversity from the overall population.
Heavy selection does very much have the possibility to ruin the line completely from choosing that wrong male from the start
Even LIGHT selection is potentially harmful; see above.
the more plants you can look at, then the better chance you have of finding what you want sooner rather than later.
It’s about a lot more than “what you are looking for.” It’s also about what you NEED: like horizontal and vertical resistance to various pathogens for instance, which in some cases may be controlled by dozens or hundreds of genes. You simply CANNOT conduct enough tests to account for such things. Even if you could, it’d be a waste of time. You’re much better off in every possible way just by open pollinating and doing a gradual selection over time, than trying to cherry pick individual plants, especially male plants.
More plants are indeed better, which is why you shouldn’t be in such a hurry to cull plants, especially males, unless it truly has negative traits you can clearly observe, and only as long as you don’t cull too many in one generation.
All I can find and have ever read has said that Cannabis, like most flowers, are obligate outcrossers. They need to be outcrossed in order to improve the line.
Corn is an obligate outcrosser. Try growing only 40-50 corn plants per generation, and you will find your variety is quickly bottlenecked. The same does not hold for cannabis. You can start a new cannabis line with only one unrelated male and female. In the first few generations, maybe only 10-20 plants in the generation is enough to preserve enough genetic diversity for most purposes. 40-50 cannabis plants per generation is enough to maintain the population for quite a long time.
All those guys talk about heavy selection to pull out those original top shelf lines.
Of course. And they usually end up with a strain that has serious faults. All of this voodoo about “picking the best male” and such leads directly to that result. You might end up with fire, but you’ll just as likely to end up with a result like Sweet Tooth #3. That’s the end result of thinking “oh I’ll just select the males I like for arbitrary reasons, do a little testing of offspring from individual males, and pick the one line that looks the best to continue with.” There is far more traits that are necessary to keep in the line than just the ones you can easily see and select for, or in the case of males, IMAGINE you can select for.
It’s important to under that the vast majority of cannabis breeders–just like the vast majority of general plant breeders–just like most humans in general–HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE DOING. That’s exactly how we got into the situation we are in today, where the market is flooded with shitty seeds with various deleterious traits locked in. That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid in my own projects.
lol
